The point that most of you are missing is that the NSA's intelligence gathering activity and activities of that class are completely unrelated to these charges. They are being charged with economic hacking activities. Trade secrets were being lifted and handed to Chinese companies. An analog would be like the NSA harvesting data from Samsung and then passing it to Apple, which is the type of stuff that we have no evidence of thus far. Regardless of your feelings on the NSA's actions, this isn't the same type of "all countries hack each other" activity.

And if you think metal and solar companies are the only one suffering these sorts of attacks, you're crazy. I think it's just that the other victims don't want to be named publicly for a variety of reasons. This sort of activity is a serious problem, but you can't just file charges all willy-nilly. Fortunately the U.S. already had economic actions in motion through resolution channels pertaining to the dumping of solar tech, so it makes this sort of thing much easier to do I think.