Sony Hack Should Give Us Pause

No matter who or what is behind the hack on Sony Pictures, it’s really bad.  The lead theory, though it begs many questions, is that the North Korean government initiated the attack and subsequent mass data dump of sensitive information along with five unreleased feature films.  The rationale I heard proposed this morning on NPR is that the attack might be retaliation against Sony for the premise of a Seth Rogan vehicle called The Interview, in which a pair of hapless reporters who’ve gained access to Kim Jong-un are asked by the CIA to assassinate the North Korean leader.  Not known for their taste in screwball comedy, the North Koreans issued a statement calling the film itself an act of terrorism, and then Sony got hacked.

Some of the data released by the hacker(s) is of dubious value.  Like the email exchange between Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal and the CEO Kazuo Hirai of Sony Corporation about the manner in which Kim Jong-un’s head is depicted exploding at the end of the film.  The exchange, thanks to Rogen’s responses, is a little bit funny, though I don’t think Sony Corp weighing in on this one project is a particularly intriguing revelation from the leak.  No doubt, the headline is worth a few thousand clicks, so what the hell.

Other data released by the hacker(s) is not so innocuous.  A lot of it was highly sensitive material, including emails, marketing plans, and payment processing information pertaining to both famous and not-so-famous people who have worked for the studio.  According to multiple reports, sensitive information such as social security numbers may have been compromised for individuals who have worked for the studio anytime in the last ten years, thus creating a bait ball that would be attractive to any sharks out there looking for opportunities to conduct identity theft.  And just in time for holiday shopping!

The Sony hack ought to be disconcerting to, well, anybody who has ever worked for any company either as an employee or a contractor.  If that’s not you, no worries. While this attack may indeed have come from North Korea, it as admittedly hard to say whether that scenario is better or worse than if it were committed by an entity like Wikileaks or just some highly-skilled teenager with a random beef against Sony.  It’s a bit like trying to parse the difference between an act of terrorism in the name of Islamic jihad and an act of terrorism in the name of just being the local sociopath. After all, the digital age has spawned quite a few home-grown anarchists who like to arbitrarily vent their self-righteousness on large corporations. They’re smart enough to encode a major security breech, but too stupid to realize they’re jeopardizing the security of regular folks like freelance contractors who’ve done jobs like build sets or haul cables for Sony projects. If this same kind of hack, for instance, had targeted GM, I suspect it would be the lead story on cable news.

What concerns me about this story is that, whether the perpetrator of a hack like this is a rogue state like North Korea or a lone hacktivist, the real casualty of all this remote-control retaliation might be free speech.  Consider this:  the likelihood that any movie producers, especially major ones, are going to produce any films mocking the prophet Mohammed is actually very low.  I’m not saying we’re in need of such a thing, but I bring it up because the calculus applied in considering a lampoon of Mohammed includes serious consideration that one might incite real violence perpetrated by extremists who’ve proven they posses nothing we call humanity.  And that’s not good for free speech in a pure sense, though such assessments are made all the time with regard to potentially hazardous material.  Still, the Sony attack reveals that in our increasingly interconnected world, we are all potentially vulnerable to forces that would silence one form of criticism or another.  After all, it’s almost de rigueur now that if a woman publicly expresses a feminist thought, she’s going to receive death and rape threats through social media; and some of these incidents have included release of information that has led to real-world stalking and physical assaults.

If the investigation proves that Sony’s attacker really was the government of North Korea in retaliation for the film The Interview, that’s a fairly impressive amount of damage being done by an otherwise largely impotent state.  Will it make producers and executives skittish about green-lighting certain material in the future that might garner a similar attack?  If so, where does that logic lead when some of the most skilled code-writers in the world live right here in the U.S., some of them working in very large, very wealthy corporations?  What if Seth Rogen’s next picture shows Mark Zuckerberg’s head exploding?  (Really, Seth, what if?)  Because my personal gut feel is that this was not the work of North Korea but was more likely someone with a personal gripe or a generalized love of vandalism.  Is it farfetched, therefore, to imagine someone within, say, Zuck’s world exposing Rogen and/or his colleagues to a similar retaliatory assault on their privacy and, by extension, their security?  Maybe.  But a great deal of evidence suggests that the moral barriers which prevent people from committing violence or vandalism or classic forms of extortion appear to break down somewhat when the weapons are a keyboard a few lines of code.

