Reaction to the Sony Hack Is 'Beyond the Realm of Stupid'
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
The problem isn't that Sony capitulated to a threat. It's that they capitulated to a nonsensical threat. They gave credence to every threat. Earlier in the day I was somewhat neutral on this, but now that I've had a chance to consider it I think that Sony is actually endangering our national security with this move. This is the first time in recent memory that America has been seen as caving to terrorist demands, and it can only create more disasters.
Of course given an article about a stupid, overblown reaction a stupid and overblown reaction would be the top comment. This craving of egos heavily immersed in the social news context for every popular news item be the Most Important Thing That Has Ever Happened And Nothing Will Ever Be The Same Again, paired with a never-ending need for everyone to be outraged about everything is just so tiring. Just get a hold of yourself and and chill out, ok, the world isn't over. Sony didn't just endanger your life. You're probably going to die of cancer in some hospital bed at 4pm in the afternoon a few decades from now after a pretty boring, normal life. You want excitement and danger go help a NGO in a war torn region. You're not going to find it on the pages of reddit and hacker news. This guy rolling his eyes in the vice article would probably roll his eyes at your response as well.
At best he just said that this could encourage more situations like this and possibly terrorist attacks. And all he literally said was "it can only create more disasters" which isn't very specific as to how many/severe said disasters are to be. How "overblown" of him.
He's not saying that the sky is falling. He's saying that it's bad policy to cave to threats like this, even once. Which it definitely is.
As an analogy, one police force giving into a hostage taker's demands probably wouldn't lead to more criminals taking hostages. But if it happened every time, hostage taking would become much more rampant. And so giving into criminals is almost universally against policy. Even if on a case by case basis it would seem overblown and ridiculous; to not just give them what they want to save lives.
And there are possibly serious consequences of just this incident. I bet there will be many fewer movies made about North Korea now. Movie studios will censor self-censor themselves more on things that might upset powerful groups. Of course that may have happened anyway but now they've given up millions of dollars - whereas otherwise they might have actually profited from the attention of the controversy. Two movies have already been cancelled over this nonsense.
People should really be upset at the theater owners who officially opted out. Chances are Sony may have pushed the release anyways but since they were forced by the theaters they are the ones who deserve to be balked at.
Also, Sony isn't America. It's a Japanese company, with a large presence and investment in America, but there's no reason to assume that give them any nationalistic motives or compass.
This has turned out to be a dead loss financially for Sony either way, and when you know you've lost the current game, it's time to start thinking about the next one. Being seen to capitulate like this marks Sony as an easy target. The next time some bunch of cybercriminals wants money and is thinking about targets for some blackmail scheme, who's going to be at the top of their list?
If it truly was North Korea or people they paid do you really think those they targeted would be safe anywhere? About any country can disappear someone, even outside their own country, and North Korea isn't beyond that, they may not be to the level of the US or Russia but I have read they had a fondness at one time for kidnapping Japanese nationals.
Sony should make some sort of TV-connected "console" to let people buy and download media over the internet. Waaaaait a second.
I know the movie studio and consumer electronics divisions aren't the same thing, but if they really wanted to get this video out I have to imagine that the Sony-umbrella companies are capable of working together.
My bet is they change course and still show it in theaters. Maybe not on the original launch date, and maybe not everywhere, but (caving to terrorists aside) they spent a pile of money on this and they want to make it back.
The movie has been produced at this point. It can't cost that much to ship some hard drives to theaters. It would make sense to try to recover at least some of their investment.
SONY should release, because fuck terror.
http://marcrogers.org/2014/12/18/why-the-sony-hack-is-unlike...
Oh FFS, that's just as stupid as calling it an act of war.
U.S. Should Make North Korea Pay for Sony Hack
Pyongyang has given the Obama administration no choice but to retaliate now by imposing sanctions or even an embargo.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/17/u-s-should-...
Did the hackers mention "the interview" before the press started speculating on the attack being from NK?
