By Prashanth Parameswaran
A closer look at the debate on how Washington should respond.
Over the past few weeks, attention has been focused on the Obama administration’s response to China for the hack on the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which compromised the personal information of more than 20 million Americans. In a July 31 article in The New York Times, David Sanger reported that while the administration has determined that it ought to retaliate against Beijing, officials have struggled to determine exactly what options to pursue.
The question of how the United States should respond to the attack – still not officially attributed to China by the Obama administration – took center stage at an August 19 panel discussion on the issue at the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The event took place just weeks before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s upcoming visit to the United States.
Catherine Lotrionte, a former intelligence official under the Bush administration, argued that the OPM hack constituted a serious attack on U.S. national security. Beyond compromising the security information of a large number of individuals, it also provided a list of people with clearances for China to potentially recruit as well as insights into which foreign nationals may have been speaking to U.S. intelligence officials.
Despite this, Lotrionte, now a professor at Georgetown University, noted that the Obama administration had remained silent on the issue, refusing to even state a clear position. Without at least lodging a formal protest, she said it was very difficult to expect a change of behavior from China, particularly since attacks according to some U.S. officials have continued to happen.
“I feel pretty comfortable saying we haven’t really deterred anyone,” she said.
Read the full story at The Diplomat