I have very mixed feelings on this. Somehow, the US wants to have this imaginary line between hacking done for politics purposes, verses that done for commercial reasons. The amount of Chinese hacking in the US is amazing.

And with the revelations of Snowden, I worry about a foreign government inditing US officials for hacking. Snowden, right or wrong, only has disclosed information on the US and British hacking efforts. This may be because he worked for the NSA, but it's strange that he ended up in Russia after passing through China. Both China and Russia have extremely active hacking communities.

The revelations in Der Spiegel  on the NSA surprised me, and if I was overseas and worried about the US hacking me, I would be very careful on buying US equipment. And the sales of IBM and Cisco in China seem to reflect that. As well as many countries requesting cloud services to host their citizens data in their own country, due to privacy concerns. I was surprised to find out how the NSA was hacking Google and Yahoo (through the interconnections between their data centers, so both companies now encrypt this data).

References:

US Indicts Chinese Military Officers for Cyber Spying - World Affairs

Edward Snowden: The 10 Most Important Revelations From His Leaks - Mashable

Inside TAO: Documents Reveal Top NSA Hacking Unit - Der Spiegel

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