Is It Hypocritical To Charge Russia For Hacking Yahoo When The US Does The Same Thing?

The US Justice Department yesterday unveiled the blockbuster charges that Russian government officials stood accused of collaborating with Russian criminal hackers in the 2014 Yahoo breach. To hear the Justice Department tell the story, this was a terrible breach of trust for a foreign government to hack into a US company to conduct espionage. Yet, in an era in which the shadowy world of spying has been illuminated by the harsh spotlight of Wikileaks, the Snowden disclosures and the more recent CIA hacking documents, is it hypocritical to charge the Russians with such activity?

Prior to 2013, most people in the technology sector understood that the US and other major governments conducted cyber espionage of some form, but the release of the Snowden documents that year crystallized just how extensive these activities were and that many of these espionage efforts involved the direct targeting and weakening of the cyber defenses of American companies and the products they sell. That American tax dollars, including the taxes paid by the companies themselves and their employees, would be turned against them to pay domestic and foreign companies and hackers to undermine American corporate security, going as far as to allegedly tap the fiber cables connecting their data centers and paying foreign hacking organizations to develop exploits for their products, was a wakeup call to the technology industry of the extent to which their own government would go to harm American companies.