Members of Congress Demand Response to Chinese Commercial Cyber Espionage

Members of both the House and Senate this week criticized China for what Representative Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) called "a massive and sustained intelligence effort by a government to blatantly steal commercial data and intellectual property." At a hearing before the House Intelligence Committee, retired General Michael Hayden, former head of the NSA and CIA, said, "I step back in awe at the breadth, depth, sophistication and persistence of the Chinese espionage effort against the United States of America." (Hayden's prepared testimony is available here.) China's cyber espionage activities are by now well known. Vanity Fair published an excellent in-depth report on Chinese hacking last month, highlighting attacks on Google and, perhaps more disturbingly, on security company RSA, maker of the SecurID network authentication system used extensively in the government and financial sector. As Jack has noted, however, it's not clear what the government's response should be. Cyber espionage (like espionage in general) is not illegal under international law, and the United States almost certainly engages in cyber espionage against China (albeit perhaps not for commercial purposes). It will be interesting to see how (and if) the Obama administration reacts to Congressional pressure on this front, and whether it's anything more than the latest manifestation of Congress's current blame-China mood (one of the few remaining sources of bipartisan consensus).