“It was the old people-in-glass-houses problem,” a senior Obama official told me. The NSA’s bread and butter was hacking foreign agencies and officials. China’s breach of OPM was essentially a countermeasure. “There was an inherent tension between protecting the private sector, the personal data of our citizens, and the interests of our intelligence community, which was directing the same kind of campaigns. But the real killer was commercial espionage.”
