Sony case could cause bind, depending on evidence

I have very little doubt that the FBI are correct in their assessment that North Korea is responsible for this. Logic and common snese would dictate that the FBI does indeed have the very type of smoking gun information that they would in no way, shape, or form have to share with the so-called "experts" arond the world who somehow seem to think they know better when it comes to the magnitudes involved in making this kind of accusation against another state in the international arena. North Korea did it, and their meager, half-hearted claims of innocence do little to help clear them of suspicion.

I'm not sure if most people take the U.S. government's word at face-value anymore.

"Trust me" won't convince anybody.

Oh how I wish that were true. But its obviously not true. The majority will side with their officials and consider it automatic if they didn't side with "the enemy". Most are too weak of mind to even see a middle ground, and certainly too weak of heart to occupy it. And to oppose their officials? As they say, its harder to stand up to your friends than it is to stand up to your enemies.

The gaping hole in this lingering suggestion that the U.S. is somehow trying to set up North Korea as some sort of erratic, belligerent rogue state is that (and I don't believe I'm having to even point this out at all) North Korea has carefully crafted the image of an erratic and belligerent rogue state all by itself over the past three decades. From abduction of foreign nationals to open military attacks on South Koreans to, -- oh, what was that little hiccup a few years back...? -- oh, yeah, the detonation of a nuclear device, North Korea has more than cemented itself in the international ledger as a bat-s#!t crazy nation willing and able to do bat-s#!t crazy things to prop up its leadership.

The U.S. would gain nothing by falsely accusing North Korea of anything at this stage of the game. Nothing whatsoever. And to maintain, however obtusely, that a trumped-up charge of cyber-terrorism via the Sony hack is the best the U.S. could come up with in indicting the DPRK suggests a profound lack of imagination, particularly when one considers the Iraq WMD clusterf$#k that was unleashed on the world by Bush & Co.

What astounds me out of all of this is the not-so-subtle implied suggestion among critics of the FBI that the DPRK is some poor, misunderstood, innocent victim underserving of closer scrutiny from the international community, despite having demonstrated in the past its penchant for trying to and on occasion successfully hacking other nations’ government servers, including South Korea’s. North Korea is no squeaky clean babe in the woods. It's a brutal, unforgiving, totalitarian regime that oppresses its people through violence and terror while allowing hundreds of thousands of its citizens to freeze and/or starve to death every year, at least when it’s not killing them outright in forced labor camps.

Look, fellas'. I understand the sexiness and allure of a good old fashioned conspiracy is nigh irresistible, particularly for some of you. But in this case, I'll go with the Occam's razor approach to the issue. All these assumptions about proxy server bouncing and insider help are just that: assumptions. At the end of the day, the FBI has provided all the evidence it reasonably can to the public in a world in which cyber-attacks that make the Sony one look like child’s play are all but guaranteed to increase, not decrease, over the coming years.

These demands that the FBI lay out all its investigative cards on the table in order to satisfy what really amounts to little more than the personal curiosity of so-called cyber-experts who are most decidedly not in the investigative loop are utterly asinine. Why in the world would the FBI announce to anyone, much less arm-chair conspiracy theorists, the full extent of their investigative capabilities? The answer is they wouldn't. And they shouldn't.

Granted, this will inevitably give rise to a chorus of, “See? They’re hiding something.” But honestly, when I weigh the FBI maintaining the unknown quantity status of its cybercrime division versus the cries of foul from folks who really couldn’t give two whit’s about North Korea or its presumed innocence, I’ll side with the FBI nine times out of ten.

Sony is not unknown for making a publicity stunt, look what it did for the popularity of this movie. How any people made a point of watching this movie because of a claim that North Korea tried to prevent them from seeing it.

LFRAgain wrote:

'...U.S. would gain nothing by falsely accusing North Korea of anything at this stage of the game. Nothing whatsoever...'

In your opinion LFRAgain.

But given the US posturing with a steady military build on the Asian side of the Pacific Rim this very fast projection of guilt looks like everything to gain.

Expecting everyone to swallow this data loss was due to DPRK hackers able to extract 100 terrabytes, that is a 100,000 gigabytes of data from Sony servers without anybody noticing, well seriously just how realistic is that?

LFRAgain wrote:

'At the end of the day, the FBI has provided all the evidence it reasonably..."

What evidence?

A story where there were similarities in specific lines of code known to be from DPRK hackers tool box, that is encryption algorithms, data deletion methods, and compromised networks. Written about by Eric Tucker in this article.Do you mean the evidence of the alleged trail of crumbs by 'military class hackers' working on a clandestine security level daily in an arena that by it's nature is 'secret' therefore opaque to the public?

Seriously how naive do they think people are?

What might be true of gullible North American centre of gravity does not apply to the rest of the Pacific Rim and Asian region. Even if the movie in question stereotypes people in the Asian region has having a low IQ.

These Black Hacker tools are used and modeled by core members of the UN Security Council.

That is the People's Republic of China, France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States. Any government taking this projection of guilt seriously just looks ridiculous as it is in reality like; 'handing out speeding fines at the Japanese F1 Grand Prix'.

This whole issue carries the hallmark of lies, and I evoke Donald Rumsfeld Paradox being applied to political confusion and disinformation on the whole the Sony issue.

'There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. ~ Donald Rumsfeld ~

The burning question that is avoided by Sony, the Japanese and U.S.Military/Government Bloc is:

* How could the Sony network administrator not notice that 100T's of data was being leached from Sony servers?

Because we are lead to believe not one Sony employee, executive or senior executive was alerted before this massive block of data was stolen.

If 100T of data was stolen;

the probabilities are it was stolen by a person or persons connecting hard drives to servers and leaching directly. Which would logically make this an inside job.

Particularly using 'Occam's Razor' principle you evoked, it just makes the external scenario look outrageous.

This isn't without recent precedence either as Edward Snowden took his 'whistleblower' data and released information gathered from the inside. If there was any reason to put up a smokescreen that corporations or government were not vulnerable to employees value systems - this is it.

Even if the pipeline was open and its source invisible to Sony, the process would take literally weeks at best. And if this is true, this would not just be any inside job either.

In point of fact, the sheer logistics mean many Sony employees would have been involved in the theft.

So if this indeed was an inside job, the system administrators had to have known about the theft. As nobody steals 100T overnight, or does it without someone noticing.

The real questions are:

* Has Sony been infiltrated and if so by whom?

* If infiltrated internally, was it competitors or a foreign power seeding staff for geopolitical reasons?

* If infiltrated which one, why is the focus on the DPRK as a scapegoat in what is an unfalsifiable^ scenario?

Just how naive does the US Military/Government Bloc and Sony public relations group think the public is?

The only real thread running through this Sony Hack is how little is actually known, yet there is so much certainty and expectation of an answer. Why, this is a very secretive corporation, no different to all the involved governments?

^