Please. Like empty words are going to deter the Russians and the Chinese. These are just scare tactics, brought to you in part by generous campaign contributions from Sony and Lockheed Martin

So wait, if one agency hacks into another they will all go boom?

We're not talking about events like hacking the PSN, here. We're talking about things like state-on-state cyber attacks: cyber-warfare. The largest cyber attacks always come from the state: Google claimed that last year's attack came from China, the article references Stuxnet, where it was probable that either the USA or Israel tried to cause damage to Iran's systems.

Just by the nature of the fact that the Pentagon has released this shows that more states/large terrorist groups have been trying to hack the USA's computers than what is released to the public.

Well... Lockheed Martin... don't see Sony really being involved at all... but yeah.

Either way... the announcemnt does make total sense.

Probably not... but i mean, the current strategy has been

Russia or China hacks into big companies or the US government to steal trade secrets.

US government does nothing.

So... something had to change.

interesting, maybe i'm just unaware of things.  i'll be honest, until the psn hack that effected me i can't say i really paid attention to hackers.  now that i am, i'm just getting increasingly pissed at how little can be done to protect legitiment interests from malicious hackers.

so what is the answer?  to hack back?  is it even possible for the US to protect its information?

Sure it will.

Once people are tired of getting nuked because their neighbour hacked some stuff they will start looking more carefully at what their neighbours is doing !

In a strange kind of way it's things like this I admire the USA for. They still have courage to at least attempt to do something. To stand upto a problem. In the UK I am fairly sure our goverment would just either a) ignore the problem, b) cry to USA to get you guys to bail us out or c) start an 'internet tax' of some sort. On second thoughts I'm fairly sure they would just skip a & b and go straight to option c.

to simply not have vital informatin on the same network as the internet. You would have to have a completely different network without a single point of crossing. But even than we would be vulnerable to hardware hacks (physicaly going to a computer attached to the secure netowrk or even a conection ie ethernet cable) or insider hacks (spies I guess or traitors) Actuallly doing this may not be feasible for all things though.