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If N. Korea hacked Sony and threatened us, here’s how we should respond

The New York Times, quoting “[s]enior administration officials,” is reporting that “American officials have concluded that North Korea ordered the attacks on Sony Pictures’s computers.”

Senior administration officials, who would not speak on the record about the intelligence findings, said the White House was debating whether to publicly accuse North Korea of what amounts to a cyberterrorism attack. Sony capitulated after the hackers threatened additional attacks, perhaps on theaters themselves, if the movie, “The Interview,” was released. [N.Y. Times]

The Times report doesn’t say whether the feds also think North Korea was behind the threats that caused Sony to pull The Interview from theaters, but North Korea certainly is profiting from the perception that it was responsible for them. Today, another studio made the cowardly decision to kill a Steve Carell film that would have been set in North Korea.

Nor would this be the first time North Korea has used terrorism to censor The Interview. It has already used its kidnappings of Japanese citizens to censor the film’s closing scene:

Japan, where Sony is an iconic corporate name, has argued that a public accusation could interfere with delicate diplomatic negotiations for the return of Japanese citizens kidnapped years ago.

The administration’s sudden urgency came after a new threat delivered this week to desktop computers at Sony’s offices warned that if “The Interview” was released on Dec. 25, “the world will be full of fear.”

“Remember the 11th of September 2001,” it said. “We recommend you to keep yourself distant from the places at that time.” [N.Y. Times]

That’s one example of how negotiations with North Korea can be worse than no negotiations with North Korea. Separately, the Times reports on Sony’s internal debates about censoring The Interview, in a simpering kowtow to North Korea’s threats.

Disturbed by North Korean threats at a time when his company was already struggling, Sony’s Japanese chief executive, Kazuo Hirai, broke with what Sony executives say was a 25-year tradition. He intervened in the decision making of his company’s usually autonomous Hollywood studio, Sony Pictures Entertainment.

According to hacked emails published by other media and interviews with people briefed on the matter, he insisted over the summer that a scene in which Mr. Kim’s head explodes when hit by a tank shell be toned down to remove images of flaming hair and chunks of skull. [….]

At one point in the tug of war over the script, Mr. Rogen weighed in with an angry email to Ms. Pascal. “This is now a story of Americans changing their movie to make North Koreans happy,” he wrote. “That is a very damning story.” [N.Y. Times]

I’m not sure what would leave me more speechless–a direct, brazen attack on our freedom of expression in our own country; the cowardice of Hollywood, Sony, Japan, and the theater chains; or the idea that the U.S. State Department agreed to review scenes from The Interview, thus putting a stamp of government censorship (or endorsement) on the film.

Or, maybe it’s the argument of an irredeemable imbecile named Justin Moyer, who defends North Korea’s reaction in a blog post at The Washington Post, without condemning its hacking, threats, violence, or use of its Japanese hostages. Moyer even writes, “If a future North Korean missile test, naval exercise, trip across the DMZ or future act of terror is blamed on ‘The Interview,’ Rogen can’t say he didn’t have fair warning.” Say what? I look forward to Moyer’s explanation of why Hitler had every right to be upset about “The Great Dictator,” or why Charlie Chaplin had “fair warning” about the Sudeten Crisis and Kristallnacht.

Whether the evidence ultimately proves North Korea responsible for this or not, petty despots everywhere have learned how to censor what the rest of us are allowed to read and see, and not only in America. I can’t help wondering whether Pyongyang, in turn, learned it from the Innocence of Muslims affair. These events have vast implications for our freedom of expression. Arguments about the film’s artistic merit have no place in this discussion. Parody, including tasteless parody, is at the core of how we express our views on matters of global public interest.

The breach is expected to cost Sony Pictures tens of millions of dollars as the company rebuilds its computer network, conducts a forensic investigation of the attack and deals with the legal fallout, including potential lawsuits from employees. It could also have an effect on the film industry’s creative choices.