For all I know, they could be playing with the fears expressed by the medias after the hack went public. If that's the case, they're probably having a hell of a time posing as NK supporters terrorizing Americans.
The movie theaters decided to not show the movie because they couldn't implement a nationwide security system in every one of their theaters in 2 weeks. Since there is 0 security at movie theaters, I as a moviegoer would be extremely scared to go to watch this movie in it's opening week.
Think about what you are saying. "There is a group capable and willing to commit acts of terror on American soil... but now that Sony has not released the movie, I am perfectly safe".
There are 18,000 theaters that could be targets. Let's say there are 10 showings over the opening weekend that might be bombed, so if you attend, there's a 1 in 180,000 chance you'll be in the bombed theater (assuming there's only one bombing). Let's say there's a 5% chance it's a real threat (personally I'd estimate around 1%, but let's use 5% to be conservative). That gives a 1 in 3.6 million chance of being in the bombed theater.
Compare to car accidents. There are 1.27 fatalities per 100 million miles traveled in the USA. If the movie theater is five miles away, that gives you a 1 in 7.9 million chance of dying in a car accident on the way to or from the movie.
If we stop calculating there, it looks like you'd be roughly twice as likely to be in the bombed theater than to die in a car accident on the way to the theater. (Note that this is the chance of being in the bombed theater, not of dying in the bombing. Presumably, most people in the theater would survive.) To me, that seems like an acceptably negligible risk.
More detailed calculations could include the chance of dying conditional on being in the bombed theater, and could include the chance of more than one theater being bombed, and adjust for the chance of the bomber being foiled or the bomb not working, and could adjust for which theater you're seeing it in (theaters in major cities are more likely targets than small towns).
That being said, I disagree with the 5% chance that the threat actually gets carried through. It is not overwhelmingly difficult to carry through this type of threat, since North Korea has a large budget and theaters don't have security.
And from Sony's perspective, it doesn't matter if 6 people dying in Tennessee (random example) is only a small percentage of their overall viewers - it's human lives on their hands in a scenario that could have been easily avoided.
Certainly I agree risks like this are not worth worrying about, life is full of risks.
I mention it because that incident wasn't expected either, but it's an excellent demonstration of how much havoc a few bad actors can wreak. given the huge number of movie theaters and the impossibility of predicting which ones might be targeted, nobody wants to be left holding the bag in the unlikely-but-nonetheless-possible scenario of a mini-massacre. On the scale of things you would be willing to assume risk for, a tasteless comedy ranks pretty low.
My comment didn't mention people not paying attention to a bombing. My comment was about estimating the risk of dying in a bombing, not about people's reactions to it.
> Yawn...
There are more civil ways to express that.
There are more civil ways to express that.
There are more civil ways to discuss risk than making statistical straw man arguments too.
Sadly, that's exactly the fear the hackers want you to have. You have much higher odds being hurt or killed in a car accident on the drive to the theater than from some potential terrorist act.
Part of me wishes that the American public viewed this mess as a cause to be supported, to say criminals and/or a dictator from a third world country doesn't get to decide what harmless entertainment is suitable for us. I, for one, do not want to be threatened because I watched (or made) a movie.
Imagine if ticket sales had gone through the roof for this movie, the kind of statement that would make. And whether or not anyone actually watched it is beside the point.
You are in vastly more danger from other traffic on the drive to the cinema. Hell, you are more likely to die through home carpentry.
Good to know.
One, the FBI told the theater chains that if they screen the movie, they could be targets for the hackers. I'm pretty doubtful that theater chains have good security, and they probably know it. They also don't want their internal emails spread all over the media and their business disrupted. As no company does. So I can't blame them once the FBI has scaremongered them.
Two, once the theaters said they won't screen it, Sony would lose money releasing it. It's not free to send out prints and continue advertising. If they have no hope to make money, why lose more money? And why piss off the hackers further? Where's the win?
It's nice to sit back and say Sony should release it, but honestly, what's in it for them at this point?
