President Obama will press Chinese President Xi Jinping on cybersecurity when he visits Washington later this month, Obama told members of the U.S. Armed Forces on Friday.
“We’ve made very clear to the Chinese that there are certain practices that they’re engaging in that we know are emanating from China and are not acceptable,” Obama said in a “Worldwide Troop Talk” on the Defense Department network. He was likely referencing the hacks into the Office of Personnel Management’s data files and high-profile intrusions into health-insurance companies Blue Cross and Anthem.
“And we can choose to make this an area of competition, which I guarantee you we’ll win if we have to, or, alternatively, we can come to an agreement in which we say, ‘this isn’t helping anybody; let’s instead try to have some basic rules of the road in terms of how we operate,'” Obama said.
“Now, as I said, there’s still going to be individual actors, there are going to be terrorist networks and others, so we’re still going to have to build a strong defense,” he added. “But one of our first and most important efforts has to be to get the states that may be sponsoring cyber-attacks to understand that there comes a point at which we consider this a core national security threat and we will treat it as such.”
Speaking of computer woes, in answering a question from a petty officer about how he carries on “while everyone seems to be hating and talking smack about” him, Obama said that he believes in owning his mistakes, such as healthcare.gov when it launched.
The Affordable Care Act “was working fine until there was this website that didn’t work,” Obama acknowledged. “It was a disaster — even though I had been asking every two weeks, ‘how’s the website going? I hope this works.’ But it didn’t work.
“And we had to own that and double down,” he said. “And we corrected it … and now 16 million people have health insurance. “But that was a screw-up; and there’s no point in trying to hide things when they don’t work.”