“I’ve got to believe that this will spook anybody from considering making the North Koreans bad guys in a film,” movie producer Bill Gerber said. “Unless you were dealing with something that was fact-based and very compelling, it might not be worth it.” [L.A. Times]

This time, will our President stand up for our freedom of expression unambiguously? That would require him to act swiftly and firmly against those found to be responsible. Unfortunately, the Times‘s reporters end an otherwise excellent report with the tired, cliche falsehood that the President has no options because “[t]he North is already under some of the heaviest economic sanctions ever applied.” Pish-posh. I don’t know how many times I have to say it–people who write about sanctions should read them first. People who’ve read the sanctions know they’re weak.

Here, then, is a brief list of things the President could do in response, assuming the evidence shows that North Korea was responsible.

1. Put North Korea back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. One of George W. Bush’s great, unsung foreign policy failures was his failed nuclear deal with Kim Jong Il, under which he relaxed sanctions and removed North Korea from the list. North Korea’s de-listing marked the beginning of a period during which North Korea escalated its sponsorship of terrorism, including threats, assassinations, and arms shipments to terrorists.

2. Ask the Senate to follow the House’s example and pass the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, to remedy the weaknesses in our North Korea sanctions.

3. Sign an executive order blocking the assets of North Korean state entities responsible for censorship inside North Korea itself. That executive order could be modeled on one that already applies to Iran.

4. Sign a new executive order blocking the assets of entities found to have knowingly perpetrated, attempted, or supported hacking, cyber-attacks, or cyber-espionage against U.S. targets. That order could be modeled on existing executive orders that target the perpetrators and sponsors of terrorism and WMD proliferation.

5. Ask the Director of National Intelligence to compile a report on China’s support for North Korean hackers, release the unclassified portions to the public, and consider either a criminal prosecution or a civil forfeiture action to attach and seize the assets of any Chinese entities hosting, harboring, or supporting North Korea’s hackers.

Sony, of course, should release and promote The Interview in its original, uncut form. Theaters should show it. Newspapers should stop printing Sony’s hacked e-mails, except as they pertain to North Korea’s attempts to suppress the film. Artists should expose and criticize the cowardly decisions of studios to censor criticism of North Korea, and any other government. Courts should exclude Sony’s hacked e-mails as evidence in litigation. And individual citizens who love freedom of speech should give to Thor Halvorssen’s Human Rights Foundation, which plans to send copies of The Interview into North Korea by balloon.

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Update:

25 Responses

  1. A few thoughts:

    1. For a Nork operation, this is kinda subtle-it’s probably them, but it’s not positively them. Granted, when your country’s hallmark of terrorist ops is sending a commando team against your neighbor’s Presidential mansion, subtlety isn’t your strong suit.

    2. Dear Hollywood: you can never complain about The Blacklist again.

    2a. Dear Hollywood (and the entertainment industry in general): I guess sucking up to China (viz replacing them as The Bad Guys in Red Dawn 2 (with the Norks, ironically) didn’t work out so well if they are willing to let these guys destroy one of your company’s IT system, huh?

    2b. Dear Hollywood: how’s the Snowden biopic coming along? I suspect cyber-security is a little less evil nowadays, huh?

    3. The DPRK is a racist, gay-bashing, genocidal, repressive regime. They commit some of the worst human rights violations in the history of the world. And yet…I keep waiting for the event that will cause them to tip over the moral nexus and generate enough outrage so that the regime become universally condemned by both the Left and the Right. This might do it…but I still doubt it, strangely.

  2. Sony’s reaction is exactly what one expects from folks who hated everyone who ever stood against communism.

  3. Whether North Korea actually did or did not hack the Sony network is largely irrelevant. The hypocrisy, cowardice and weakness that the studio has shown by backing out of the release is going to be an absolute field day for KCNA and the Kim Jong Un propaganda machine. I can’t wait to read about how the “glorious leader stood up to the American Imperialist dogs and demanded that the movie be cancelled and destroyed. The Americans cowered in the great general’s stoic fist of glory and apologized to the great leader” — it’s going to be a complete farce.

    Not to mention, what does this do to our negotiating power in the long term when the elite in North Korea realize that all they have to do is throw a few veiled threats and we drop to our knees and acquiesce? I’m ashamed of Sony, the groups in Hollywood who aren’t striking over this, and anyone else defending Sony’s decision to pull the plug, especially to the point where now nobody will see the film. They should release it for any format anywhere for $1 and donate the proceeds to LiNK.