It would take a wider cultural consensus to respond in solidarity: theaters don't cave, studios don't cave, moviegoers don't cave, media doesn't feed panics, the legal system doesn't require cowering as a liability issue. We're not there yet... but maybe we can get there, with discussion and experience.
How should that work, how can we change it?
Considering that the American public has been sprinting in the opposite direction for the last decade, I wouldn't hold my breath.
It takes a serious and abiding commitment to total cowardice in the face of adversity to make up excuses for admitted torturers and war criminals - I don't think a single person is going to find their stones now over a film that apparently no one was going to watch anyway.
Once they all took them up on the free pass, yes - canceling the release may have been the sensible move.
You want to show the new Hunger Games movie in your theaters? Then you also have to show those duds for so and so long.
Forget motives and social constructs. Forget thinking about real solutions. Are they "cyberterrorists"? Are we being "terrorized"?
The answer to the latter question is of course yes, but not by the "terrorists" but by sensationalist articles like this.
Hacking Sony is not an act of terrorism, threatening theaters with violence is.
Yes the definition is a bit broad. I thought about excluding nation states but that's not quite right either. Perhaps I could argue that the British were not bystanders in your example.
It wouldn't make any sense to exempt states from the list of potential terrorist actors - because the state invented terrorism. As I said, spectrum of warfare. Now intelligent people can disagree about the ability of individuals to declare war... but then terrorism is restricted to the state. I hope you've misunderstood my WWII example, because otherwise you've just argued that civilian children, elderly and infirm were somehow not bystanders while huddled in bomb shelters. My history isn't super strong, but I don't think anybody has ever argued that the British engaged in total war - which would be necessary for children to be classified as anything but bystanders.
Civilians in a time of war aren't exactly targets but they're not 100% innocent either. It's complicated. Children don't make choices but they are affected by the choices of their guardians. It would be nice to say that any civilian casualties in war are unacceptable but that's clearly not how humans work.
As far as war: fear is nowhere near the emotional response needed to end hostilities. Everybody is afraid in war. There are only two ways to end a war (in victory): attrition or subjugation. Look at the failed wars of the last century, see what they're missing? Actually, I can't really think of a war that was won through attrition... the western front of WWII maybe. Anyway, war is politics - when one side surrenders they have given into political threats to make the danger go away.
I'm a little surprised that I have to break it down this way, but try this: you are an Iraqi in occupied Fallujah. In one scenario the Americans only intentionally kill military aged males who openly engage them in firefights. You're afraid but you know the rules to the game and your will remains unbroken. In the second scenario the Americans publicly execute every military aged male they come across and rape every woman in your family, repeatedly on a random schedule. They capture you and torture you for days, then finally release you after they cut off your right arm. Also, they threaten to bury every Muslim killed in combat inside a dead pig - preventing them from entering heaven (as the British threatened back in the day in India). Also, piles of dead children are stacked and set fire on every street corner. This goes on for months. I'd argue that in the second scenario the population would effectively be terrorized, and your will to fight would be broken.
That is the original meaning of terrorism. What is called terrorism today is pretty much criminal activity, rebranded to justify feeding the military industrial complex. War isn't complicated by the way, it is just wrong. There is no need to tie your brain in knots trying to explain how children aren't 100% innocent in war :)
Yes, their executives were uncouth in their private e-mails. However, these e-mails were literally stolen from them and made available publicly in a campaign designed to embarrass them after they refused to cave to initial blackmail demands. There is no Pentagon Papers conspiracy here that the press needed to expose for the public good -- they're just airing dirty laundry and furthering the ends of criminals.
Yes, Sony had lax computer security and they made it a lot easier than it should have been to abscond with internal data. However, it is so much harder to protect against a targeted attack and (I don't believe) the method of the attack has been disclosed, if it is even completely understood yet. They should be ashamed and apologetic about their security practices, but that doesn't mean they as much as published this information themselves.
