Sony: the cat’s out of the bag
The recent hacking of Sony Pictures, which managed to extract all kinds of data, documents, and communications, has highlighted a subject that interests me greatly: what happens to all this information after it’s been hacked?
If you haven’t been following the story, the best account of Sony’s woes since the end of November can be found on The Next Web: in a nutshell, the perpetrators, about whose identity there has been much speculation, none of it conclusive, have been able to access all levels of the organization, and have distributed scripts of upcoming films, along with tons of personal emails full of all kinds of data, including private telephone numbers, and covering a range of highly questionable topics.
But the most interesting thing about all this, in my opinion, is that Sony contacted dozens of media outlets and agencies, telling them not to report any of the stolen information, and to destroy anything they may have obtained.
Can they actually do that? On the basis that the information has been stolen can they impose blanket censorship on the media? And if what has been revealed turns out to be immoral, illegal, and inappropriate? Months ago, some media decided not to publish the stolen photographs of young female actors, even though they were easily available on dozens of websites, an act of self-censorship that to some extent limited the damage caused to the affected people’s reputation. The same has happened in the case of the horrific videos posted by the Islamic State, with most media refusing to help distribute them.
We currently have a situation where the moral standards of certain organizations are creating an information blackout, at the same time as other, more ridiculous situations such as when the television cameras refuse to cover somebody streaking at a sports event, as though that person wasn’t going to be happy enough with several tens of thousands of people watching him or her cavort naked.
It’s pretty much the same deal with what’s happened to Sony Pictures: the company has been the victim of an attack, but not only has it failed to garner much sympathy for what happened as a result of the widespread antipathy among the general public, but the theft has exposed its utterly despicable tactics, all of which can easily be accessed by consulting the material the thieves have posted on line.
It’s just the same as what my grandmothers would tell me: “Always put on clean underwear, because you might get run over by a bus and taken to hospital.” Well, not only has Sony Pictures not changed its undergarments for many years now, but its spent a great deal of time and energy casting aspersions about the cleanliness of the rest of us, insulting its customers and accusing them of having no morals, i.e. using the technology that is available to access material the company doesn’t want us to, as though that were really possible. And now, to continue the clothing analogy, the company has been caught with its pants down by a bunch of people whose actions I in no way condone.
Does Sony Pictures really think that nobody is going to look at this information? Would you like the media to ignore it if something was published that put you in a bad light? Sure, but it’s not going to happen. Sony Pictures’ style, or lack thereof, has been highlighted here in all its glory: rather than asking the media nicely not to hang out its dirty washing in public (those clothing analogies just keep coming…), it instead threatens to set the lawyers loose. Come on, does it really think that we’re going to help cover up revelations about its dark arts and its problems simply because the source is illegal? Sorry, Sony, but you should have thought about this a long time ago. The cat’s out of the bag, and I have every right to find it, use it, publish it, talk about it, and even ridicule it. Life is hard.
(En español, aquí)
