Justifiable Cowardice
It’s remarkable how broad the consensus is condemning the decision of Sony to cancel distribution of The Interview. Even in a time when seemingly no one can agree on anything, everyone is in agreement that Sony sucks.
It seems like ancient history now, but there was once a time back in 2001 when George W. Bush was criticized by his ideological opponents for more or less suggesting that the way to not let the terrorists win was to go out and be a consumer.
No such divisiveness exists now. Everyone is upset that they can’t express their patriotism by paying money to watch a movie.
It’s your civic duty to watch The Interview: http://t.co/nlzeAvJmVX
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) December 17, 2014
At least those CIA interrogation officers bothered to get off their butts, even if it was only to stick a tube up someone else’s. Watching a movie is more our speed.
No one owes you a movie though, especially not one you probably weren’t going to see in the first place. Asking an American subsidiary of a Japanese company to show it’s commitment to American values is obnoxious. Asking that company to absorb all the risk associated with the action is equally naïve. Cybersecurity guy Peter Singer is representatively dismissive of these concerns:
This same group threatened yesterday 9/11-style incidents at any movie theatre that chose to show the movie. Here, we need to distinguish between threat and capability—the ability to steal gossipy emails from a not-so-great protected computer network is not the same thing as being able to carry out physical, 9/11-style attacks in 18,000 locations simultaneously. I can’t believe I’m saying this. I can’t believe I have to say this. This group has not shown the capability to do that.
This is embarrassing for Singer because he is mistaking other people for being “in the realm of beyond stupid” when he is in fact the one who is woefully naive.
I can’t believe I have to say this to a guy who wrote a book about cyberwar and cyberterrorism, but an attack against the movie doesn’t have to occur in 18,000 locations simultaneously to cause considerable damage. In fact, if you check the Wikipedia page about 9/11, you will find only a few of the perhaps 18,000-ish planes flying around the US that day were attacked. All you really need is one, and you don’t have to tell anyone in advance which one you will target.
Regarding the group’s lack of a demonstrated capability to attack a movie theatre, I make two observations.
- A movie theater isn’t exactly hard to get into. At most, you need to come up with $25 for a ticket if you live in a particularly annoying city.
- Any security presence movie theaters have is geared toward preventing movie hopping and food smuggling. And scheduling, and the poor quality of the average movie are probably bigger deterrents to movie hopping than effective security.
Obama’s comments cleverly side-step these issues.
Sony’s retreat, he suggested, was as silly as a football fan who wouldn’t go to an NFL game because of the vague, post-9/11 threat of a terrorist attack on a stadium. Or, he mused, what if the organizers of the Boston Marathon had cancelled this year’s race after last year’s bombing?
These are willfully misleading analogies. NFL games and marathons are government sponsored and government protected. They use a panoply of government resources, none of which are made available to movie theaters.
Even without a demonstrated ability, I would trust that the average reader here could figure out how to attack a movie theater and cause considerable damage including deaths without assistance, assuming they didn’t care about getting caught. A target that is sufficiently vulnerable shouldn’t wait to be threatened by an organization with a demonstrated capability to carry out large-scale attacks if all that is required to make international news is for a random guy with a rental car to mow over people waiting in line.
It’s justifiable to doubt the ability of someone to successfully rob a bank and evade capture. You might need a skill or two for that. A threat to create unspecified violence, however, is credible regardless of the source because violence is comparatively easy even for unskilled first-timers to inflict.
Additionally, if we do believe North Korea is behind the attacks as everyone seems to accept, it’s worth remembering what their demonstrated capabilities in fact are:
North Korea yesterday stirred up a strategic weapons storm in the Pacific by launching a new, long-range ballistic missile which overflew Japan before splashing down in the ocean. Pyongyang’s cry for world attention shattered the limits of Western tolerance when it emerged that the Daepodong-1 rocket passed without permission through Japanese airspace.
…
In extended Japanese television news broadcasts, commentators claimed the new missile was capable of carrying a 1,000kg nuclear, chemical or conventional warhead.
Also note that the yields on North Korea’s nuclear tests seem to be following some modified version of Moore’s Law.
