One of the big stories lately has been that of Sony getting
hacked. I think everything has gotten a little out of control and of course,
that means I need to give it a Renée twist. For those of you who haven’t been
following, Sony Pictures Entertainment (the movie studio arm of Sony) was
hacked near the end of November (it was discovered by employees on Monday,
November 24th). The hackers stole large amounts of information,
deleted original information and generally damaged Sony’s network, causing it
to be down for several days. Among the stolen information were 5 movies (4
unreleased), including Fury and Annie, which has its official release tomorrow.
The movies were then released on file sharing sites and are being downloaded
like crazy – this will definitely hurt Sony’s bottom line. The stolen
information also included private company communications which interestingly
enough have only been released to journalists so far (the documents are
protected and only journalists were sent the password). These documents include
some unflattering exchanges about Hollywood celebrities and some potential
movie projects – Sony will definitely be doing damage control for a while.
Now the big question is, who hacked Sony? And following
that, why did they hack Sony? Well it’s starting to look like North Korea
hacked Sony. Why? Because they were outraged at the soon to be released movie, The
Interview. The movie is a comedy where two journalists (played by Seth Rogen
and James Franco) get an interview with Kim Jung-Un and are instructed by the
CIA to assassinate him. There are so many things wrong with this movie – I honestly
don’t understand how there was never a point where someone was like, hey guys, maybe this isn’t such a good idea.
The movie focuses on assassinating the CURRENT leader of North Korea – a country
that isn’t exactly known for its openness. Would any country be okay with this?
What if someone made a movie about trying to assassinate Obama? Americans would
go insane. What about the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel? Or Canada’s Prime
Minister, Stephen Harper? Let’s be real - no country would be okay with a movie
talking about killing their current leader, so why did Sony think this would be
okay? Also, how did they not think that this would hurt relations with North Korea,
which are already terrible? They are certainly never going to let a journalist
in after this. 
This movie feels like it was trying to be in the same genre
as Borat, which was also a terrible idea, but at least he wasn’t talking about
killing anyone. Now I haven’t seen the film, so I don’t know what kind of
commentary they provide about assassinations, but I think this shows how
acceptable it has become for the government to kill leaders or people who have
different ideas and values. We have come a long way from Executive order 12333,
signed by Ronald Reagan, which reiterates the U.S stand on assassination,
stating that “No person
employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage
in, or conspire to engage in, assassination”. This has been relaxed and
stretched significantly since the war on terror began. But that’s a topic for
another day.
So
Sony gets hacked, and the demand is that Sony does not release the movie. This
is accompanied by threats of 9/11 style violence against movie theatres that
show the movie and against people who go see it. Sony wanted to make a movie
with a political angle – now they get to join in the global political mess. Because
of these threats, theatres started to pull out of playing the movie and so, yesterday
Sony announced it would not be releasing the film at all – losing them at least
$44 million (we know how much the film cost to make because the hackers
released that information too). Sony then released a strongly worded letter to
media organizations telling them to stop reporting based on stolen information
and delete all copies they have. I find this particularly interesting because a
lot of media organizations are owned by organizations that also own movie
studios – for example, the Walt Disney Company also owns ABC News. While they
are certainly interested in reporting breaking news, one could argue that they
benefit from Sony being under attack because that’s one less competitor for
them. Certainly none of the other large movie studios have come out and said
anything to condemn the attacks.
I
think the craziest thing about all of this is the most recent news that the
U.S. government is considering a ‘proportional response’. A proportional
response to what? The United States was not attacked – a company that is based
in America, but is the subsidiary of a Japanese company, was attacked. The U.S.
should almost be happy at the insight from these hacks, that 1) companies have
weak security measures that need to be worked on to protect the information of
their American employees and 2) North Korea has sophisticated cyber warfare
capabilities. Besides, what are they going to do? North Korea is already
incredibly isolated and sanctioned against – any actions will likely only hurt
the people further. Will they hack North Korea back? Figure out a way to give
everyone access to the internet and the truth? I feel like if they were able to
do that already, they would have. Also, is the U.S. sure that they have better
cyber warfare capabilities than North Korea? Do they really want to test that
theory by turning the hackers’ attention to the U.S. government?
I’m
not saying that we should be okay with what happened, but we should consider
all the information before responding. One, this movie was a dumb idea and
North Korea was right to be upset by it. Two, they hacked the company
responsible for the movie and did damage to it, but did not overly hurt
employees (while personal information was included in the hacked data, that data
has not been released to the general public, only to journalists, who we can hope
will keep that data private). Three, they asked (with threats) that Sony not
release the movie, which Sony has decided to comply with. Four, the world is
now aware of North Korea’s cyber capabilities and should increase their cyber
security accordingly. That is all.