Yes, The Interview doesn't look particularly great, and I didn't plan to see it. Yet it should absolutely be allowed to exist and to be publicly released. It is a comedy. It is not "an act of war" as Sony's attackers claim. The existence of this film did not harm real people, that is entirely a result of the extreme overreaction by the people behind these attacks.
I absolutely think that Sony is being blamed for their victimization, and I don't agree with it. It would be terrible to be in their position, and I don't think any company who operates within the laws of their country should be subject to any of:
1. A loss of over $40 million
2. A smear campaign using their own stolen, private correspondence
3. Release or misuse of all manner of employee personal information, SSNs, etc.
4. And all of the other things they're dealing with right now
The people stealing private emails are not Robin Hood but Sony is still the Sheriff of Nottingham.
Being right is not proved by being on the opposite side of a dispute with someone who is doing wrong. They can both be wrong.
I laugh when people in the mainstream media talk about how bad it is that the government is spying on us. Why does it even matter anymore? 1984 is here. It has nothing to do with the government and everything to do with social media.
It's so easy to spread lies around as fact on social media...and people believe it. Just look at all of the false information spread around during the Ferguson protests..which people still believe to this day.
Even Obama admit to swaying public opinion using social media and data mining.
I don't know how they would react if every e-mail sent or received by their mail server was made public and dissected. Maybe they would just laugh it off, but I'm sure there are a few they might prefer to hold on to.
I have to keep reading it for gems like this one: http://gawker.com/my-14-hour-search-for-the-end-of-tgi-frida...
I don't really think their other sites are disgusting; gizmodo, io9, jalopnik and kotaku are pretty straightforward bloggy-newsy sites.
Media is a tool.
Right. Lying to get your point across
"Media is a tool."
The only tools are the people that believe the lies of our politicians...which seems to be a vast majority of the US population.
"including the good guys"
The problem is that people don't respond to good things. To win, you need to smear your opponent and destroy all credibility. Anybody who does this isn't a "good guy", which leads only to one conclusion..
Doesn't excuse others illegal activities, but it certianly makes it easier to feel a certian level of schadenfreude in this case.
The root kit was attached to Sony BMG's products (CDs), and this current attack was against Sony Pictures. Sony is a giant conglomerate with 140,000 employees and who knows how many child companies. To top it off, Sony BMG was a 50/50 joint venture with Bertlesmann. The root kits first appeared on BMG CDs, suggesting that it originated at Bertlesmann and not Sony (although I don't know that and it doesn't excuse Sony anyway).
While it's hard to measure the impact that the root kit had on Sony BMG's customers, it's safe to assume that most of them did not have their personal data disseminated all over the Internet and in newspapers. Whereas that's the reality Sony Pictures and their employees are currently dealing with.
It also happened eight years ago. While not everyone may forget or forgive, I think it's more productive to respond to the way Sony treats me as a customer today versus a decade ago. That's how you encourage better behavior from a company, by rewarding them for doing a better job.
The thing to remember here is that law is a fiction, enforced by the state.
I don't think anyone is "siding against Sony", they just
1) Realize that if this is indeed a nation-state attacking, the perpetrators are beyond the reach of justice. So law really is a fiction in this case.
2) Are calling out Sony, not for being in the wrong, but for being stupid.
Saying that Sony behaved stupidly isn't a problem in itself. I just feel like this is the dominant narrative and that it's been taken to the point where people are blaming Sony and not the attackers.
It's analogous to the furor over companies like Yahoo being outed as supposed PRISM participants. Yes, that sucks but the US government is the culprit there. That's where the blame rightly belongs.
I think it's easy for some people to look at this and say it just prevented the release of a not particularly exciting movie, no big deal. How would we all feel if it hit a little closer to home though? What if Putin decides that it offends him that many of the world's computers use an OS with a kernel created by a Finnish programmer and takes similar steps?
It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbour and to say: --
"We invaded you last night--we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."
"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!"But that Batman movie was a good movie. (OK, not the best of the franchise, but still OK). The plot of The Interview is "a celebrity journalist and his producer land an interview with Kim Jong-un and are instructed by the CIA to assassinate him." That sounds like a good action-adventure movie. But it was made as a comedy. Dumb. Then the plan was to release it on Christmas Day, usually a day for take-the-kids movies. Dumber.
