Truth is Stranger than Fiction Indeed

The Sony hack is proving to be the most interesting story of the year, not just because of the original event (which is scary because of how much the hackers got access to) but also due to all its fallouts. Here’s a quick summary of how it all started:

“A hacker group that identifies as the Guardians of Peace (GOP) broke into the internal network at Sony Pictures (a US based subsidiary of the Japan-based parent company, Sony) and stole everything they could find. Everything. The GOP claims to have 100TB of data of emails, movies, passwords, payroll info, what have you.”

Next, the group started leaking some of the more damning emails written by Sony executives. In one of those mails, Sony Picture’s co-chairman, Amy Pascal, had made multiple (sort of, kind of) racist remarks about Obama. Salaries too were exposed: turns out Sony’s top boss makes less than several people below him! Another email showed a Hollywood producer of the Denzel Washington starrer The Equalizer writing this to Sony:

“I believe that the international motion picture audience is racist — in general pictures with an African American lead don’t play well overseas.”

(If you didn’t see The Equalizer, what does this say about you, huh?)

If you thought this is just about embarrassing emails, wait, there’s more.

The hackers warned Sony against airing a movie, The Interview, which shows the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un being assassinated. The threats were about launching terrorist attacks against theaters that might air the movie. Which is probably why the US thinks North Korea is behind the Sony hack (note that North Korea needn’t have the brains to do this kind of hack; there are a lot of hackers-for-hire out there). Check out what Bruce Schneier, a security expert, says about the allegations of North Korea’s involvement:

“I am deeply skeptical of the FBI’s announcement on Friday that North Korea was behind last month’s Sony hack. The agency’s evidence is tenuous, and I have a hard time believing it. But I also have trouble believing that the U.S. government would make the accusation this formally if officials didn’t believe it.”

A couple of days later, North Korea’s Internet connections all went down. Was that part of what Obama had warned (a proportional response), some wondered?

The theaters backed down and refused to air the movie. But of course, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. And so the movie’s online ratings are unbelievably high! As The Mary Sue said:

“The Internet will take it from here.”

David Carr was pissed with Sony backing down:

“The threats and subsequent cancellation will become a nightmare with a very long tail. Now that cultural discourse has become the subject of online blackmail, it is hard to imagine where it will end. Documentaries, which have become increasingly important sources of news and information, could suddenly be in jeopardy.”

Obama agreed with Carr: he said Sony had “made a mistake” by caving in. And so Sony decided to release the movie after all! (The White House applauded the decision.)

This whole sequence of events is so unbelievable that it might have been a, er, movie! As David Carr wrote:

“It was a remarkable and disorienting turn of events: a tiny, failing state that lacks the wherewithal to feed its own people was deciding which movies we can and cannot see, while the industry it had attacked watched silently from the sidelines, and the president of the United States felt compelled to step into an international confrontation catalyzed by a lowbrow comedy.”

Truth is stranger than fiction indeed!