There are acts of patriotism and then there's this

There are acts of patriotism and then there's this

by digby

BuzzFeed newsroom at a standstill, transfixed, watching The Interview. This is our moon landing.
— Tom Gara (@tomgara) December 24, 2014

I assume he was kidding. At least I hope so ...

Before we all rush to download The Interview as the greatest act of patriotism in our time, this strikes me as worth considering:

Everyone has a theory about who really hacked Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.

Despite President Barack Obama's conclusion that North Korea was the culprit, the Internet's newest game of whodunit continues. Top theories include disgruntled Sony insiders, hired hackers, other foreign governments or Internet hooligans. Even some experts are undecided, with questions about why the communist state would steal and leak gigabytes of data, email threats to some Sony employees and their families and then threaten moviegoers who planned to watch "The Interview" on Christmas.

"Somebody's done it. And right now this knowledge is known to God and whoever did it," said Martin Libicki, a cyber security expert at RAND in Arlington, Virginia, who thinks it probably was North Korea. "So we gather up a lot of evidence, and the evidence that the FBI has shown so far doesn't allow one to distinguish between somebody who is North Korea and somebody who wants to look like North Korea."

Perhaps the only point of agreement among those guessing is that even the most dramatic cybercrimes can be really, really hard to solve convincingly. When corporations are breached, investigators seldom focus on attributing the crime because their priority is assessing damage and preventing it from happening again.

"Attribution is a very hard game to play," said Mike Fey, president of security company Blue Coat Systems Inc. and former chief technology officer at McAfee Inc. "Like any criminal activity, how they get away with it is a very early step in the planning process, and framing another organization or individual is a great way to get away with something.

Fey added: "If they're smart enough and capable enough to commit a high profile attack, they're very often smart enough and capable enough to masquerade as someone else. It can be very difficult to find that true smoking gun."
[...]
"Attribution to any high degree of certainty will always be impossible," said Chris Finan, a former White House cyber security adviser. "At some point these are always judgment calls. You can do things like corroborate using intelligence sources and methods. But ultimately you're still looking at a pool of evidence and you're drawing a conclusion."

Even knowing North Korea was involved doesn't mean others weren't, too.

"It's very difficult to understand the chain of command in something like this," Fey said. "Is this a hacking-for-hire scenario? Is it truly delivered by an organization? Or, is it possible there's some alternate nefarious plot under way none of us understand yet."

He later added: "One last idea. What if all this is just a movie-goer (who) can't stand the idea of another Seth Rogan movie.

For all I know, Dear Leader did the deed himself. We don't know. So all this chest beating about not letting that tin-horned Axis-o-evul dictator tell us what we can and cannot watch might just be a bit overblown.

The hacking into private company emails is very disturbing because they are supposed to be ... private. I certainly hope that doing this --- and blackmailing companies --- doesn't become common. It's a serious problem on any number of levels. But rallying around the flag and the bill of rights over this movie is very dicey. "Content" companies censor and withhold and just plain refuse to finance material that foreigners find offensive to their "pride" all the time. The industry simply isn't a bastion of free speech. Controversial material almost always gets made by accident not intention.

I'm all for defending free speech. I even defend Dear Leader's right to say what he wants. But the overwhelming outpouring of emotion around this particular event, which may very well turn out to have been a stunt --- or something else entirely --- strikes me as yet another opportunity for too many people to yell USA! USA! --- a chant which signals something else entirely.

I'm sure Sony and the theatres will have a very profitable holiday week-end box-office now, though. So that's nice.

It's annual holiday fundraiser time. Your support is appreciated.

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