President Barack Obama said at his end-of-the-year press conference that he thought Sony made a mistake in canceling the release of The Interview. This is what he said:
"Sony is a corporation. It suffered significant damage. There were threats against its employees. I am sympathetic to the concerns that they faced. Having said all that,yes, I think they made a mistake. In this interconnected, digital world, there are going to be opportunities for hackers to engage in cyber assaults both in the private sector and the public sector. Now, our first order of business is making sure that we do everything to harden sites and prevent those kinds of attacks from taking place. When I came into
office, I stood up a cybersecurity interagency team to look at everything that we could at the
government level to prevent these kinds of attacks. We’ve been coordinating with the private sector, but a lot more needs to be done. We’re not even close to where we need to be And one of the things in the New Year that I hope Congress is prepared to work with us on is strong cybersecurity laws that allow for information sharing across private sector platforms, as well as the public sector, so that we are incorporating best practices and
preventing these attacks from happening in the first place.
But even as we get better, the hackers are going to get better, too. Some of them are going to be state actors; some of them are going to be non-state actors. All of them are
going to be sophisticated and many of them can do some damage.
We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States. Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of
releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don’t like, or news reports that they don’t
like. Or even worse, imagine if producers and distributors and others start engaging in self-
censorship because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of somebody whose sensibilities
probably need to be offended.
So that’s not who we are. That’s not what America is about. Again, I’m sympathetic that Sony as a private company was worried about
liabilities, and this and that and the other. I wish they had spoken to me first. I would have told them,do not get into a pattern in which you’re intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks. Imagine if, instead of it being a cyber-threat,somebody had broken into their offices and destroyed a bunch of computers and stolen disks. Is that what it takes for suddenly you to pull the plug on something? So we’ll engage with not just the film industry but the news industry and the private sector around these issues. We already have. We will continue to do so. But I think all of us have to
anticipate occasionally there are going to be breaches like this. They’re going to be costly. They’re going to be serious. We take them with the utmost seriousness. But we can’t start changing our patterns of behavior any more than we stop going to a football game because
there might be the possibility of a terrorist attack; any more than Boston didn’t run its marathon this year because of the possibility
that somebody might try to cause harm. So let’s not get into that way of doing business."
"The FBI announced today and we can confirm that North Korea engaged in this attack. I think it says something interesting about North Korea that they decided to have
the state mount an all-out assault on a movie studio because of a satirical movie starring Seth
Rogen and James Flacco [Franco].I
love Seth and I love James, but the notion that that was a threat to them I think gives you some sense of the kind of regime we’re talking
about here. They caused a lot of damage, and we will respond. We will respond proportionally and
we’ll respond in a place and time and manner that we choose. It’s not something that I will announce here today at a press conference.
More broadly, though, this points to the need for us to work with the international community to start setting up some very clear rules of the road in terms of how the Internet and cyber operates. Right now, it’s sort of the Wild West. And part of the problem is, is you’ve
got weak states that can engage in these kinds of attacks, you’ve got non-state actors that can do enormous damage. That’s part of what makes this issue of cybersecurity so urgent.Again, this is part of the reason why it’s going
to be so important for Congress to work with us and get a actual bill passed that allows for the kind of information-sharing we need.
Because if we don’t put in place the kind of architecture that can prevent these attacks from taking place, this is not just going to be
affecting movies, this is going to be affecting our entire economy in ways that are extraordinarily significant."
Obama warned against "self-censorship," adding: "That's not who we are."
Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton tells CNN that Obama, the press and others are "mistaken" about what happened. He cited the initial decision by movie theaters not to show the film, and took issue with Obama's comments. He said Sony has not "caved" or "given in" and wanted the public to see the movie.The company also released a written statement citing the decision by theaters as the major
factor. "We had no choice," the company said, while adding that they are looking at ways to release the film on "a different platform."
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