One potential response named in the report involves breaching China's famed "great firewall" to embarrass the Chinese government and damage its ability to control what its citizens can and cannot see on the internet.

This would actually be a good thing!

However, this does have a bitter aftertaste. As the last wikileaks documents show, the USA is conduction espionage on politicians of allied nations, and is also doing industrial espionage. From the Snwoden leaks we know that they are trying to surveil the whole internet traffic. Everyone who isn't US citizen is free game.

When people form Europe complain that the surveillance of our elected governments by an allied state is outrageous, usually the reaction is a mere 'that's just how it works'.

The US, however, 'retaliates'. That's actually not bad and is totally the right thing to do when you are attacked - I just wonder why none of the US allies that are attacked by the US do anything about it.

At this point, however, the government still has not made an official statement accusing China of being behind last month's theft, though director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. made it clear in earlier comments that the government considered China to be at fault.

Oh, if Clapper said it, it sure is true. Lying to Congress does not all in any way destroy our trust in him!

Personally, I think the US has good reasons here to act against China. If they find a way to do it by hacking the great firewall, it might be a really good thing. I'd just hope the German government would show an equally harsh reaction to the fact that the US spied on them for years. The US are a huge international offender in the cyber-wars, and they don't distinguish between friend and foe when it comes to total surveillance. The harsh truth is, that in this case, the German government has good reasons to cooperate with the Chinese, just to get these records to unmask US spies in Germany, spying on German politicians, industry and citizens. And that's just fucked up.