Senator blasts Obama for not blaming China over OPM hack

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) is criticizing the Obama administration for refusing to blame China for the recent cyberattacks that have roiled the government.

“This refusal is a strategic mistake, and the fact that we’re making it may indicate things are even worse than we’ve been led to believe,” Sasse wrote in an op-ed in USA Today on Monday.

{mosads}Since days after the first of two devastating hacks at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) were revealed, administration officials have said privately they believe China orchestrated the attacks.

In total, over 22 million people had sensitive information stolen in the breach.

The digital theft is thought to be part of Beijing’s broader cyber espionage effort to create a comprehensive database on all U.S. government workers.

The detailed, deeply personal information that was stolen from OPM — which included 21.5 million exhaustive background investigation documents — could be used to digitally imitate officials, stage future cyberattacks, identify undercover operatives, or even blackmail government workers and recruit informants.

“By declining to tell the truth about China, we abandon a core tenant of cyber deterrence theory: public attribution,” Sasse wrote. “The administration knows this.”

“So why is the administration officially staying silent?” Sasse wondered.

The White House has indicated it’s concerned that releasing evidence tying China to the incident would expose sensitive intelligence information.

“We don’t see enough benefit in doing the attribution at this point to outweigh whatever loss we might [experience] in terms of intelligence-collection capabilities,” a senior administration official told The Washington Post last week.

Sasse, who sits on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, called the rationale the “flimsiest” of justifications.

“This is wrong,” he wrote. “Telling the truth about China doesn’t disclose our own capabilities. We’re not taking China to court. We don’t have to publicly file the intelligence and analysis that informs our judgments.”

The White House is also trying to calm its increasingly tense relationship with China ahead of a September visit from Chinese President Xi Jinping. The two sides have been clashing over a number of issues, including China’s territorial disputes in the South China Sea. There is fear that a public accusation or new round of economic sanctions could snap the tenuous bond between the two countries.

Sasse called this reasoning “more concerning.”

“Cyber threats keep our defense and intelligence leaders up at night because no aspect of daily life is immune to attack, and the administration’s decision not to attribute the OPM hack to the Chinese suggests that we’re not operating from a position of strength,” he wrote.

Sasse has been making the argument for several weeks that the OPM hacks have revealed a broader national security concern.

Earlier this month, he told The Hill, “I’m worried that foreign actors who have nefarious goals in this space know that we’re asleep at the switch. There are a lot of bad actors out there thinking about cyber in ways that seem well ahead of where this government is.”

The lawmaker redoubled his point on Monday

If the White House is “silent out of duress,” he wrote, “it underscores the essential point that we’ve got a lot more to worry about than just the loss of social security numbers and ruined credit scores. Our national security is at stake.”