Does NSA Spying Leave the U.S. Without Moral High Ground in China Hack?

All signs point to China being responsible for one of the worst hacks in U.S. history, exposing sensitive records of millions of federal employees.

But the U.S. is an awkward position in deciding how to respond to the humiliating blow. That’s partially because in the two years since Edward Snowden’s leaks about U.S. surveillance, the Obama administration has repeatedly argued that hacking into computer networks to spy on foreigners is completely acceptable behavior.

It won’t be so easy for the U.S. to express indignant outrage just because it’s on the opposite side of the surveillance this time.

“Stealing secrets from governments is part of spying,” said Adam Segal, who studies cybersecurity and Chinese policy as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “You can get angry with the incompetence of our defense. It’s hard to get angry with the Chinese for trying.”

China has denied responsibility for the breach of the Office of Personnel Management, and attributing responsibility for cyberattacks is always tricky. It’s possible that the hackers could be Chinese criminals hoping to use the Social Security numbers and other federal employee records to commit financial fraud.

But top U.S. officials reportedly believe that the Chinese government is behind the attack, and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, who receives classified intelligence briefings, blamed the country in a speech on the Senate floor last week.

If the attack was the work of Chinese government hackers, they could use the information to build a detailed database of information on U.S. officials at all levels of government. Administration officials say the hackers likely obtained security clearances, which could be used to identify undercover U.S. operatives or blackmail officials.

The U.S. has called out China before for cyberespionage. The Justice Department even indicted five alleged Chinese military hackers last year for stealing secrets from U.S. businesses.

But the U.S. has drawn a bright line between spying for national security and spying to gain an economic edge. It’s unacceptable to steal trade secrets, U.S. officials argue, but governments spy on other governments every day.

The Snowden documents, for example, revealed that the NSA had tapped into links between Google and Yahoo data centers overseas to collect records on hundreds of millions of people at will.

“The legal safeguards that restrict surveillance against U.S. persons without a warrant do not apply to foreign persons overseas,” President Obama explained in a speech last year. “This is not unique to America; few, if any, spy agencies around the world constrain their activities beyond their own borders. And the whole point of intelligence is to obtain information that is not publicly available.”

The OPM breach also appears to be different from North Korea’s alleged hack of Sony Pictures last year, which caused unprecedented damage to a U.S. company, experts say.

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