Remember when everyone was discussing how bad it is for the NSA to know everything, because they can do things like ride in at critical moments in someone's life, like a politician's, and blackmail them with releasing something unless it goes their way?

Same argument holds with China, or anybody who gets the data.

Plus, the ability of attackers is not bounded by your creativity or credulity, or mine. The question isn't whether you or I can come up with something interesting to do with the data, the question is whether anybody who gets their hands on it can.

For the most part, the data really is mundane and irrelevant, sure. I know some government employees I went to college with, none of whom are in any position to do anything all that interesting at China's behest. But it's that .1% percent of data on the movers and shakers, and the people who will be tomorrow's movers and shakers, that is very valuable.

(And I've got a bridge to sell you if you think the full range of the hacking has been revealed yet.)

Edit: Oh, hey, look what I found in my newsfeeds literally one minute later: http://www.wired.com/2015/06/opm-breach-security-privacy-deb... "Federal background checks, after all, are meant to suss out information that might be used by foreign enemies to blackmail a government staffer into turning over classified information. And that stolen information could be used for exactly that extortion purpose, says Chris Eng, a former NSA staffer and now VP of research at the security firm Veracode." They literally got their hands on the forms constructed to contain exactly the information we didn't want foreign governments could get.

...so your personal data being compromised by persons unknown is not something you would deem a problem?

It is a problem, but the United States NSA is currently the biggest offender in that department. Let's start out by not doing it to ourselves.

The US passively spying on 300,000,000 > China actively spying on [and suppressing] 1,300,000,000. What a wacky world.

I was referring to China's efforts to compromise systems in the US, not their (dismal) domestic human-rights record. The point: we shouldn't be collecting and concentrating the private communications of American citizens in a giant data center – it's provided no proven protective value, and is a huge glowing target for foreign espionage (corporate and/or governmental).

Not one worth going to war over.

"Going to war" was not a part of my question at all.

Its framing in the context of threats to the US. The CIA can do their job and attempt to catch foreign hackers, you don't need 800 billion of army, navy, and marines sitting around to do that.

>the CIA is not responsible for "catching foreign hackers". That is the FBI.

>the US military is roughly 1.5 million people. that is in total. .00375% of the US population

I know it is easy to think that america has a huge military, and that the CIA is some massive organization that functions as an all knowing entity, and that they do nothing. But you need to expand your information sources. Watching the news and 0dark30 does not adequately prepare one to understand how international relations work.

I know there is a tendency to think that the US overspends on defense (~22% of the total estimated budget) [http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_budget_detail].

To make a parallel, if there is some tech company that has a small, highly skilled staff, would it be silly for them to spend ~22% of their gross total budget on having the best gear and training?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces

> the CIA is not responsible for "catching foreign hackers". That is the FBI.

The CIA is foreign, the FBI is domestic. They are both investigative agencies. If the hackers are operating out of the US for a foreign interest, they are in the domain of the FBI. If they are attacking from China, thats the CIA's business.

> I know it is easy to think that america has a huge military, and that the CIA is some massive organization that functions as an all knowing entity, and that they do nothing.

It isn't "think". The US spends 4 times as much as the next largest military, China, while having the same land area and a quarter the population. We have treaties and agreements that make us the military defense force of a quarter of the world, and we do about a third of the spending. While being 4% of the global population.

And of course the CIA is doing stuff. That is my point. You don't need the 800 billion dollar tumor to have a foreign investigations agency do their job protecting us from information threats.

> To make a parallel, if there is some tech company that has a small, highly skilled staff, would it be silly for them to spend ~22% of their gross total budget on having the best gear and training?

The staff you describe are only trained to stand in front of your competitors offices and block them from entering. They aren't adding value to the company, they are just eating its resources to threaten the competition. The 800 billion sunk into the DoD is producing a trickle of R&D results and innovation, but is not improving our GDP or producing goods or services of value to citizens.

The bigger question is why when you have a small, highly skilled staff (NASA) you regularly cut its budget when it has at various points in history produced incredible R&D returns for its cost.