Perhaps the threats against the movie’s opening were overblown, but if anything were to happen, the decision would be laid solely at the feet of Sony and the theaters showing the movie. The commentators mocking Sony now would go on to write articles about how releasing a movie while there were outstanding threats was an obvious failure mode.
I don’t pretend to know what the right decision here is (though I favor immediate online release). I don’t think it’s fair, however, to accuse a company of cowardice minutes after it has been stripped digitally naked before the world. Not everyone can afford to double down each time it is threatened. Sometimes being intimidated and fearful is a rational response.
Did Obama forget that the NFL postponed a week of games immediately following the 9/11 attacks? Whoops. And that our government has done a number of things — all of which at least inconvenience if not directly harm our citizenry — in response to terrorism (e.g., TSA, PATRIOT ACT, PRISM). This is a private company making a calculated decision… much like shipping companies (or perhaps their insurers) that were willing to pay parities for hijacked ships.
The state should avoid being bullied by terrorists. The same such obligation is not held by individuals or companies.Report
They cancelled the NFL games out of respect, but also out of the logistic need that airplane travel was hella restricted for the rest of the week after the attacks. Baseball started up again the Monday after.Report
Baseball still has a season to play!
(and they play tons upon tons of games…)Report
Frankly, I object to Sony’s actions for exactly the same reason I object to Bush telling us that we can defeat the terrorists by shopping.
They both use the threat of violent extremism to do exactly what they want to do anyway. It’s not as though Bush would have said “oh hey, don’t worry about being a consumer right now” if there weren’t terrorists.
Similarly, I’m convinced that Sony is only taking this step because they know the movie is crap. If they avoid a theatrical release b/c terrorism, they avoid having to pay a lot of their bills, probably get an insurance payout to cover the gaps, and can release the whole thing on Itunes in January.
When Bush asked us to go to war with Iraq over non-credible threats of WMDs, it was an objectively horrible thing. But it also did so by creating cynicism and fear that paved the way for more horrible things. When Sony cancels a movie over non-credible threats, it’s not objectively horrible–at worst, it’s shady accounting. But it’s shady accounting that still carries with it a by-product of cynicism and fear that paves the way for more horrible things.Report
Indeed it looks like a stinker:
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/interview-handles-assassination-kim-jong-un
“This bare-bones synopsis doesn’t do justice to a story that is as much about the policies of the United States as those of North Korea. The film’s comic setup is built around the unfunny idea of North Korea’s ramped-up nuclear arsenal and the notion that its missiles can reach the West Coast. As Kim’s threats grow increasingly hectic, the C.I.A. asserts that a moderate dissident faction within the regime is ready to take over, but doesn’t dare act against Kim personally. What follows is a lot of clattery, only intermittently funny comic riffing by Rogen and Franco as they play bumbling but well-meaning bourgeois nerds who are forced into physical action. Yet Rogen and Evan Goldberg—the movie’s directors and the co-writers of the story, along with Dan Sterling (who wrote the screenplay)—take seriously, in their own soft-handed way, the movie’s underlying question: When is it legitimate to kill the sitting leader of another country?”Report
That actually sounds kind of interesting.Report
I would certainly pay $6 to see it at the local matinee. But everyone knows I have no taste.Report
$6?! Where is your theater located, in 1995?Report
Glyph,
my local theater plays movies for $3.
It’s good to live near a university!Report
Why Sony did not decide to just go to dvd and on-line release is not clear. Was netflix unwilling? I suspect with the publicity they got they could have made a killing. I can see the theater owners point of view in particular if they have not put door alarms on the emergency exits (which would have stopped the Co event. By these I mean the door bars that say if this door is open an alarm will sound.)Report
I give the theaters a pass. Whether I give Sony a pass depends on what they do with the movie.
I am at least softly supporting indemnity for venues.
What I remain at least a little skeptical of, though, is that this is entirely about threats of physical violence.Report
I agree with Tod’s comment the other day; Sony seems to have pulled the movie because theaters cancelled. Why did theater’s cancel? Because of insurance; the lingering flavor of Aurora, and potential dents in sales of other seats in other movies? I don’t know.