Kim Dotcom & the Illusion of Freedom

I’m still stuck on the following dependent clause:  “In a dramatic series of tweets,…”

I can’t help it. That’s just funny.  Because for me personally, the verb tweet will never quite convey the kind of gravity that begs for an adjective like dramatic.  But that’s just my personal taste for what Roy Blount Jr. calls “sonicy” in discussing the correlation between the sound of words and their meanings.  Nevertheless, “In a dramatic series of tweets,” writes Kaveh Waddell for National Journal, the infamous Kim Dotcom declared himself “HIlary’s worst nightmare” with his vow to establish a foothold for his New Zealand Internet Party here in the United States – a party that has yet to gain an actual foothold in New Zealand, by the way.

One might think that Dotcom’s status as a fugitive from U.S. justice, continuing to fight extradition for mass intellectual property infringement, racketeering, and a few other charges, would preclude his laying the groundwork for a new political party in this country, but we do live in strange, some might say psychotic, times, so never say never.  At least never say never about what Dotcom represents to some people.  I think it’s safe to say that Kim Schmidtz himself has no future in American politics in any literal sense and is unlikely to be Hilary’s “biggest nightmare,” if Mrs. Clinton decides to run in 2016, but this particular corpulent criminal still spews a rhetoric that resonates with young and understandably frustrated American citizens.  And by rhetoric I mean an echo chamber from which there is no escape.

I know what the Green Party is, but what the hell is the Internet Party? It makes as much sense to me as the Paved Sidewalk Party. The “internet” is a work of infrastructure.  The current manner in which the internet is used is not the only way in which it could have been or can be used or might be used in the future. In fact, the design and economics of Web 2.0 are in many ways an aberration of the visions of some of the web’s early pioneers.  The internet had its roots in sharing information among colleagues, in openness, and in building a better world through information, but that is not quite the internet we have today.  The internet we have today belongs to a handful of corporate owners, who more than a decade ago, traded in any lofty visions they might have had for the wealth derived from advertising and the power derived by designing the most sophisticated, yet ironically voluntary, surveillance state in global history.

Kim Dotcom himself may be a joke (let’s hope so), but the rhetoric he coughs up, the rhetoric still being shouted from Silicon Valley is in reality just the cosmic background noise of long-exploded dreams of the digital pioneers who no longer influence the evolution of the web we are using. I believe that many people are desperate for new answers, fed up with government both left and right, and continue to buy this premise that “a free and open internet,” the central plank of any Internet Party, is essential for a more progressive, less authoritarian future.  But who defines what a “free and open internet” is?  Should such a political party become manifest in the U.S., that definition will surely come from the financial backers of that party, and they will be the same plutocrats whom we empower and enrich with every tweet, text, status update, and agreement to their terms of service we don’t bother to read.

The EFF’s Maria Sutton yesterday wrote yet another post asserting that the DMCA, the legal mechanism used to request takedowns of material that infringes copyright is the quickest and easiest way for “state officials to censor online speech.”  Hmm.  The documentary film  Terms and Conditions May Apply highlights three or four cases in which citizens were subjected to, shall we say, unfortunate encounters with various authorities resulting from innocuous posts and searches online.  The lesson is that privacy is dead, any of us can be un-anonymized, and companies like Google and Facebook are not only profiting from all our voluntary data sharing but are the surveillance database for the government agencies we’re supposed to be concerned about.  People like Maria Sutton write articles about videos on YouTube being taken down, even temporarily, as though to imply that this kind of “censorship” is the leading edge of a slippery slope.  But anyone who thinks this way doesn’t realize we’re already in the middle of the avalanche. A free and open internet my ass.  Sutton even cites one anecdote of a takedown in Saudi Arabia without any acknowledgement that free speech in that country has a long way to go past its murderous history before we need to worry about the temporary removal of some videos from YouTube.  People get shot for speaking their minds, and speech somehow survives.  And in the U.S., where speech is everything, our overvaluation of these social media toys, as though speech itself depends on their unfettered existence, is probably the fastest way to bring about the end of free speech because it’s not a one-way street.  These platforms enable us to, as my son says, “spy on ourselves.”

