Althouse: "Hours after an announcement that U.S. authorities determined North Korea was behind the recent cyber-attack on Sony Pictures..."

December 18, 2014

"Hours after an announcement that U.S. authorities determined North Korea was behind the recent cyber-attack on Sony Pictures..."

".... the entertainment company announced it was pulling the release of the film The Interview."

27 comments:

chickelit said...: Anything to avoid another Benghazi.; 12/18/14, 9:31 AM
Rusty said...: I'm pretty sure the Norks aren't sophisticated to pull something like this off.
As other , more savvy, people have mentioned This smacks of an inside job.; 12/18/14, 9:33 AM
Nonapod said...: Mitt Romney suggested that Sony release it online for free, or maybe take $5 donations for Ebola for it. I think that's an interesting idea.; 12/18/14, 9:34 AM
Joe said...: There is a much more logical reason the movie is being pulled: theater owners watched the pirated copies, realized that it sucked and wouldn't sell any tickets.; 12/18/14, 9:37 AM
Anonymous said...: Danegeld, pure and simple...; 12/18/14, 9:39 AM
Anonymous said...: Now that Sony has shown us the wrong way to react to a threat like that, here's the right way.; 12/18/14, 9:40 AM
TRISTRAM said...: So for the last 50 years, Christian, Republicans and conservatives (social and / or economic) have been running scared of Hollywood and the News-Entertainment-Publishing Complex. Now a tin-pot dictator that can't even light his own country can intimidate Sony into shutting down? I don't know where to begin with how messed up that is.

The stupid party in thrall to the shock troops of the coward party. The liberal shock troops make WWII Vichy French look heroic by comparison. And we have let them set the tone and direction of culture for a generation. If the GOP/Conservatives had any capacity for retrospection (or sentience), they'd ask themselves 'Why did we capitulate to the Media and Entertainment industries for the last 50 years?'; 12/18/14, 9:40 AM
Brando said...: "I'm pretty sure the Norks aren't sophisticated to pull something like this off.
As other , more savvy, people have mentioned This smacks of an inside job."

Exactly my thought. Their official government website looks like something from the Clinton years. How could they pull off an operation like this?

I wonder what's really going on here.; 12/18/14, 9:44 AM
Joe said...: BTW, I call bullshit on the claim that North Korea did this. No theater owner would give a rat's ass. This is spin by SONY to justify their shitty movie.; 12/18/14, 9:44 AM
NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...: Rusty said...
I'm pretty sure the Norks aren't sophisticated to pull something like this off.
As other , more savvy, people have mentioned This smacks of an inside job.

Norks could possibly get into Sony's system, but the way the breach has been exploited requires a knowledge of American culture that I don't think the Norks have.; 12/18/14, 9:53 AM
MadisonMan said...: I don't think that's the whole story.; 12/18/14, 10:02 AM
Psota said...: The quoted passage does not reflect the sequence of events, Sony got hacked and the emails got released. For a little while, everyone had a good laugh over that. Then the threats about the movie started, Sony pulled its marketing, then the theater chains began announcing they would not show the film. Finally sony pulled the movie altogether. It was only then that stories started to appear in which the government started to take the position that NK was behind all of this.

The government has been notably weak in responding to this. Hack or not, there was at least 72 hours when american theater-goers were being threatened if they went to see this film. The government had nothing to say about this while it was building towards the cancelation of the movie. Surely Sony acted in part because it was getting so little support from DHS, et al.; 12/18/14, 10:07 AM
Bobby said...: Hector Monsegur- who was known as Sabu during his previous life as an Anonymous hacker- has hypothesized that while North Korea has very sophisticated state-sponsored hackers (as do Russia, China and the US), they don't have the physical infrastructure to have done it from North Korea. The 100TB data transfer would have taken several years on North Korea's pipeline.

He did, however, note that it could have been North Korean hacker agents operating out of, say, China. A more likely scenario appears to be that North Korea simply hired mercenary hackers- probably operating from several different countries- to do this for them. And there's always the possibility that this was an inside job- a Sony employee hacked the servers from the inside, sold it to the hacker group, who in turn claimed to have gotten in it by hacking in to the system. We may never find out the truth.

After the major theater chains refused to screen the movie (based off the hackers threats to target the theaters with 9/11-style attacks), I'm not sure what Sony could have done to get a theater release- they don't have that kind of distribution capacity. They could do a DVD release. Or they could sell it to streaming video services like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu+ - but those companies are extremely vulnerable to denial of service attacks, which would expose them to greater risk than the theaters (it's not clear to me why the theaters took the threat so seriously- we've seen nothing yet from these hackers that suggests they could launch any meaningful physical terrorist attack on US soil...)