But what I do know is that in general, our world is out there, you can see it on google earth and maps. You can see the movie theaters, schools, malls, churches, synagogs, water supplies, power lines, highways, tunnels. It’s all pretty easy to get at for a determined terrorist. That it’s not got at often and repeatedly suggests that determined terrorists are really, really uncommon. And that’s the best reason to go to a movie, have a drink of water, or take a stroll in a famous park. You’re in more danger from the car ride getting there.Report
Martin was willing to show it in his theater.
(Yes, Martin owns a damn theater. Because he’s not got better things to do with his money).Report
I guess I wonder why Sony did not just can the theatrical release and let Netflix et.al. release it as well as on DVD. As someone pointed out from the point of view of the theater company only 20% of the ticket price goes to them so its now worth it if extra security is involved. Going to the digital and DVD channel makes attacks that much more difficult (assuming Netflix has adaquate security in place, but they have been warned. )Report
Interestingly Mitt Romney might have the perfect response/solution. Release it on-line and ask for a 5 dollar voluntary contribution to Ebola.
http://news.yahoo.com/why-mitt-romney-may-response-sonys-interview-224830041.htmlReport
FWIW one of my more left-wing friends has been pointing out with sardonic glee that the same people who want SONY and the Theatres to show The Interview are often the same idiots who led us to the debacle in the Iraq War.
Personally I think John Chait has the right take:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/12/us-must-defend-us-culture-from-north-korea.html
“This is not to defend Sony’s decision, but to point out that there is a mismatch here between the public interest at stake and the private interests who are positioned to act on it. Sony is a for-profit entity, and not even an American one, that effectively has important influence over American culture. We don’t entrust for-profit entities with the common defense. And recognizing that the threat to a Sony picture is actually a threat to the freedom of American culture ought to lead us to a public rather than a private solution.
The federal government should take financial responsibility. Either Washington should guarantee Sony’s financial liability in the event of an attack, or it should directly reimburse the studio’s projected losses so it can release the movie online for free. The latter solution has the attractive benefit of ensuring a far wider audience for the film than it would otherwise have attracted.”Report
Should our Federal Government take on the financial responsibility of attacks on theaters in other countries, too?Report
No, though at least one other country is actually showing the movie.Report
“The federal government should take financial responsibility. Either Washington should guarantee Sony’s financial liability in the event of an attack, or it should directly reimburse the studio’s projected losses so it can release the movie online for free. The latter solution has the attractive benefit of ensuring a far wider audience for the film than it would otherwise have attracted.”
“hey guys, let’s all watch a terrible movie because AMERICA and so we can show up the world’s craziest awful government somehow.”
i know it’s chait and all but he’s generally not completely bonkers like this.Report
Sony’s real mistake was ever making picture in the first place. Did they really think the north korean nutters were going to do nothing given their history of terrorism?Report
Yeah, especially after all the terrorist attacks related to “Team America” (which I just added to my Netflix queue, shh, don’t tell anyone)Report
I WILL RAIN FIRE UPON YOUR NETFLIX QUEUEReport
I’m honestly surprised this has generated so much discussion. Movies — and artistic endeavors* and commercial projects of all stripes — get shelved everyday for numerous reasons. ESPN cancelled “Playmakers” because a financial partner (the NFL) felt it showed the League in a bad light and put pressure on them to pull the plug. Episodes of “South Park” have been edited, censored, or pulled from syndication because they offended one group or another. We may not agree with all of these decisions, but provided they are made by private actors without undue influence by the government, I think we have to ultimately conclude that Sony made the decision they thought was in the best interest of their company and move on from there. No one has a ‘right’ to see this movie, Sony has no obligation to release it under any circumstances. It feels a bit like this is becoming a weird wedge issue in the Left/Right wars, though I’m not even sure who is on which side…Report
Forgot to address my *…
I’m sure that @saul-degraw can offer plenty more examples from this category than I can dream up as he seems to be the resident expert on the inner workings of the art world.Report
There are no obligations and there are plenty of movies that get shelved for later because they look like bombs or get switched to a straight to DVD/Streaming release for the same reason.
