Director of National Intelligence James Clapper cautioned lawmakers on Thursday about the posture they take toward certain foreign countries’ adversarial cyber behavior, reminding them that the US engages in similar activities around the world.
Clapper was responding to comments from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, who called for more international rules when it comes to foreign intelligence gathering.
“With respect to that which is conducted for espionage purposes, I would just caution that we think—in the old psalm about people living in glass houses—we should think before we throw rocks,” Clapper told lawmakers.
The spy chief added that “this is a personal view.”
Rep. Schiff noted that there’s a difference between “cyber attacks” like the one that struck Sony last year and “foreign intelligence gathering efforts” akin to the hack on the US government’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) earlier this year.
While the US doesn’t engage in economic espionage and cyber attacks, Schiff claimed, policymakers should consider playing with “rules of the road” when it comes to foreign intelligence gathering.
Clapper explained to lawmakers that the OPM hack resulted in “no destruction of data or manipulation of data.”
He then went further in downplaying the significance of the attack, describing it as “a passive intelligence collection activity—just as we do.”
The OPM data breach, which was discovered in April, resulted in the theft of more than 20 million records containing personal information such as social security numbers, names, and addresses of current, former, and prospective government employees.
Clapper was the first administration official to publicly blame China for the data breach, though he has been careful not to condemn it.
“You’ve got to salute the Chinese for what they did,” Clapper said during a June intelligence conference in Washington. “If we had the opportunity to do that, I don’t think we’d hesitate for a minute.”
Schiff’s claims about the US not engaging in cyber espionage have also been called into question by one of Clapper’s adversaries, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
During a January 2014 interview with a German TV network, Snowden said: “If there’s information at Siemens that’s beneficial to US national interests–even if it doesn’t have anything to do with national security—then they’ll take that information nevertheless.”
Secret documents released to journalists by the former Booz Allen contractor also revealed US spying organs looking into the activities of several foreign businesses. A 2013 New York Times report identified a French oil company, Total, and an electronics company, Thales, as targets of the National Security Agency and its British partner, GCHQ.
