Anonymous Obama administration sources say US will retaliate against China for OPM hack and is weighing options that include breaching the Great Firewall
U.S. Decides to Retaliate Against China's Hacking — The Obama administration has determined that it must retaliate against China …
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands two months after the White House confirmed hackers breached a second computer system at OPM and said President Obama was considering financial sanctions against the attackers — a breach Reuters later linked to a rare tool also used in the Anthem intrusion tied to Chinese intelligence. The retaliation decision converts that consideration into declared policy.
It is also a sharp reversal of tone: in December 2014 the administration had asked Beijing for help blocking North Korean cyberattacks, treating China as a potential partner in cyber norms. The options now under discussion — from sanctions to breaching the Great Firewall — would instead make US cyber policy directly adversarial.
First-order effects
- Chinese state-linked hacking operations face direct US retaliation rather than diplomatic protest, with the administration explicitly refusing to rule out attacking China's censorship infrastructure itself.
- By briefing anonymously through the New York Times rather than acting through indictments alone, the White House is signaling the response publicly to shape Beijing's cost calculus before any operation is acknowledged.
Second-order effects
- The follow-on Washington Post reporting shows where this heads: [[a:832338|sanctions targeting Chinese companies and individuals who benefited from trade-secret theft]], extending retaliation beyond government hackers to commercial actors.
- Beijing gains a propaganda frame if US action touches civilian internet access, letting it cast economic-espionage disputes as attacks on Chinese sovereignty and complicating cooperation on issues like the North Korea cyber channel the US sought just months earlier.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, cyber espionage by states gets answered with economic instruments — sanctions designations and network-level countermeasures — normalizing retaliation as standing doctrine rather than case-by-case response.
- Treating national firewalls as legitimate military-intelligence targets sets a precedent other authoritarian states can cite when they retaliate against Western networks, blurring the line between espionage response and offensive information warfare.
The trend: US-China cyber conflict is moving from quiet diplomacy and mutual accusations toward codified retaliation doctrines that treat both economic theft and censorship infrastructure as fair targets.