There are also movies that break companies by going wildly over budget. Heaven’s Gate is the most famous example. There is a newish movement that is trying to claim that Heaven’s Gate is really better than its reputation but I’ve never been able to complete a full-viewing of it.
However, Seth Rogan and James Franco are very popular and my guess is that unless this movie was REALLY REALLY REALLY BAD (caps are intentional) that Sony would have made a profit. Seth Rogan and James Franco are also really really popular and it if Sony tried to pull or downplay this movie under any other circumstance, it would have been huge news and backfired on them. So Alan Scott is probably right that Sony might be seeing the hack as a blessing in disguise if the film is REALLY REALLY REALLY BAD.Report
For example, the period between January First to the summer blockbuster season is generally when studios release movies that they have low hopes for*. This is largely still a graveyard season but it is changing and Blockbuster season now seems to be a year long event. The Lego Movie was a pleasant surprise from last year’s dead time.
*I don’t really understand why because I figure that the generally miserable weather of January and February would be a great way to get people to see movies.Report
“…felt it showed the League in a bad light and put pressure on them to pull the plug.”
Well, I hope we threatened to attack them.Report
We were going to but first we had to choose a leader and by the 9th round of balloting, wherein everyone demurely voted for the person to their right so as not to upset anyone, we decided to form an “Atlas Shrugged” book club instead.Report
I am even more uninformed on this topic than usual, so it’s probably been pointed out many times already that here in Japan, threats from North Korea are hardly hypothetical. They have shot missiles this way, and their boogeymen have kidnapped a score of Japanese civilians (something I was once confident was a ridiculous myth). Sony’s reluctance to stand up to a threat from these lunatics is sad but not indefensible.Report
Sorry, in my haste to chime in, I failed to note that the OP made exactly this point.Report
If North Korea doesn’t like our films, they should just kidnap Seth Rogen and James Franco and make their own.Report
Or kidnap them and prevent them from ever hosting the Oscars, as a goodwill gesture.Report
During the heyday of the kidnappings, the Japanese right were sure that North Korea was someway behind it. This was dismissed by others like most Americans would dismiss the claims of the JBS society. The Japanese rightists were happy with glee in away when it turned out that their worse case scenario was true.Report
To be fair, the Japanese do blame any small, unexpected boats on the North Koreans.
Causing international incidents is substantially easier when you’re on the water.
Causing international incidents because of littering takes talent.Report
+1 to the OP.
I did think that Obama’s “I think they made a mistake” was appropriately measured if he was going to take that position, and I do think there is value in encouraging courage by speakers in the face of threats. Overblown rhetoric about Sony striking a blow against free speech is unfair and unproductive, though, and Obama was right to avoid it.Report
The idea that a private company choosing not to release a movie that they don’t want to release is somehow a blow to free speech is… curious…Report
Yes. It’s a confused rabbit hole. The First Amendment protects us from restraint by the government on our free speech. Extortion laws protect us from threats by each other on our free speech. And the federal government acting to provide for the common defense protects us from threats from outside the country on our free speech. Unless it can’t, in which case we have to make prudent choices for ourselves about what to say and not say, which is not a blow to free speech. Even domestically, there are things we can say that are First-Amendment protected that we know might get us punched in the nose, and wen we close not so say them at the times when they’ll get us punched in the nose, that’s not a blow to free speech – even though the guy who punches you can then get prosecuted for it.Report
I don’t really know how to put this into words at 1:30 after a long day of work, but it seems to me that America has the “free speech” that is enshrined in the Constitution, which prohibits making any law that abridges freedom of speech, and then also has the “free speech” that exists as a broader cultural value. Really, it is possible to limit or curtail a person’s ability to express themselves freely in any number of ways, but when it happens in ways other than through law, people can respond that it’s not a first amendment issue- even if it is still a free speech issue. In this case, I wouldn’t really say Sony sucks, but definitely anyone who would threaten violence against the public for watching a movie seriously sucks.Report
Another thing that came to mind when reading the post was the famous IRA line (although I think it might have been used previously in a book on guerrilla warfare in general) in their communique after the Brighton hotel bombing:
“Remember we will only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”Report
In the short term, I totally understand why Sony did this.
