Well, the difference is that when someone fires nuclear ICBMs everyone typically knows unambiguously where the missiles came from and where they went.
To me, drumbeating over hacker threats is just a preparation to give the government yet another carte blanche to do whatever they want. At some point, there will be a grave "cyberattack" which the government detects and there will be lies, lies, lies, and more lies about it, which nobody external will be in a position to contradict, and the government will take it as political justification for retaliating in whatever manner they wish against Iran, China, North Korea, or an as-yet-unnamed enemy of the day.
As a citizen of the USA, the only way I would be comfortable treating a "cyberattack" as an act of war is if there were some kind of transparent, independent, and obviously competent commission evaluating the attack, and I have no faith that such a thing would ever happen in the event of some attack on government information.
To me, drumbeating over hacker threats is just a preparation to give the government yet another carte blanche to do whatever they want. At some point, there will be a grave "cyberattack" which the government detects and there will be lies, lies, lies, and more lies about it, which nobody external will be in a position to contradict, and the government will take it as political justification for retaliating in whatever manner they wish against Iran, China, North Korea, or an as-yet-unnamed enemy of the day.
As a citizen of the USA, the only way I would be comfortable treating a "cyberattack" as an act of war is if there were some kind of transparent, independent, and obviously competent commission evaluating the attack, and I have no faith that such a thing would ever happen in the event of some attack on government information.