There are a number of issues that I really want to comment on today, but this one is doubtless the most easy to digest into a quick post before I head down to my father's house to bake Christmas cookies. I had managed to see previews for "The Interview," a comedy about an assassination attempt against North Korean President Kim Jung-Un, but I had had no intention of investing even five dollars on a discount movie Tuesday at my local Cinemark theater to see the film because I just don't get into this kind of farcical, amateurish, slap-stick comedy, even to the extent that it deploys clandestine satirical undertones. Emphatically, if the movie ever does see the light of day, I'm still not likely to waste two hours of my free time to watch it. The problem here with Sony Picture's decision to withdraw the movie from circulation and with the decisions of several major theater corporations not to air the movie is, precisely, as Obama and the Republican National Committee independently have argued this week, that these actions amount to the censorship of political art and political speech exercised by a foreign state under the threat of violence against Americans. It would have been one thing for North Korean hackers to compromise the internal networks of Sony Pictures to divulge information embarrassing to the corporation and its executive officers and to cause financial damages through the theft of internal materials as a reprisal to the release of "The Interview." If this were simply the case, then the actions undertaken against Sony by the North Korean government or by affiliated individuals would have been a relatively private matter, concerning the failure of an American corporation to adequately safeguard its internal networks to ensure that hackers, either under the employment or assistance of a foreign government or strictly private individuals (e.g. "Anonymous"), could not compromise internal information. The character of the attack this week was different insofar as it threatened physical violence against individual employees at Sony and threatened terrorist actions on American soil against wider numbers of American citizens if "The Interview" was released. Expressed in these terms, such a threat, leveled against the U.S. by a "shadow" entity linked to the North Korean government might have solicited an aggressive reaction by the U.S. government in the absence of any connection to the release of a motion picture. The fact that such threats were made explicitly in connection to the release of a motion picture, with particular satirical elements addressed toward the North Korean regime, and that these threats motivate self-censorship by a broad spectrum of the motion picture and cinematic industries, however, implicates the Constitutional artistic liberties of the movie's producers and screenwriters. What, precisely, are American screenwriters, producers, directors, and other motion picture professionals at liberty to produce if they have to pass the muster of censors half-way around the world?! There is something odious in the notion that American artists should be forced by the motion picture and cinematic industries out of fear that their work will offend parties in a foreign state to such an extent that they would be compelled to commit physically, lethally violent acts against persons and property in the U.S. if their art was publicly displayed!
My reaction to this event should be reasonably plain and consistent with that of the Obama administration. Sony Pictures and the cinematic corporations with which it contracts for first-run distribution of its movies should not have backed down on distribution of "The Interview." If terrorist actions against Americans were legitimately at issue, then the issue is wholly within the province of the U.S. government and its authorities, not private corporations who are vested with the authority to defend neither the life nor the property of American citizens. Respecting the sensible and realistic response from Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton that his company cannot be expected to release a motion picture that a large number of cinematic distributors have refused to present to their customers, the response from both the motion picture and cinematic industries to cyber-threats related to "The Interview" seems to imply that private, for-profit corporations have a responsibility to their shareholders to act in defense of their property in lieu of directing such concerns for the protection of property and for the protection the lives of employees and customers to governmental authorities. A response of this nature might be analogous to the conclusion that an American corporation should take personal, private responsibility for the recovery of property seized by a foreign state or by private parties in a foreign country in lieu of diplomatic and/or military operations by the U.S. government. Even if Sony has generously compensated the producers and screenwriters of "The Interview" for their work and, thus, stands to lose a potentially large stream of revenue from its actions in squashing the film, neither Sony nor its cinematic partners had any right, emanating from their roles as for-profit capitalist corporations, to simultaneously usurp the authority of the U.S. government to act in defense of U.S. citizens, their property, and their Constitutional liberties and to subvert the artistic liberties of its screenwriters, producers, and other contracted motion picture professionals in the creation of "The Interview" and other prospective films referencing North Korea. In this respect, acknowledging that the U.S. government lacks the authority to compel a private corporation to release an artistic product for general distribution, I wish that there were some available means for the Obama administration to enforce punitive ramifications against the motion picture and cinematic industries for their behavior, against the best interests of the larger American public, in this incident.
Beyond this, acknowledging that the protection of the lives, property, and liberties of American citizens against threats issued by foreign states and their representatives remains wholly within the province of the U.S. government, to the extent that the North Korean government can be convincingly linked to the hacking of Sony Pictures and, more importantly, to the issuance of threats of physical violence against the U.S., the North Korean government needs to be explicitly and firmly punished for its behavior! As such, I don't know how much more the U.S. government can do to impose economic sanctions against North Korea. Something more needs to be done. Succinctly, we need to seriously investigate the means of the North Korean government to engage in cyber-warfare of this kind and determine how we can use available military, civil intelligence/counter-intelligence (i.e. NSA, CIA), and information warfare assets (i.e. U.S. government hackers) to definitively cripple the capacity of the North Korean government to engage in new cyber-warfare activities. I am not going to advance such a proposition with the notion that such a counter-offensive (within cyberspace and outside of it) would be easy or entirely uncomplicated by our need to cooperate with other governments, but such actions are absolutely indispensable if we intend to defend the artistic liberties of Americans against the capacity of a foreign government to censor the works of American citizens out of fear that the production of some satirical work will, through the global dissemination of ideas, undermine its capacity to exercise tyranny against its people.
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