N. Korea forces Sony to withdraw movie
I would risk my life for some things. Going to see “The Interview” isn’t one of them.
“The Interview” now ranks among the best known movies that almost no one has seen. It gained instant notoriety as the movie that so infuriated North Korea and its leader, Kim Jong Un, that Pyongyang decided to retaliate with cyberterrorism.
The allegedly raunchy satire involves a TV host (played by James Franco) and producer (Seth Rogen) who are accorded an interview with the elusive Kim. But once the CIA gets wind of the fact that the two men have access to Kim, the agency recruits them to “take him out.”
But soon after the pre-release publicity machine started to gear up last month, Sony Pictures, which produced “The Interview,” and the movie itself were mysteriously hacked. A huge information dump – including company emails, salaries of employees and other private materials – occurred, which proved to be immensely embarrassing to Sony execs.
The mystery of who hacked Sony was solved this week when government cyber detectives traced the deed back to North Korea. The Hermit Kingdom had, in fact, been suspect No. 1 from the start, but the confirmation still was startling for a variety of reasons.
For one, it is another example of the mercurial nature of North Korea’s moon-faced leader, a trait he seems to have inherited from his late father, the equally weird North Korean leader, Kim Il Sung. Last year, for example, North Korea executed 80 people across the country in one day. Kim, the younger, also ordered the execution of a government premier who had fallen out of favor – by blowing him up with mortar rounds.
Kim Jong Un also has befriended former NBA star (and wierdo himself) Dennis Rodman. During a visit to North Korea last February, Rodman became the first American to meet Kim. Rodman said they became fast friends, and the basketball star returned to North Korea in September for another visit with his new bro.
But hacking Sony is an enormous leap in strange and scary behavior. Kim essentially put all his nation’s technological resources to the task of taking revenge on the company that produced a satire about him.
It is extremely frightening if North Korea has the capacity to hack into just about any company or agency in the world. We worry about terrorists with bombs, but this ultimately could be more destructive.
At any rate, don’t start trying to buy tickets to “The Interview” any time soon. North Korea threatened to follow up its hacking attack with actual terrorist attacks at theaters showing “The Interview” if Sony releases the flick.
So Sony decided to pull the plug on the movie, canceling its planned grand opening and its release to theaters. Company officials say they have no plans to release "The Interview" on DVD, video-on-demand or online streaming platforms, either.
Members of the Hollywood community, including friends of the movie’s two main stars, have criticized Sony for “caving” to North Korea’s threats. Late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel, writing on Twitter, called the decision “an un-American act of cowardice that validates terrorist actions and sets a terrifying precedent.”
Come on, it was a business decision. Theater owners across the nation already had told Sony they wouldn’t screen the picture. And why would they?
Let’s weigh the pros and cons: On the plus side, the movie has received lots of free publicity. On the minus side, any theater showing the movie risks a terrorist attack with the potential of killing all the patrons dumb enough to buy a ticket.
It’s petty to go after Sony for its reluctance to take a risk like that or for allegedly allowing the North Koreans to “stifle free expression.”
Sony – and other companies – need to improve their cyber defenses. They also need to cooperate with government investigators when hacks occur.
The feds, meanwhile, need to consider the broader implications. This illustrates what one rogue state can do in the way of infiltrating supposedly secure computer systems. Government computers could be next.
In other words, this could be just the start of an international hacking wave. It seems we have bigger things to worry about than missing the latest Seth Rogan movie.
This story was originally published March 11, 2015 at 4:36 PM with the headline "N. Korea forces Sony to withdraw movie."