With his nation’s population of about 24 million people and a military and paramilitary force of 9 million – the largest in the world – that can be mobilized very quickly under a nuclear umbrella with missile-delivery capacity, I wonder what North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un sees when he looks into the mirror. He has executed members of his own family who seemed unwilling to do his bidding as he envisioned it. His prison camps – where dissenters and their families are condemned for life (and often into future generations), brutal torture centers where rape, killing-for-fun and starvation are the rule – have been in existence longer than those created by Hitler or Stalin.
He is a deity to his people who deeply love and admire him, although extreme food shortages, dietary deprivation if you will, and an incredibly low standard of living define their lives. They have no other vision of their country or their leader beyond the glorification of what they see on state-controlled media. Look at the satellite photo of the Korean Peninsula above. Cities without light, no real Internet, nothing to connect that barren North with the rest of the world.
Their one ally, China, is the major crossing point for trade and commerce that the North has with anyone else. A small South Korean-controlled manufacturing center, just above the Demilitarized Zone separating North and South, opens and closes with the political winds. It is generally accepted that North Korea exists at China’s whim, the reality of China’s intense desire to avoid having a border with an American ally (e.g., an expanded South Korea, should the North fall). But the North has gone and continues to be rogue. There are serious questions being asked in Beijing about Kim’s mental stability and the litany of embarrassments that his missteps have wrought, often landing on the PRC doorstep for China to clean up.
It is within this context that an American motion picture studio owned by a Japanese conglomerate faces what I call simply, The Big Hack: exposing intensely personal information, embarrassing private communications releasing valuable intellectual property to be shared in the world of content piracy, and literally posing such clear threats of violence that no theaters in the United States would play a farce-comedy (The Interview) in which the CIA foments the assassination of Kim Jong-Un through two bumbling journalists. The FBI has told the world that this electronic asymmetrical assault on Sony Pictures was implemented at the direction of the North Korean government.
China’s public face reflects this reality: “‘Any civilized world will oppose hacker attacks or terror threats. But a movie like The Interview, which makes fun of the leader of an enemy of the U.S., is nothing to be proud of for Hollywood and U.S. society,’ said an editorial in The Global Times, a tabloid sister paper to China’s official The People’s Daily… ‘No matter how the U.S. society looks at North Korea and Kim Jong Un, Kim is still the leader of the country. The vicious mocking of Kim is only a result of senseless cultural arrogance,’ it said.” Variety.com, December 21st.
But in the same periodical comes the “other story” of China’s growing dissatisfaction with Kim and his tactics: “‘China has cleaned up the D.P.R.K.’s [North Korea’s] mess too many times. ‘But it doesn’t have to do that in the future,’ [PRC] General Wang Hongguang wrote in the same Global Times. ‘If an administration isn’t supported by the people, collapse is just a matter of time.’” Variety.com. Does that mean that China will help the United States contain Mr. Kim? Time will tell, but North Korea is only accelerating its own disconnect from the PRC.
Still, China knows how to play the “seemingly neutral card”: “China said on [December 22nd] it opposed all forms of cyberattacks but there was no proof that North Korea was responsible for the hacking of Sony Pictures, as the United States has said.” Washington Post, December 22nd. And in a 1700 word press release, the North is demanding an apology from the United States for the “false” accusations that they fomented the attack… and for fostering such an insulting and dangerous motion picture. By God, someone has finally taken Seth Rogan seriously!
One gets the sense that Kim, perhaps striking macho poses as he checks himself in that mirror, is having a great time at this seemingly successful attack on the United States. His Guardians of Peace subcontractor-hackers are gloating over their bringing down both the hated film and the studio that made it. The fact that a major multinational corporation was so easily decimated has to be troubling for every man, woman and child in the United States, a nation with many layers of exceptional vulnerability of its over-connected (and easily hacked) infrastructure.
To add salt in the fresh wound, Kim has denied the North’s participation in this assault and “offered” to cooperate with a joint US-North Korean investigation to find the “truth” of The Big Hack… by alluding to America’s sullied reputation as a torturing global bully. “‘The U.S. should bear in mind that it will face serious consequences in case it rejects our proposal for joint investigation and presses for what it called countermeasures while finding fault with’ North Korea, the spokesman said in a statement carried by the Korean-language version of the Korean Central News Agency… ‘We have a way to prove that we have nothing to do with the case without resorting to torture, as the CIA does,’ he said.” Variety.com. Cultural imperialism, some even free societies have said of the United States.
But sensing perhaps that the best defense is a good offensive, North Korea is now charging the US itself with pushing Sony to make the offensive film, making the entire US a justifiable target, and indicated that any counter-action taken by the United States would be brutally responded to. [North Korea] “‘has clear evidence that the U.S. administration was deeply involved in the making of such dishonest reactionary movie,’ reads the statement, according to the Voice of America… ‘[North Korean has already launched the toughest counteraction,’ it continues. ‘Our target is all the citadels of the U.S. imperialists who earned the bitterest grudge of all Koreans.’
“It further claims that ‘Whoever challenges justice by toeing the line of the biggest criminal U.S. will never be able to escape merciless punishment.’” AOL.com. December 21st. Could a minor film produced though a Japanese conglomerate actually foment a nuclear war? Ugh! But, really, what is next? Oh, it seems that whatever “Internet” North Korea does have is going a bit haywire, cutting in and out… hmmm… I wonder… But in North Korea, that doesn’t remotely do very much!
“The country has only 1,024 official Internet protocol addresses, though the actual number may be a little higher. That is fewer than many city blocks in New York have. The United States, by comparison, has billions of addresses… But when the sun rose in North Korea on [December 23rd] morning, the few connections to the outside world — available only to the elite, the military, and North Korea’s prodigious propaganda machine — were still out.” New York Times, December 23rd. U.S. government sources were expectedly mum about their possible involvement, as the North’s Internet trickled back sporadically. There were even whispers that it was really China that temporarily unplugged its neighbor! Hmmmm. But where really is the humor?
In the end, these events force the United States to confront two harsh realities: (i) our most critical financial/commercial system linked by the Web and our electrical power grid are likely potential hacking victims of our lax cyber-security measures and (ii) our capacity to respond in-kind to nations with primitive electronic infrastructure is severely limited. If there is a place for a military budget, it has to be far more in protecting what we have than in building weapons that are impractical to deploy.
I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder how many in both the private and public sector will learning anything from this egregious assault?
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