  6. Although I believe that bad art deserves just as much protection from censorship as good art, I’m sure Parker and Stone could make a much funnier, smarter movie than Seth Rogen could.

  7. I was going to write something…then VentoGT said it way better.

    Only thing I would add is if the US Govt. tried to censor Sony Studios the howls of outrage along Sunset Boulevard would rise beyond our galaxy.

    I’m mad at North Korea…I am positively livid at SONY.

  9. The way you put pressure on N Korea is to put pressure on China. Without aid from China North Korea could not survive for more than a few months. China has a 350 billion balance of trade surplus with the US, make China choose between trade with the US and North Korea. Force S Korea to close Kaesong and stop giving ten of millions of dollars to N Korea. The US should announce that if N Korea is allowed to attend the 2016 Olympics the US wont attend and the billion dollar check we write for TV rights wont be in the mail. North Korea is a strain upon humanity and needs to be treated as such. Any leftist that defends NK should be forced into the DMZ and left to face the North Koreans, I have always believed that a few years in gulag might help leftists see the world as it really is.

  10. Obama has a chance to do something right, however I believe he will bow down before North Korea and do nothing. If we surrender in the first cyber war without ever trying to fight back we can expect far worse in the future. I sure we know what buildings the NK govt. hackers work out of. Send a group of F-22’s to level the buildings and don’t do it at 3 am and kill the janitors do it at 3 pm and kill the hackers.

  11. In all honesty, Sony had no business depicting an assassination attempt on a sitting head of state. Why not have changed the antagonist’s name to Kim Something-Else? The character could still be Kim Jong-Eun in all but name. It is virtually unheard of for a sitting head of state to be depicted in this way in a film. As for Hitler and Chaplain, the US was at war with Hitler in WWII, with active, existential hostilities for years. The same is not true here with North Korea, whom the US engages in negotiations with fairly regularly.

    Sony has done the world a disservice here, and for what? Dollars for a large corporation, and bread and circuses for the masses.

    By the way, none of the above means that I am an apologist for the horrible government in Pyongyang. If I had my way, Kim Jong-Eun would be referred to the ICC and remanded in custody in the Hague.

  12. The horses are still in the barn, and the door remains wide open. So our first response, nationally, is to find some way to disable the ability of Dept 121 to penetrate and damage our nationally important computers. That is an unintended consequence of the actions of the spoiled brat’s sycophants in Pyongyang. I would expect this is a major event in the cybersphere, and will require active measures. That is good.

    Feel sorry for Sony: they’re an entertainment company, not a news company. Clearly, they have been attacked and they have capitulated. Sony acted responsibly in backing down, much as I would prefer to have seen the movie. The alternative is pretty miserable because everyone, who is as addicted to this blog as I, knows that the spoiled brat’s sycophants will kill. Ask the shade of Jang. It’s like the fatwa on Salman Rushdie where he was forced to go into concealment in Australia for a decade: lunatic governments have lunatic servitors.

    Finally, whatever may have been the attitudes of our government and Japan’s to the DPRK, those attitudes will have undergone a seachange. There will be no accommodations in future. Our government is a large and sloppy dog that likes all strangers … until one of them kicks it and it will thereafter bite the foot that kicks it.

    This is not merely a matter of hardlines in discussions over nuclear tests. Sony is a major Japanese company, and its dollar earnings are vital to Japan’s balance of payments. The DPRK’s behavior is actually destabilizing. I think there will be very strong countermeasures designed for the active overthrow of the regime, by the USA and Japan together.

    I would expect that China will abstain. No matter that Chinese computerists assisted the DPRK: the Red gummint must by now be as alarmed as we by the national defense consequences of computer penetration, and the threat to their own military preparedness from an unreliable neighbor.

    I think the consequences of the Interview Attack will all be antithetical to the continued survival of the Kim Regime.

  13. Ten years ago on the PBS show Frontline the former head of the Ass. of electrical Companies stated that sitting at his computer he could knock out power to half the country and it would take at least 6 months to repair the damage. Today thing are probably worse, this is treason by our leaders and should be treated as such.

  14. Related to what David said about this ultimately hurting the regime: the FBI said today they had information about what malware the attackers used, what IP addresses they used, and other clues. This will make it harder for them to successfully attack in the future. They took that risk, and left those clues, just to censor some stupid movie. Perhaps we got off light.

