President Obama now has the authority to sanction anybody who attacks the United States’ infrastructure, and experts and lawmakers alike want him to unleash it on China.
Obama signed an executive order April 1 allowing economic sanctions against “malicious cyberactors whose actions threaten the national security, foreign policy, or economic health or financial stability of the United States.”
Two months later, on June 4, the administration revealed that the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources department, was the victim of a massive cyberattack in December that compromised the personnel files of four million past and current federal workers.
Although the White House hasn’t placed any blame yet, plenty of other government officials are anonymously accusing the People’s Republic of China.
Retired Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the U.S. will pay a steep price if it doesn’t get tough with China now.
“Along with the hacks into government systems we’ve just seen, the danger to our economy is the sheer volume [the Chinese] steal in intellectual property,” he said. “If we do not deal with them on these two fronts, we’re going to pay for it dearly down the road.”
“In the past few years, China has stolen from U.S. companies the amount of intellectual property equal to 50 times the current print collection of the Library of Congress,” wrote Rogers and Maryland’s Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, then ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence panel, when they introduced legislation to combat cybercrime in 2012. “This activity can no longer just be a cost of doing business in China.”
“We must remain equally vigilant … in our efforts to protect U.S. companies and workers from a fundamental threat to the strongest economy and largest middle class in the world,” they wrote.
Since then, China is thought to have been behind several attacks on U.S. businesses and government agencies, such as the recent hacks into the databases of health insurers Anthem and Primera, plus the OPM breach. Although the Justice Department last year indicted five members of the Chinese military for cybercrimes, the Obama administration is under fire for not publicly taking a harder line on China.
Rogers says one reason is obvious: “It’s hard to punch your banker in the nose when you owe them that much money,” he said, referring to the billions of dollars of U.S. debt China holds.
But Adam Segal, a China and cyberexpert at the Council on Foreign Relations, says it’s more complicated than that.
“A lot of that is a straw man,” Segal said about the debt issue. “We have so many other interests” in which the U.S. needs China’s help, such as easing tensions in the South China Sea, curbing the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran, and keeping the global economy running smoothly.
“We have been pushing cyber on the agenda but it doesn’t rank [high enough against] other priorities,” Segal said. The term “frenemy” comes to mind, he said. “China is such an important partner.”
The administration contends that it is not treating China with kid gloves on the issues of cybercrime and espionage, but acknowledges the balancing act that maintaining good relations with China requires.
“[T]here are going to be some areas with China where we’re able to cooperate and some areas where we’re going to compete,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters Wednesday. “And engaging with China has served this country well, and it’s something that we intend to do for the foreseeable future.
“But even in the context of those engagements, we won’t shy away from raising concerns about those areas of Chinese policy that we believe need to be changed,” Earnest said.
In fact, Washington has upped its outreach and cooperation with China.
Last week, Fan Changlong, a Chinese general who holds a position roughly equal to the U.S. defense secretary or Joint Chiefs chairman, led a military delegation to Washington and had a Capitol tour. The delegation visited military facilities in California, Texas and at sea. Fan and U.S. Army Gen. Ray Odierno signed an “army-to-army dialogue” mechanism at the National Defense University.
And in September, Chinese President Xi Jinping is making a state visit, his first, to the U.S.
Pasi Eronen, a cyberexpert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the U.S. must realize what is at stake with the cyberattacks and respond accordingly.
“The Chinese and their collaborators hope to compromise America’s core intelligence capabilities and erode the source of U.S. global power: its economic dominance,” Eronen wrote June 8 in the New York Post. “We must start making our adversaries pay a steep price for their attacks.”
Since announcing the OPM breach, the White House has defended its record on taking China to task for its cyberspying.
“[T]he United States has not at this point identified a perpetrator in this latest reported breach of the OPM computer system,” Earnest said. “But as it relates more broadly to China, we have previously on a number of occasions expressed our concern to the Chinese about some of their activities in cyberspace. Some of those activities have actually resulted in a Department of Justice indictment of five Chinese military members. So I think that’s a pretty clear statement that we have concerns broadly about some of China’s activities in cyberspace.”
