Early last week, the US publicly announced that it was not going to publicly blame China for the OPM hack.
The evidence of China’s responsibility for the hack has not been made public, and doesn’t seem particularly strong. The FBI initially suggested several possible candidates, including “state actors.” Media outlets took this to mean China, and started reporting China was being blamed. Congressmen took the media reports as proof China did it, and other media outlets took the Congressmen’s comments as proof China did it.
The idiocy through which we got here is neither here nor there though, as the US, which still hasn’t “publicly” blamed China, despite publicly saying they weren’t going to do so, is now publicly saying they’re going to carry out some sort of revenge act against China.
Officials are said to be split on how big of a revenge attack to conduct, and some are afraid that it will spark a revenge attack from China, which would be followed by a revenge-revenge attack, and so on.
Those calling for more aggressive attacks are said to believe it will be a “deterrent” in the future, despite it also being obviously more likely to result in retaliation. The question of whether China even did the OPM hack in the first place seems long since forgotten.
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