  16. The plot of The Interview also bears a faint resemblance to a 1969 Gregory Peck vehicle called The Chairman, in which the CIA implants a bomb in an unwitting scientist’s head and nearly sets it off while he chats with Mao Zedong (over a ping-pong match, no less!).

  17. I don’t think North Korea was ever concerned about the film being in US theaters. The worry was that the film would eventually end up on the black market in North Korea. So give them what they feared most. The following approach is intended to give Kim Jong Un a metaphorical kick in the balls and make him look foolish. Dictators don’t like to be made to look foolish.

    Sony could create two versions of the film. One version dubbed in Korean and one in Chinese. These can then be made into a reduced quality file for loading onto thumb drives, DVDs and suitable for Internet download.

    The thumb drives and DVDs can be smuggled and balloon dropped into North Korea by those already involved in these activities. The thumb drives and DVDs would of course be provided free of charge. How much would one million DVDs cost to a company like Sony? The download version can be posted on South Korean servers and the Chinese version distributed for free in the border area with North Korea.

    Let the fun begin.

    When North Korea protests, as they will, Sony can claim they had nothing to do with the distribution because the film was stolen, along with many other files, from their servers. Since North Korea denies any involvement in the cyber-attack how can they argue that it was anyone but the unknown attackers that distributed the film?

    P.S. I would even be happy to see my US tax dollar spent for this project if Sony wanted to hide in the closet while their house is being robbed.

  18. Rachael Maddow gives a terrific recap of the Salman Rushdie affair way back in 1989. It’s an almost exact parallel.

  20. The download version can be posted on South Korean servers and the Chinese version distributed for free in the border area with North Korea.

    I’m not sure what purpose this Chinese version is supposed to serve. All Sony has to do to get a Chinese version distributed in the border area (and everywhere else in China) is release it in some form anywhere in the world, be it via online streaming or DVD/Blu-ray. Once that happens it will be a matter of literally days before it’s subtitled in Chinese (which is how the Chinese generally watch foreign films these days) and available online and as bootlegged DVDs. Making an official Chinese version would expedite the process by a few days but hardly seems like a pressing concern.

  21. I just wanted the Chinese in the border region to see the film as they probably have more contact with smugglers and could increase demand and distribution. Use the border region of China as a marketing tool. In the end the logistics and process are of little importance to me and I am sure many others could do better. The takeaway here is the idea to get the film into North Korea, via the black market, any way you can and on the media best suited for the job.

    My key assertion is that preventing anyone in the US from seeing the film is of only minor concern to the rulers of North Korea. It is the prospect of the film making its way to North Korea that has them angry and concerned and as such that is where effort should be focused.

  22. We seem to have two Garys. I occasionally post here under the name Gary, and the earlier comments on this thread were not by me. Not to be rude, but one of us needs to pick a different name so as to avoid confusion. I could switch to Gary S., which I have used in the past.

  23. Hmm, I am late to come back to this thread. Thanks, Robert. I hadn’t heard of the film you had linked to, but I would agree with its critics, including both Democrats and Republicans, who found it in very bad taste. The depiction of the assassination of a sitting head of state is extremely rare in film-making, and I do think it remains a very bad idea for a whole host of reasons–especially when the country whose leader being targeted is in effect an enemy.

  24. If you pick and choose what speech you defend from terrorism based on your sensitivity to the hurt feelings of despots, you’ll soon have all the free speech you deserve. Were you complaining about Team America parodying Kim Jong Il when he was a sitting head of state, or South Park parodying Saddam Hussein’s death and having a gay relationship with Satan in hell? Did you abstain from seeing all those films out of principle, or did you only decide that this was “a very bad idea” after someone threatened violence?

  25. First – Sorry to the original poster known as Gary. It was not my intention to masquerade as another contributor. I just messed up. I will go by “Gary A” from now on. Again I apologize for any confusion.

    I am only responsible for two posts on this page.
    December 21, 2014 at 12:21 PM
    December 23, 2014 at 9:05 AM

    Related to my previous posts there is an interesting link related to the film “The Interview” on the Chosun Ilbo site. Please check this link.

    “>http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2014/12/29/2014122901548.html