In the long term, I’m wondering what I won’t be able to see next year, or the year after that, or the year after that because of this decision by Sony.Report
“A threat to create unspecified violence, however, is credible regardless of the source because violence is comparatively easy even for unskilled first-timers to inflict.”
While this is obviously true, what the OP doesn’t explore is how we conduct a civil society if we treat every threat of unspecified violence from unknown persons as a prompt to change our actions.
People had no issue putting pressure on, say, Chik-Fil-A for taking actions, either as individuals or as a corporation, that they saw as ultimately damaging to a pluralistic free civil society. I see no reason Sony should not be subject to the same pressures of public opinion. If Sony is putting its own financial and PR interest over that of broader society, I can both say that that’s their right and also say, as Obama has, that I wish they hadn’t, and I hope the next guy won’t follow their example.
Free speech and not letting bullies have their way is one area where *this* libertarianish guy gets collectivist and says we are all in this together; we stand in unison or we fall alone. If that means a multibillion dollar international conglomerate takes a little public drubbing and shaming, I’m OK with that.Report
I have a completely different take on the credible threat thing. DPRK to US government: “We cracked one of your big corporation’s computer network. We poked around for years. We downloaded everything and no one even suspected until we released it. Do you want to bet that we’re not in the computers that run your electric grid? Your cell phone networks? Your oil refineries and pipelines?”
Not small random violence; a credible threat of something much worse.Report
I guess I’m not sure how that applies here.
Assuming arguendo that it’s true that they *might* already have made those kinds of inroads:
1. Sony didn’t know that (or even who was responsible) when they pulled the film.
2. That wasn’t the threat made (at least publicly, though as you say, it may be implied).
3. If that’s the implicit or explicit threat, then the U.S. govt, not Sony, needs to figure out how it wants to respond to what I assume would be a threat or act of war. While the govt. could certainly ask Sony to respond a certain way (“Listen, we have a plan, but it’s not ready to go yet, so can you please accede to these demands to buy time”) we have no evidence that’s what happened here.
I guess I just don’t think “capitulate” is the best long-term option. For any individual small business owner, it is far less costly to just pay that protection money when the wiseguys come around telling you “nice place ya got here, be a shame if something were to happen to it.” But overall it’s more costly to everyone. Free Civil Society is, paradoxically, one big Prisoner’s Dilemma, and right now Sony sort of defected first.Report
The point is that North Korea isn’t threatening Sony. Nothing happens if Sony releases the film, at least not on the scale of bombing theaters. Maybe a few databases at Sony get wiped — if North Korean hackers have been crawling around in Sony’s servers for the last couple of years, who knows what unpleasant bits of software they might have left behind.
And indeed, now that the FBI has accused North Korea, it’s the US government that has to figure out what to do. Commit to spending a trillion dollars to harden the country’s software infrastructure against intrusions like that? Commit private companies to spending a trillion dollars to harden their software infrastructure? Laugh it off?
The best argument against my position is that Robert J. Samuelson took the same position in his column this AM.Report
So apparently Sony will release the movie online. A stand-up thing to do.Report
@will-truman I’ve been unable to load the front page. The only thing I can think of is that I switched the email address; so mostly experimenting to see if I can recover my old self and this community.Report
Totally Off Topic, but the front page will not load for me, no matter how I try. Strange request this, but please put a link in comments so that I can try and diagnose my problems? Page me with an @zic so that I might get to it?
Thank you!Report
Hey @zic, I was having the same issue but a browser cache clear resolved it (though it’s still super slow and is getting pelted with spam left and right).Report
I had that and clearing the cache didn’t help. I think the site was down much of todayReport
Try clearing your browser cache, then reloading.Report
@zic
The site was down for most of the day. Right now we are blaming the North Koreans and Gilmore Girl fans who are angry at Sam.Report
We currently think that the site is under attack by the Loyal Order of Gilmore Girls fans.Report
….und das hat mit ihrem Singen
die Lorelai getanReport
After Sony sued geohot over his PS3 research, and after the Sony Rootkit debacle, I’m done with Sony. It doesn’t matter what decision they made over this movie, it would take much, much more than that to convince me they don’t suck.
