The U.S.-China game of cyber chicken could derail Silicon Valley
There's a funny scene in "Blazing Saddles" when Cleavon Little, playing the black sheriff, puts a gun to his head and says to a crowd that was about to lynch him: "One move and the [expletive] gets it."
U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping are enacting a similar scene -- only it isn't funny. I don't think the two presidents are about to blow up the planet, but they are in danger of blowing up the trillion-dollar world market for information technology.
Obama has tolerated, if not encouraged, the NSA's huge data hacking programs, and Xi, whose nation has also engaged in cyber espionage for more than a decade, now insists that U.S. tech companies put backdoors in their software and share their encryption keys if they want to operate in China.
This espionage-tinged trade war could get seriously out of hand
This is beginning to take on the color of an old-fashioned trade war, with China discovering the joys of protectionism and both countries making impossible demands on, in this case, technology vendors.
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http://www.infoworld.com/article/2895106/technology-business/the-us-china-game-of-cyber-chicken-could-derail-silicon-valley.html
