US government officials are nearly certain that the Chinese government was involved in the theft of sensitive personal information about millions of government employees, members of the US military, and employees of government contractors requiring background checks or security clearances from the systems of the Office of Personnel Management. But according to a report by the Washington Post, the Obama administration has decided to not publicly and officially call out China for the attack—in part because it might require the administration to reveal some of the US' hacking of China to make the case, and expose other information intelligence and warfare capabilities of the National Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security, and FBI.

Ellen Nakashima, the Post's national security reporter, citied anonymous conversations with officials involved with the White House's decision-making process surrounding the OPM, and reported that the administration "has not ruled out economic sanctions or other punitive measures" for the theft of data from OPM. But US officials, including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, have "even expressed grudging admiration for the OPM hack, saying US spy agencies would do the same against other governments," she reported.

Part of the calculus that went into the decision, one official told Nakashima, was that “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.” Another official said that the White House might opt to simply put sanctions in place under other justifications, and then privately communicate to the Chinese government that the sanctions were in fact in retaliation for the OPM hack.

Given that the Obama administration has made a show out of placing blame on the Chinese government for attacks on US businesses—including the filing of charges by the Justice Department against members of China's alleged military hacking unit—not taking action over the government employee data breach could send a signal to adversaries that such attacks on the US government are fair game. Robert Knake, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former Director for Cybersecurity Policy at the National Security Council, told the Post, “We’re effectively saying you can do in cyberspace a volume of spying that is far greater than we ever could have during the Cold War and there will be fewer consequences for it.”

But one Obama administration official said that filing indictments or taking other actions directly based on the OPM attack could backfire. "If you start trying to indict members of their intelligence service for conducting this type of espionage," the official asked rhetorically, "what’s the response going to be? Are they going to start to indict NSA guys?"