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China, U.S. to form working group on cyberspying issue

After a meeting with China Foreign Minister Wang Yi, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says the two countries have agreed to work toward cybersecurity for both nations.

Edward Moyer Senior Editor
Edward Moyer is a senior editor at CNET and a many-year veteran of the writing and editing world. He enjoys taking sentences apart and putting them back together. He also likes making them from scratch. ¶ For nearly a quarter of a century, he's edited and written stories about various aspects of the technology world, from the US National Security Agency's controversial spying techniques to historic NASA space missions to 3D-printed works of fine art. Before that, he wrote about movies, musicians, artists and subcultures.
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The U.S. and China have agreed to form a working group on cybersecurity, after a recent volley of cyberspying accusations from both sides.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced from Beijing that the two countries will ramp up action on cybersecurity, Reuters reported.

Cybersecurity "affects the financial sector, banks, financial transactions -- every aspect of nations in modern times are affected by the use of cybernetworking, and obviously all of us, every nation, has an interest in protecting its people, protecting its rights, protecting its infrastructure," the news agency quoted Kerry as saying after a meeting with China Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

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Reuters said China's official Xinhua news agency had earlier reported that during the meeting, the foreign minister had called for a joint effort to secure cyberspace and had said the U.S. and China needed to work toward more trust and cooperation in this area.

The issue was reportedly a top topic during a telephone conversation last month between President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The U.S. and China have been vociferously accusing each other of cyberespionage recently, a public back-and-forth that gained momentum after a rapid series of revelations early this year of cyberspying against The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.