Movies can be dangerous things. Comedy and satire too mingle with danger, tyrants and dictators aren't powerful due to their great sense of wit.
Yesterday, fearful of a promise of violent attack on movie theaters showing "The Interview", Sony Pictures pulled the movie from release. The movie's comic misadventures in a silly CIA plot to assassinate an actual, living human dictator in North Korea catapulted it from obscurity to infamy and history in record time.
Immediately too, cries that removal of the movie from distribution was giving terrorists control followed Sony's decision.
Sadly, caving in to demands of supposed terrorists seems more a rule than an exception.
Millions upon millions of shoes being removed at airports seems proof of that. Nation after nation has embraced a grim surveillance society since 2001. Haven't we already caved?
As for the movie -- did North Korean hackers acting on behalf of the state attack Sony? Some say no way:
"It's not possible. It would have taken months, maybe even years, to exfiltrate something like 100 terabytes of data without anyone noticing. ... Look at the bandwidth going into North Korea. I mean, the pipelines, the pipes going in, handling data, they only have one major ISP across their entire nation. That kind of information flowing at one time would have shut down North Korean Internet completely."
"Monsegur thinks it's also possible this was an inside job, that an employee or consultant downloaded all the information from Sony's servers and then sold it to someone else."
The potential of lawsuits against distributors and theater owners seems large, given they had been "warned" ahead of time of an attack on theaters.
The screenwriter of "The Interview" is beyond amazed by all this.
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