Sony may be using this as an excuse to escape from a turkey of a movie. Of course, now we all have to see it. Probably on Netflix; it's not worth a trip to a theater.
This whole affair is in the realm of stupid, on all sides.
The NYT mentioned an email sent to multiple media outlets – but did that email somehow prove inside knowledge of the hacks? Perhaps, by revealing fresh info or using a cryptographic signature associated with earlier releases or messages left behind on Sony's machine's? If so, no reports have said so.
Another site mentioned a Pastebin source for the threat, which was accompanied with links to other Sony emails. But were those new, unique emails that could have only come from the hacker(s)? And which was the first threat source – an email or a Pastebin?
These are basic questions of apparent provenance that should be answered in any coverage of internet-delivered threats.
The cyber threat is certainly the more credible of the two. Hackers who owned Sony so completely could now turn their focus to AMC, Regal, Cinemark, and Carmike. Aside from looting data stores, they could potentially shutdown ticketing systems, hack customer databases, steal credit cards...
We know a well-funded persistent targeted attack is guaranteed to succeed against these kinds of targets. I'm not really sure what's even holding back the tides of cyber-warfare beyond perhaps governments' inefficiency at organizing the necessary task forces. Fear of enforcement or retaliation certainly isn't the gating factor on the teams who are perpetrating these hacks.
The whole thing seems beyond absurd from one angle, and at the same time portends an escalating cyberwar which will not be nearly as fun to watch as The Interview.
More likely, they are concerned about the economic threat. It's a great excuse to not lose exibition rooms empty with a bad movie, and yet evade any kind punishment by Sony.
What use is the FBI/CIA/NSA/etc good for if the same attacks happen regardless of how much money we funnel their way? I couldn't care less about this movie, I might have watched it when it came out on DVD but pulling it from theatres because of threats from an unknown entity? Even if it's from NK that's an even bigger reason to ignore it.
This is a dangerous precedent we are setting when a threat can stop a movie from getting released. We are caving to terrorism (this is probably one of the first times ever "we are letting the terrorists win" actually fits the situation) of an unknown entity.
That said knowing Seth Rogen movies, Im sure it ended up with them smoking weed with KJU and having a party out of it, so he shouldn't be that upset...
"Death of a President" is movie about solving the assassination of George W. Bush with British production companies, so it's been done. I don't recall going to war over it or anything.
Personally, if I were President and a foreign country made a raunchy comedy about assassinating me, I'd give it a try before condemning it with a low review score.
How is a small country like North Korea capable of mounting such a sophisticated attack when they aren't even teaching their computer students about the Internet? - http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2014/12/07/suki-kims-exper...
Even if they specifically trained a hacking group, the talent pool would be tiny.
Sometimes I feel embarrassed that I've missed them, but mostly I'm just happy that I have. This one seems like the latter.
This essay is good (although I don't feel as strongly about it as the author).
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
(I still like journalists and news, I just wish it would be more long-term, less 'real-time')
Firstly, "cyberterrorism" has forever been defined as attacks on computer resources, not attacks on people. If a nation state crippled a business to coerce their actions, that is pretty much spot on with the definition of cyberterrorism.
Secondly, who ever said that such a theater attack would have to simultaneously hit 18,000 theaters? The threat seemed to be that any theater could be at risk. I mean, is ten theater attacks okay? Five? Two? One? Sony and theaters are not the US military or the government. They're a risk abatement private enterprise.
This is a terribly weak article. He redefines existing terminology and then strikes down absurd strawmen to get the cheering crowd to nod along.
If I rob a bank it is not a terrorist act. If I use the money to make a dirty bomb and commit a terrorist act with said bomb, that's a terrorist act, not the initial robbery.
"Did shit blow up? Then It was an act."
Threats are not acts, despite what any legal framework may say.