Sony has been heavily criticised for cancelling The Interview after terrorist threats. Photo / AP
Reality mirrors craft in attack on Hollywood giant’s secrets, widely blamed on Pyongyang, with irony at every turn.
When principal photography begins in Germany next January on Oliver Stone's film about Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who released a trove of National Security Agency secrets, it will join a growing canon of Hollywood films that mine America's post-9/11 story: the military adventure in Iraq, the Osama bin Laden manhunt, WikiLeaks and that other US nemesis Julian Assange, and the ubiquity of Orwellian-style surveillance in a digital world.
But, recently, reality has mirrored art. On November 24, staff at Sony Pictures Entertainment found their corporate network had been hacked, and a huge trove of confidential material stolen. Sony executives were left with red faces by emails that dished Angelina Jolie and other stars, outed executive salaries and showed which movies were profitable. A handful of new or unreleased Sony movies surfaced online.
The culprits signed as the Guardians of Peace, a shadowy group some suspect is North Korea. The rationale is that the Hermit Kingdom's leader, Kim Jong Un, has taken umbrage at The Interview, a Sony comedy about his fictional assassination. North Korea did not share the joke, thundering that the Seth Rogen comedy was "an act of war".
This week, as The Interview's December 25 US release date loomed, the Guardians of Peace threatened "the world will be full of fear", hinting at a 9/11-style attack. The film's New York premiere was canned and major cinema chains baulked.
By Friday, Sony had abandoned the film's release. A White House spokesman described the Sony hack as a "serious national security matter" by a "sophisticated actor". Anonymous intelligence officials fingered North Korea, a claim not backed publicly at press time.
As Pyongyang, which has denied responsibility, is already isolated it is hard to see what the US can do. Uncertainty about US cyber defences - and fears of damage to infrastructure, such as power grids - means any escalation with North Korea could invite costly counter attacks.
In a through-the-looking-glass twist, Sony had become embroiled in its very own high-stakes ransom thriller, menaced by a sinister adversary able to exploit the studio's digital Achilles heel so journalists could drip-feed stories from 38 million stolen files. Was Bureau 121, a North Korean cyber unit, responsible? Evidence is circumstantial, although Pyongyang allegedly paralysed South Korean banks in 2013.
Malware used to hack Sony "would have got past 90 per cent of the net defences out there today in private industry", according to the FBI, which is hunting the hackers. It is an intriguing claim given reports US and UK spy agencies are using Regin. This malware masquerades as Microsoft software, and "displays a degree of technical competence rarely seen" according to US security firm Symantec. But critics, who cite the 2011 Sony PlayStation breach, believe the studio's lax computer security methods amounted to an own goal.
"They failed spectacularly," says Eva Galperin, global policy analyst with San Francisco's Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We have evidence Sony failed to engage in many basic industry practices, vis-a-vis security." Sony apparently failed to isolate internet-based departments, so someone in, say, finance could see what is happening in mergers. "This is one of the reasons why, once the hackers got into the corporate internet, they could get their hands on everything." Sony conveniently stored passwords in a file called passwords.
The Sony hack is said to have cost US$130 million ($166 million) before The Interview, which cost US$44 million, was pulled, although Hollywood's accounting is best served with a dose of salt. It may portend a wider criminal shakedown of corporates in an era when security experts warn of a "digital Pearl Harbour". The Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a US think-tank, says cybercrime costs US$300 million to US$1 trillion - on par with drug trafficking.
But Sony is not adverse to exploiting hacking or surveillance at the box office. George Clooney, set to direct Hack Attack, about the phone hacking scandal that rocked Rupert Murdoch's UK tabloids, sent a (hacked) email with a prescient subject line: "Knowing this email is being hacked."
In another irony, The Interview mocks the CIA - the plot has two hapless TV reporters, granted an interview with Kim, told to kill him by the CIA. The agency is reeling from last week's Senate report condemning the agency's post-9/11 torture programme. The report was foretold by CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who spoke to ABC News in 2007. He remains in jail for speaking out.
Hollywood and Washington often scratch each other's backs, with military hardware proffered for good PR. The Daily Beast reports that US officials gave The Interview their blessing in a June screening. The filmmakers of Zero Dark Thirty, the 2013 movie about the Osama Bin Laden hunt that depicts CIA agents using torture to find their quarry, had CIA help. The CIA insists "enhanced interrogation techniques" helped find Bin Laden, a claim rejected by the Senate Intelligence Committee's chairwoman Senator Dianne Feinstein.
