obama

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By Matt Spetalnick and Michael Martina WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama announced on Friday that he had reached a “common understanding” with Chinese President Xi Jinping on curbing economic cyber espionage, but threatened to impose U.S. sanctions on Chinese hackers who persist with cyber crimes. The two leaders also unveiled a deal to build on a landmark emissions agreement struck last year, outlining new steps they will take to deliver on pledges they made then to slash their greenhouse gas emissions. Speaking after White House talks during Xi's first U.S. state visit, Obama quickly homed in on the thorniest dispute between the world's two biggest economies – growing U.S. complaints about Chinese hacking of government and corporate databases, and the suspicion in Washington that Beijing is sometimes behind it.

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By Michael Martina and Eric M. Johnson SEATTLE (Reuters) – Chinese President Xi Jinping sought to reassure U.S. officials on Tuesday that Beijing remains committed to financial reforms and an open economy. “China will not go backward in this process,” Xi said at a forum for U.S. and Chinese governors in Seattle during the first day of his week-long visit to the United States. Xi's visit will include meetings with tech and other top business leaders, a black-tie state dinner at the White House hosted by President Barack Obama and an address at the United Nations.

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The White House is considering applying sanctions against companies and individuals in China it believes have benefited from Chinese hacking of U.S. trade secrets, the Washington Post reported on Sunday. The newspaper, citing several unidentified Obama administration officials, said a final determination on whether to issue the sanctions was expected soon, possibly as early as the next two weeks. Suspicions that Chinese hackers were behind a series of data breaches in the United States have been an irritant in relations between the world's two largest economies as President Xi Jinping prepares to make his first visit to the United States next month.

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U.S. intelligence chief James Clapper said on Thursday that China was the top suspect in the massive hacking of a U.S. government agency that compromised the personnel records of millions of Americans. The comments from Clapper, the director of National Intelligence (DNI), were first reported in The Wall Street Journal and marked the first time the Obama administration has publicly accused Beijing of the hacking attacks on the Office of Personnel Management. “You have to kind of salute the Chinese for what they did,” given the difficulty of the intrusion, the Journal quoted Clapper as saying at a Washington intelligence conference.

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By Richard Cowan WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Top U.S. tech companies are warning the Obama administration against imposing new policies that the companies say would weaken increasingly sophisticated encryption systems designed to protect consumers' privacy. In a strongly worded letter to President Barack Obama on Monday, two industry associations representing major software and hardware companies said, “We are opposed to any policy actions or measures that would undermine encryption as an available and effective tool.” The Information Technology Industry Council and the Software and Information Industry Association, representing tech giants, including Apple Inc, Google Inc, Facebook Inc, IBM and Microsoft Corp, fired the latest salvo in what could be a long fight over government access into smart phones and other digital devices.

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By Andrea Shalal WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A massive breach of U.S. federal computer networks disclosed this week is the latest in a flood of attacks by suspected Chinese hackers aimed at grabbing personal data, industrial secrets and weapons plans from government and private computers. The Obama administration on Thursday disclosed the breach of computer systems at the Office of Personnel Management and said the records of up to 4 million current and former federal employees may have been compromised. U.S. officials have said on condition of anonymity they believe the hackers are based in China, but Washington has not publicly blamed Beijing at a time when tensions are high over Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea.

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By Dan Levine and Lawrence Hurley SAN FRANCISCO/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration has been locked in internal wrangling over what position to take in high profile litigation between two American technology giants, Google and Oracle, according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions. It faces an end-of-May deadline to decide whether to take sides in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court that will have wide implications for the technology industry.     The case involves how much copyright protection should extend to the Java programing language. Oracle won a federal appeals court ruling last year that allows it to copyright parts of Java, while Google argues it should be free to use Java without paying a licensing fee. Google, which used Java to design its Android smartphone operating system, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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By Jonathan Stempel NEW YORK (Reuters) – A U.S. spying program that systematically collects millions of Americans' phone records is illegal, a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday, putting pressure on Congress to quickly decide whether to replace or end the controversial anti-terrorism surveillance. Ruling on a program revealed by former government security contractor Edward Snowden, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said the Patriot Act did not authorize the National Security Agency to collect Americans' calling records in bulk. Circuit Judge Gerard Lynch wrote for a three-judge panel that Section 215, which addresses the FBI's ability to gather business records, could not be interpreted to have permitted the NSA to collect a “staggering” amount of phone records, contrary to claims by the Bush and Obama administrations.

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The Obama administration on Wednesday launched the first-ever sanctions program to financially punish individuals and groups outside the United States that are engaged in malicious cyber attacks. U.S. President Barack, in an executive order, declared such activities a “national emergency” and allowed the U.S. Treasury to freeze the assets and bar other financial transactions of entities engaged in cyber attacks. Under the program, first reported by the Washington Post, cyber attackers or those who conduct commercial espionage in cyberspace can be listed on the official sanctions list of specially designated nationals, a deterrent long-sought by the cyber community. The move, which the paper said has been in development for two years, comes after a string of high-profile cyber attacks ranging from corporate hacks targeting Target, Home Depot and other retailers, to an attack on Sony and other data breaches.