"Relax, it's North Korea: the nation-state equivalent of the short bus." —
Sterling Archer
On Wednesday, Sony Pictures cancelled the release of
The Interview, staring Seth Rogen and James Franco. It's the end result of a hacking of Sony's computer system by the "Guardians of Peace" that has seen the theft and release onto the internet of unreleased films,
company emails, employee's personal information, threats to those employees and their families, and finally promises of
violence against theaters and the public.
The people who did all of that have been given exactly what they wanted. On Tuesday, even though there was no evidence of a credible threat, America’s top five theater chains, including Regal Cinemas, Cinemark, Cineplex, Carmike, and AMC Theatres, dropped the film after Sony gave theater owners the option of backing away from the film, and the writing was on the wall. American intelligence officials believe North Korea is behind the attacks, and the U.S. is mulling a "proportional response." Others are not so sure North Korea has the technical capabilities to perform this sort of cyber attack. Per CNN, investigators believe hackers were able to penetrate Sony's computer network by stealing the credentials of a system administrator. Also, a formal announcement by the U.S. government accusing the North Koreans of this crime may be in the works.
According to reports, the movie is officially dead for the foreseeable future. No release straight to DVD/Blu-ray, VOD, or streaming it online is planned.
So, to recap, making anonymous terrorist threats on the internet totally works. For all wackos and groups of wackos, if you're offended about any film, song or TV show, just hire some hackers, commit privacy theft, and threaten violence until you get your way, since Sony has just done a bang-up job of incentivizing it.
More after the jump.
From an interview with cyber-security expert Peter W. Singer by Jason Koebler at Vice:
"It is mind boggling to me, particularly when you compare it to real things that have actually happened. Someone killed 12 people and shot another 70 people at the opening night of Batman: The Dark Knight. They kept that movie in the theaters. You issue an anonymous cyber threat that you did not have the capability to carry out? We pulled a movie from 18,000 theaters."
Yesterday, in the wake of the decision to pull
The Interview from wide release, some theaters decided they would screen
Team America: World Police in its place.
However, today Dallas/Fort Worth Alamo Drafthouse theater, The Plaza Atlanta Theater in Georgia and the Capital Theater in Ohio have all canceled screenings of
Team America after
Paramount Pictures forbid use of the film.
From Variety: "Obama Says People Should ‘Go to the Movies:"
In an interview with ABC News on Wednesday, President Obama called the cyber-attack on Sony “very serious” but suggested that the administration has yet to establish the hacker threat to moviegoers over “The Interview” as credible.
“For now, my recommendation would be that people go to the movies,” he said ... “Well, the cyber-attack is very serious. We’re investigating, we’re taking it seriously,” Obama said in the interview with David Muir. “We’ll be vigilant: If we see something that we think is serious and credible, then we’ll alert the public.”
In October 1940, the Battle of Britain was being waged above London, Jews began to be forcibly moved into the Warsaw Ghetto, and Charlie Chaplin's
The Great Dictator premiered in New York City. The film, a satire of fascism, Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler, was very controversial at the time, with European governments having threatened to censor or ban it as part of their policies of appeasement while the movie was still being made. While many of the Hollywood studios were wary of Chaplin doing the film, President Roosevelt encouraged him to make the movie.
I bring this up not for its Godwin's Law implications, but because there are many who have argued Sony brought this situation on itself by producing a comedy mocking a head of state and the most ass-backwards country on the planet. Well, as evidenced by The Great Dictator, we have a long history of satirizing everything, including the biggest mass murderers in history. And if the free societies of the world and their citizens can't stand up for the ability to make a dumb comedy ridiculing a ruling caste of delusional scum that has starved and incarcerated millions of North Koreans over the past sixty-six years because of fear of retaliation, then we've already lost.
By Sony and theater chains giving in to fear, it only encourages fanatics of every stripe to believe a threat of violence will work, whether it's people killing over a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad or the group of assholes harassing and threatening others to shut them up in Gamergate.