The Senate torture report is the latest blowback from bad policy to hamstring US foreign affairs. Examples include civilian deaths from CIA drone strikes, kidnapping of suspects to CIA "black sites" and the incarceration of suspects without trial at Guantanamo Bay, all of which arguably help terrorist recruitment. More recently, a Guardian investigation showed that the detention of Islamists at Camp Bucca and elsewhere in Iraq served as a Petri dish for the genesis of Isis (Islamic State), allowing militants to network, recruit and strategise in US taxpayer-funded safe havens.
In a topsy turvy world where civil liberties are squashed, and extreme measures - some illegal - are used to fight extremists who would deny us our civil liberties, a New York case has emerged as the latest flashpoint. Microsoft, backed by tech and media companies, is resisting a US demand to release data held at its Dublin cloud storage facility, arguing to a federal appeals court that the US lacks jurisdiction. "If it turns out Microsoft does have to hand over information stored in Ireland, in response to a US warrant, then is there anywhere a US warrant cannot reach?" asks Galperin.
If the court finds for the US, what is to prevent other nations from serving cloud storage firms with warrants demanding information about their dissidents? Ruling against Microsoft, says Galperin, would "oblige these companies to essentially become snitches for anyone who could show up with a warrant."
Sounds like a topic for a good spec screenplay.
Whodunnit
•In June, North Korea warned there would be severe repercussions for anyone involved in The Interview.
•Professor Hajime Izumi of Shizuoka University said the film crossed a red line for North Korea because it struck at the country's biggest taboo: criticism of its supreme leader. Suppression of such criticism is vital to the very survival of the regime.
•A decade ago, Team America: World Police had Kim Jong Un's father, Kim Jong Il, turning into a cockroach. It got a rather toothless response. Izumi said the more furious reaction to The Interview could suggest a lack of confidence in the regime's ability to keep illegal copies of foreign movies from being smuggled in and viewed by ordinary North Koreans. Further, the new film didn't merely mock Kim but portrayed his assassination.
•North Koreans have become Hollywood's villains de jour. The 2012 remake of Red Dawn and last year's Olympus Has Fallen were both about North Korean attacks on the United States.
-AP
Sony's decision to cancel The Interview in the face of terrorist threats is already affecting the way Hollywood does business, and it is killing artists' faith in studios to release envelope-pushing content.
Gore Verbinski said Fox has pulled out of plans to support his North Korea-set thriller, and theatres that planned to screen 2004's Team America: World Police in place of The Interview announced those showings had been cancelled.
Actors, film-makers, politicians and pundits denounced Sony's decision to cancel The Interview in response to theatre owners' refusal to show the Christmas release in light of threats invoking September 11. The comedy stars Seth Rogen and James Franco as journalists tasked by the CIA with killing Kim Jong Un. The film shows the North Korean leader dying in a fiery explosion.
"Sad day for creative expression," Steve Carell tweeted.
Artists could increasingly turn to the web as a way to distribute content without studio interference, amplifying a challenge the industry is already facing with audiences consuming more entertainment at home.
Lizz Winstead, a creator of The Daily Show, suggested the creative community may have to go even further.
"Do performers and artists need to start buying theatres so we aren't beholden to the multiplexes now?" she asked.
But Todd Boyd, film and culture professor at the University of Southern California, said it was naive of Sony to proceed with the film without expecting some blowback from the North Korean Government.
Free speech is an American value, not a North Korean one, he said.
"It's provocative to make a film where a living figure is assassinated, in spite of what you may think about that figure," Boyd said.
"To do so in a comedy seems especially arrogant and inconsiderate and naive, and as it turned out, Sony had to pay the price for making a bad decision."
Other studios are likely to carefully consider films that take swipes at the reclusive nation, he said.
Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin blasted the studio and the media at large for their reactions to the Sony hack.
"Today the US succumbed to an unprecedented attack on our most cherished, bedrock principle of free speech by a group of North Korean terrorists who threatened to kill moviegoers in order to stop the release of a movie," he said.
"The wishes of the terrorists were fulfilled in part by easily distracted members of the American press who chose gossip and schadenfreude-fuelled reporting over a story with immeasurable consequences for the public."
AP
Residential areas in both countries have suffered from deadly strikes in the conflict.