‘Megaphone Diplomacy’
“Cyberattacks are usually conducted anonymously and across borders, making them hard to trace back to the source,” Cui Tiankai, China’s ambassador to the U.S., wrote in an Aug. 26 article in National Interest magazine. “Unfounded accusations or megaphone diplomacy will be nothing but counterproductive.”
“Megaphone diplomacy is exactly what we are getting,” said Rosita Dellios, an associate international relations professor at Bond University on Australia’s Gold Coast. “It looks like they are trying to prime Xi into being receptive and playing a role with the U.S. in trying to establish some sort of cyber norms. But it is also unnecessarily disruptive just before Xi’s trip.”
There is widespread concern in the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Operations, the spy corps, that officers’ private health, marital, financial and other information may have fallen into Chinese hands, said one undercover officer, who also asked not to identified given the sensitivity of the information.
Xi Visit
The timing of any move is being debated, the officials said, with diplomats and others arguing that making any kind of announcement or imposing any retaliatory sanctions in advance of Xi’s visit could cause unwarranted damage to ties. Some officials have argued that Obama should warn Xi privately of what will happen if the hacking continues but hold off taking any action to see if China responds.
Such sanctions are already authorized by an executive order that Obama signed in April, the officials said. It calls “malicious cyber-enabled activities” a national emergency and authorizes the Treasury Department to take action against individuals, companies and other entities that engage in it. In announcing it, one of the officials said, Obama noted that such attacks can originate “from a range of sources,” underscoring the possible breadth of the retaliatory actions being debated.
The actions that could trigger retaliation would have to meet a threshold of damage that’s still being debated, the officials said, but high on the list will be impacting the U.S. financial or energy infrastructure, a concern triggered by a destructive hack of Sony Pictures that the U.S. said was carried out by North Korea, and other intrusions into U.S. electric grids and pipelines.