The international community must engage in serious discussions on whether cyber intelligence collection is necessary. If it is, what should be the boundaries? Any ambiguity or hesitation on the part of major players will lead others to mimic U.S. behavior.

The US must demonstrate that cyber attacks and manipulation of social media will incur costs.

Although Moore’s law about the doubling of computing power every two years means that cyber time moves quickly, human habits, norms, and state practices change more slowly.

U.S. authorities on Thursday accused a Chinese national visiting the United States of providing malware that has been linked to the theft of security clearance records of millions of American government employees.

Fear-mongering about efforts to improve Internet security ignores an important reality: The new rules may bring bigger and better opportunities for cooperation between Chinese and American technology firms.

China’s controversial new anti-terrorism law would require foreign companies to install “backdoors” to give authorities remote access to computers and networks, and has been placed under review due to Western concerns. Since China still has to rely on foreign technology in the immediate future, the law might have been used to tell the United States government not to engage in what Beijing called “reckless behavior,” or to further expose U.S. hypocrisy in its own cyber espionage practices.

The U.S. is concerned over China’s new anti-terrorism law due to additional network security regulations that would affect its enterprises in China. Since Chinese governments, banks, and research institutes are almost entirely dominated by foreign IT companies, there is justified concern over domestic cyber security. Strict regulation in law could ensure that all investors are treated equally without favoritism.

The USCC assessment on the weaknesses of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) offered little new analysis on PLA’s cyber-warfare capabilities. This is due to impossibility of finding a comprehensive assessment of China’s military cyber capabilities on the public record. Much of the debate surrounding the PLA’s cyber war capabilities is mere speculation based on evidence of its undoubted success in cyber espionage.

China’s Great Firewall restricts access to the main Internet communication platforms in the U.S. (Facebook, Twitter, Google), thus leading to a general western perception that China lacks Internet openness and access altogether. Stephen Harner argues that Internet protectionism actually allowed China to create rival services (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) that have developed into a thriving Internet industry.

Despite being one of the most pressing Sino-US issues, cybersecurity has received scarce attention during meetings between China and the United States at this year’s APEC Summit. Franz-Stefan Gady questions the effectiveness a U.S. “name and shame” strategy, amid efforts to expand ASEAN member states’ cyber defense capabilities.