The reverberations on this thing are going to be huge.

--Bobby; 12/18/14, 10:15 AM
Anonymous said...: Incidentally, at the time it was pulled The Interview was at 53% on the Tomatometer-- not great, but not the sort of stuff megaflops are made of either. Last weekend's top grosser, Exodus: Gods and Kings, is at 27%.; 12/18/14, 10:36 AM
Darrell said...: Sony should just leak the film to online streaming sites--the free ones. They can try and take the write-off.; 12/18/14, 11:25 AM
J. Farmer said...: I cannot believe that Sony Pictures, particularly being a subsidiary of a Japanese company, could not have predicted that making a movie about assassinating the NoKo dictator would have resulted in this kind of backlash. The North Korean regime is notorious for reacting in an outsized way to the slightest provocations or perceived insults. One of the main ways the regime justifies its power over its serf residents is by claiming to be constantly under siege by "imperial powers." Whether that's a warship or a third-rate Hollywood film does not seem to matter much. Threats against individual theaters always seemed ridiculous to me. Henceforth, will Sony Pictures and cinema chains be screening all their films for the NoKo regime to ensure they meet their approval. Rank cowardice.; 12/18/14, 11:33 AM
mikee said...: Just what, these days, constitutes an act of war against the United States?

No particular reason I'm asking, just sort of wondering out loud.; 12/18/14, 11:39 AM
Beldar said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 12/18/14, 11:45 AM
Anonymous said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 12/18/14, 1:19 PM
Thorley Winston said...: There is a much more logical reason the movie is being pulled: theater owners watched the pirated copies, realized that it sucked and wouldn't sell any tickets.

That was pretty much my thought as well. It looked like a terrible movie from the trailer and the “threats” by North Korea seemed like a good way to either (a) gin up publicity in the hopes that people would turn out to see it or (b) find an elegant way for theaters to refuse to show it (purportedly for the “safety of their patrons”) without poisoning their relationship with Sony.; 12/18/14, 1:45 PM
Unknown said...: No doubt the nkoreans learned this from what Obama did to petreaus; 12/18/14, 1:57 PM
damikesc said...: And Paramount banned airing of Team America in its place.

I anxiously await the Oscars "We Are So Fucking Brave" speeches this year.

Fuck the media.; 12/18/14, 2:15 PM
Jupiter said...: Bobby said...

"(it's not clear to me why the theaters took the threat so seriously- we've seen nothing yet from these hackers that suggests they could launch any meaningful physical terrorist attack on US soil...)"

Consider what the theaters' liability would have been if they did not take it seriously, and something happened.

"The reverberations on this thing are going to be huge."

Yes and no. ISIS has already shown that they can behead Americans simply for being Americans, and America will do nothing. Someone has now shown that they can publicly blackmail American corporations with terrorist threats, and America will do nothing. I suppose that was not previously known. But it is failry generally recognized at this point that there is no downside to threatening the white people Obama would like to get rid of anyway.; 12/18/14, 3:49 PM
Clyde said...: Blogger damikesc said...
And Paramount banned airing of Team America in its place.

Yup. We've gone from "America, Fuck Yeah!" to "America, Please Don't Hurt Us!" in just a few short years.

John Belushi is probably rolling over in his grave.; 12/18/14, 3:58 PM
RecChief said...: how is this any different than leftists throwing a fit about when someone expresses a view that isn't SJW approved?; 12/18/14, 6:27 PM
Freeman Hunt said...: Said by someone who is making a movie: "I just hope Kim Jong-Un likes [it.]"

Ha!; 12/18/14, 6:40 PM
bgates said...: Consider what the theaters' liability would have been if they did not take it seriously, and something happened.

Hm. You are suggesting that the theater would be liable if a threatened terrorist attack took place at the theater. OK.

Suppose the threat was that the terrorists would attack a school if the movie wasn't pulled. Would the theater still be liable?

Suppose it was a movie that was already playing, and terrorists threatened to attack a school if it wasn't pulled.

Suppose somebody wanted Jon Stewart off the air badly enough to threaten to murder schoolchildren over it.

Suppose somebody wanted to forbid anybody in Hollywood to say anything positive about Barack Obama, under penalty of some horrific crime somewhere in America. Would Will Smith or Chris Rock or Gwynneth Paltrow or some other idiot face civil liability for talking up Preezy?; 12/19/14, 2:27 AM