And the real irony of this misguided premise — that it’s those bastard copyright holders who foster censorship — is that intellectual property rights are about the only thing left that Google, Facebook, et al can’t quite get their hands on.  We’ve already ceded privacy and potentially some rather more serious expectations of civil liberty.  After all, there is no legal guarantee of privacy, and by volunteering information through social media, we actually waive our 4th Amendment rights with regard to government use of that data.  But intellectual property law remains.  It says that what I author belongs to me, and you can’t have it unless I say so.  Kim Dotcom made millions breaking that law and called it “freedom,” and the tech billionaires who would back an “internet party” would like to see those laws gone.  They’ll tell you it’s for the good of society.  I say, it’s because it’s the only form of speech left for them to steal.

Ferguson & the Case of John v Sam

When I think about Ferguson, I can’t help but think about the story of the Boston Massacre and how often history repeats itself.  That incident, which was no massacre, led to the trial of the British soldiers who fired into the crowd and who faced hanging if found guilty.  Of course, it wasn’t the soldiers themselves who were really on trial, but the larger crime of British occupation and policy itself.  John Adams recognized the difference and, because he believed in the rule of law, successfully defended the individual soldiers who had not themselves committed a criminal act.  Then, of course, Adams went on to argue the cause of rebellion and a war for independence from the tyranny that put those soldiers in Boston in the first place.

In a similar way, I think it’s fair to say that the Ferguson story and our reaction to it is not ultimately about Michael Brown and Officer Wilson.  The evidence we have available may or may not have supported an indictment of Wilson himself, though investigation continues that may yet reveal new evidence regarding events of that day. In the meantime, isn’t the most important issue that, like Adams, we need to make a distinction between the rule of law regarding any one case and the larger indictment we seek against a greater, institutionalized injustice?  By far too many accounts, predominantly black neighborhoods in the U.S. resemble Boston in 1775 with a uniformed, occupying force on patrol, making second-class citizens out of residents just trying to live their lives. And with the correspondent militarization of civilian police forces, this can only aggravate already dangerous circumstances.

I am continually dismayed by the state of race relations in the U.S. nearly fifty years after the death of Martin Luther King; and this regressive trend is a force that indeed begs for revolution, though preferably one without bloodshed. It is interesting, though, how often we Americans need to decide whether to follow the path of John Adams or that of his second cousin Samuel.  Because Sam Adams was frankly a bit of a nut, so hell-bent on revolution that he didn’t care much about nuance like truth or fairness or the rule of law. He was a shameless propagandist, responsible for commissioning the famous but inaccurate sketch of the “Boston Massacre,” reprinted ever since in American school textbooks — the one depicting soldiers firing down upon cowering colonial citizens.  He was a member of the real Tea Party, a mob that tortured a relatively minor British official — a customs officer — with a tar-and-feather “Yankee Jacket” before they dumped all that tea into Boston Harbor.  Sam was a patriot, but he was also one of the goons who might break the window of some shopkeeper, who bore little or no responsibility for the injustice of The Crown.

Today, we have social media, which can be a great way to rely on friends we respect to curate and share worthwhile information and editorials on subjects as emotionally raw as the Ferguson story.  But forums like Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr also challenge us to choose between our John Adams side and our Sam Adams side.  The photographic meme or provocative update allows our inner Sam to reduce general outrage or sorrow into a fragment of ephemeral propaganda; and maybe this is a healthy outlet, but I do wonder if on some level it does not also stifle the more contemplative and more valuable capacity of our inner John.  After all, sustainable change has never been authored or led by the Sams of the world.  We may drink Sam Adams’s eponymous beer this holiday, but the toast should go to John.

It is certainly clear that social media produces a lot of armchair experts in all fields from tort law to ballistics, leading to kitchen-table theories about what Officer Wilson could have done differently or what Mike Brown did or did not do that day.  But to what extent all this speculative noise gets us even one step closer to Dr. King’s dream is a very tough question to answer. So, as we head into the long, holiday weekend and millions of American televisions switch from Ferguson to football, and families stoke arguments with their relatives over this case, it is pretty hard to see the progress being made. It simply isn’t enough to change our profile pictures and share a few editorials, including this one.  I don’t presume to know exactly what is necessary, but if all we do is click, share, and move on, then the only people left taking tangible action are the goons setting things on fire.

Wishing everyone a peaceful and hopeful Thanksgiving.