By Graham Webster
Retaliation without a clearly communicated principle won’t deter anything in particular.
The U.S. debate over how to respond to the embarrassing breach of government personnel databases raises many questions, but one of the hardest has been largely overlooked amid calls for “retaliation” and “deterrence.” China’s government is the “leading suspect” in the data theft, and if it is indeed responsible, what does the U.S. government want them to stop doing?
Soon after the public learned of the breach, which exposed personal data in millions of security clearance files held by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), former National Security Administration (NSA) chief Michael Hayden memorably declared the files were a “legitimate foreign intelligence target,” and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said, “You have to kind of salute the Chinese for what they did.”
Despite these frank assessments, there are widespread calls to “impose costs” or otherwise penalize China for the unprecedented breach, and anonymous sources told The New York Times the Obama administration is considering a wide variety of options. According to one official, “One of the conclusions we’ve reached is that we need to be a bit more public about our responses, and one reason is deterrence. We need to disrupt and deter what our adversaries are doing in cyberspace, and that means you need a full range of tools to tailor a response.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat