PROVIDED BY CNNNEXT.COM
Published on Aug 2, 2015
China’s alleged theft of personal information of millions of American employees is embarrassing while Washington’s response to the hacking indicates “double standard hypocrisy” in US foreign policy, a geopolitical commentator in Missouri says.
“First of all, it’s an embarrassment for the United States that the Chinese were able to penetrate our cyber network to that extent,” said Dean Henderson, an author and columnist at Veterans Today.
“But the more interesting thing is the response of the United States to the Chinese security hacks” for refusing to impose sanctions on China while imposing several rounds of embargoes on Russia, Henderson told Press TV on Saturday.This shows China’s economic power and at the same time the “double standard hypocrisy in US foreign policy,” he added.Henderson also said a New York Times report published Friday revealing the Obama administration has determined that it must retaliate against China for its recent cyber attacks is not surprising.
The report said the White House is still struggling to decide how it can retaliate against the Chinese government without prompting an escalating cyber war.
The decision to retaliate came after the Obama administration concluded that the hacking attack on the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) was so vast in scope that the usual practices for dealing with traditional espionage cases did not apply.
According to officials involved in the internal debates over responses to the cyber attack, Obama’s aides considered imposing economic sanctions against Beijing.But officials from the US Departments of Commerce and Treasury provided a long list of countersanctions China could take against US firms that are already struggling to deal with China.
In June, US officials said hackers based in China had broken into the computer system of the OPM, accessing the personal records of millions of Americans, including current and former federal employees.
The OPM said the data breach had started in March 2014 or earlier, but was noticed in April 2015.
The cyber attack has been described by federal officials as among the largest breaches of government data in the history of the United States.
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