OPM Hackers are The Usual Suspects

Ellen Nakashima had an interesting piece in the Washington Post yesterday[ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/chinese-government-has-arrested-hackers-suspected-of-breaching-opm-database/2015/12/02/0295b918-990c-11e5-8917-653b65c809eb_story.html] about the "arrest" of the Chinese hackers who got the data at OPM.  There is no information about the suspects, or whether they worked for the government.  If ever a story showed the manipulation of our government by China, this one does.

The Post is a ready outlet for the views of the White House staff, and Ellen has good sources in the Washington cyber world.   She usually turns out to be right about the events.  I checked the China Daily to see if anything had come out in their press about the same subject, and found nothing mentioned since June.  The June story was a denial that China had anything to do with this theft of 24 million records of security clearances.

The Post article points to sanctions as the main reason for the arrests.  The Chairman's [Xi] visit to the U.S. was being accompanied by internal U.S. discussions of sanctions against companies that benefit from  the theft of data that is plowed back into the Chinese economy.  The Chinese knew (because they asked several of us) we were considering more harsh action than sanctions.  I told them there would be an agreement on cyber because that was what the White House said, but we were considering more than sanctions.  [see my 8/3/15 post on David Sanger's New York Times article that describes what was being considered]  The story goes, China wanted to head those off by making an arrest of the usual suspects.    Apparently, their actions worked, since we saw nothing of sanctions before or after the visit, and none of the more serious kinds of retaliation being discussed were ever carried out.

Can we be so easily influenced that we forget retaliation, forget sanctions, and turn the other cheek?   Looks like it.  Our political leadership understands one basic thing about human nature:  we only pay attention until the next shiny news object comes along.  The next time, we may be sorry we didn't make a more forceful statement this time.