From
The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II by David Welky:
Some have
wondered whether the withdrawal of
The Interview is part of some greater publicity stunt by Sony to drive up interest. Some have argued Sony is using the opportunity to write-off a shitty movie they weren't enthused about releasing in the first place. And others have pondered whether this is Sony's way of diverting attention from those embarrassing emails that are all over the internet. The damage to Sony goes far beyond the
financial losses of this one particular film, which the studio had already spent around $50 million creating and marketing. Future projects have been affected, with screeners for unreleased films
Annie, starring Jamie Foxx and Quvenzhané Wallis, being leaked to the internet, and an early script for the next James Bond film
Spectre complete with commentary from Sony executives complaining about its ending through emails. Beyond all of that, Sony's reputation has taken a major hit, with the question of whether some talent may be wary to work with the studio after learning of the insults in the company correspondence, and Sony's own workers upset about the lax security given to the protection of their private data.
But whatever the reason for this current course of action by Sony, many think this particular incident has set a dangerous precedent for the future.
This story has a lot of angles, including ethics in journalism. For most people, if they should use stolen material for personal gain they might get 3-5 years at a correctional facility. For journalists, the rules are somewhat different, since they get page views and sometimes Pulitzers while dealing with stolen things. This has led to a lot of outrage in Hollywood, with many in the town seeing it as a perfect storm of cowardice by studio executives and theater owners, facilitated by media coverage that has played into the hands of the hackers.
Aaron Sorkin
wrote an Op-Ed in the
New York Times on Monday accusing the media of being "morally treasonous" and complicit in the hackers' agenda. Sorkin argues the media's behavior is indefensible, and the "Fourth Estate" is brokering in naked gossip being used to intimidate an industry into an act of self-censorship.
I understand that news outlets routinely use stolen information. That’s how we got the Pentagon Papers, to use an oft-used argument. But there is nothing in these documents remotely rising to the level of public interest of the information found in the Pentagon Papers.
Do the emails contain any information about Sony breaking the law? No. Misleading the public? No. Acting in direct harm to customers, the way the tobacco companies or Enron did? No. Is there even one sentence in one private email that was stolen that even hints at wrongdoing of any kind? Anything that can help, inform or protect anyone?
The co-editor in chief of Variety tells us he decided that the leaks were — to use his word — “newsworthy.” I’m dying to ask him what part of the studio’s post-production notes on Cameron Crowe’s new project is newsworthy. So newsworthy that it’s worth carrying out the wishes of people who’ve said they’re going to murder families and who have so far done everything they’ve threatened to do. Newsworthy. As the character Inigo Montoya said in “The Princess Bride,” I do not think it means what you think it means. So much for ever getting a good review from Variety again. And so much for our national outrage over the National Security Agency reading our stuff. It turns out some of us have no problem with it at all. We just vacated that argument.
The flip side to Sorkin's argument is presented by Justin Peters in
Slate, where he argues the leaks are newsworthy and the information relevant to public issues. Peters goes further to say that while the hackers may have an agenda, if the coverage of that agenda and the information provided through it serves an informative purpose, the ends justify publication.
Just because the Sony data may have been released for one reason doesn’t mean that reporters can’t use it for another. Journalists don’t have to support the source of the information or the means by which it was acquired to believe that it has news value. And the information released by the Sony hackers does indeed have news value.
Is it newsworthy that Sony executives have exchanged vaguely racist emails in private? Yes, it is—these are the people who determine which movies get made and who stars in them, and it’s reasonable to wonder whether opinions exchanged in private affect their public-facing decisions. Is it newsworthy that there are race and gender discrepancies in pay in Hollywood, as Fusion has reported? Yes, it is. Gawker has used the leaks to report on how Sony may have mustered influence to kill stories in the New York Times. The Verge used the leaks to report on how, after the Stop Online Piracy Act died in 2012, movie studios and the Motion Picture Association of America changed tactics in their war against pirated content, in an initiative dubbed “Project Goliath.” These are all legitimate stories, and they’re all stories that we wouldn’t have if not for the leaks.