For now, until I’m convinced they’ve thoroughly repented of their earlier evils, I’m not going to deliberately consume any Sony product – I’ve bought products less well suited to my preferences when a Sony one was better, to avoid giving them any of my money. I’ll continue doing so, including not watching this movie (not much of a sacrifice), as well as not watching movies of theirs I would actually like to see.
A thorough apology to geohot, refunding all money he paid them and releasing him from all terms of the settlement, and endowing several very generous professorships in security research in his name (and absolutely not in Sony’s) would be a start.Report
I suggest Glyph finds a bootleg version on the Internet and converts this month’s listening session into a shared solidarity and viewing session.Report
Even without a demonstrated ability, I would trust that the average reader here could figure out how to attack a movie theater and cause considerable damage including deaths without assistance, assuming they didn’t care about getting caught.
Sure, this is actually pretty trivial.
But the barrier to attack a movie theater is so ridiculously low that the question then needs to be asked: do you close the entire movie theater industry every time someone makes a threat on the Internet?
Because I will bet you right now one nice crisp newly minted $1 bill that somewhere on Twitter or YouTube or Facebook there are at least 1,000 posts threatening actual violence to the moviegoing public. This is what you get when you have billions of people on the Internet.
I can’t believe I have to say this to a guy who wrote a book about cyberwar and cyberterrorism, but an attack against the movie doesn’t have to occur in 18,000 locations simultaneously to cause considerable damage.
If this group threatened to blow up “a national historic landmark if Sony released this movie” do you think (a) movie theaters would have dropped the movie (b) Sony would have not released the movie or (c) anybody anywhere would be talking about how irresponsible Sony and/or the theaters were if they released the movie because “these people might blow up any national historic landmark anywhere”?
There are too many national historic landmarks in the country to secure, after all. The same logic for attack space follows.
Demonstrated capability is important in risk analysis precisely because it has to be demonstrated. Any freakin’ loon on the Internet can make all sorts of crazy-ass threats (and they do, by the millions, every day), and statistically nearly zero of those threats are executed. This is exactly why after every actual incident of violence, everyone spends days talking about how it was so obvious that this guy was going to go off, because look at all these things he said or did on the Internet prior to exploding, but it ignores the fact that right now there are thousands upon thousands of people saying precisely that same sort of freakin’ loon stuff and none of them are going to go off. There is no predictive value, at all, in “somebody said something scary on the Internet” and the actual likelihood of them doing anything other than saying something scary on the Internet again.Report
Patrick,
oh, dear lord, you have no idea how scary the internet can get, do you?
Here’s a tip: businessmen tend to be pretty predictable, and when they say that they’re doing something, they generally have a good deal of followthrough (whether or not Sony can actually get people deported…)
Again, like the US Military, some folks have their credibility on the line, and actually care about what they say.Report
I’ve read this comment five times and I cannot follow a logic chain through itReport
Then they’ve gotten to you too.Report
This is what happens when your write a comment while trying to follow what’s happening in a novella but you don’t speak Spanish.Report
And it’s Eastertime too.Report
This is an informative read, given the OP:
A Lot of Smart People Think North Korea Didn’t Hack Sony.Report
Yeah, I blame Obama.
His FBI has been remarkably quick to blame people without proof that they’ve actually done anything wrong.Report
Dunno about Obama, but it sure makes the FBI look bad.Report
Cyber security experts are questioning the FBI’s claim that North Korea is responsible for the hack that crippled Sony Pictures. Kurt Stammberger, a senior vice president with cybersecurity firm Norse, told CBS News his company has data that doubts some of the FBI’s findings…
He says Norse data is pointing towards a woman who calls herself “Lena” and claims to be connected with the so-called “Guardians of Peace” hacking group. Norse believes it’s identified this woman as someone who worked at Sony in Los Angeles for ten years until leaving the company this past May…
It’s worth noting that the original demand of the hackers was for money from Sony in exchange for not releasing embarrassing information. There was no mention of the movie “The Interview”… Report