Dual Billing for Art and Conflict in Blockbuster Sony Hack

Un-Computer

#feareatsthesoul

As Twitter hashtags go, it is a well-crafted one. The tweet last week that went with it, “Sad day for creative expression,” was sent by none other than comedian Steve Carell, an actor whose effortless affability was snuffed out by news that his upcoming film “Pyongyang” was being shut down after Fox said it would not distribute the film. It was only the latest industry casualty of the massive cyber exploitation of Sony Pictures by hackers tied to North Korea.

“The Interview,” the film that appears to have triggered the operation, is in limbo after Sony scrubbed the movie’s December 25 release in response to the hackers’ threat of violence at any theaters that showed it. Sony is still working to release the movie, company lawyer and veteran troubleshooter David Boies told NBC’s Meet The Press on Sunday. In a sign of the ongoing uncertainty, the New York Post on Sunday reported that Crackle, a free video website owned by Sony, might release the film while other outlets such as Mashable said that was not the case.

President Obama said Friday that backing down from the in-theater release established a troubling precedent, a crucial aspect of this entangling of art and conflict. President Obama also indicated the United States would conduct a proportional response to the attack at some point in the future, giving new weight to the release and dissemination of everything from petty e-mail feuds among studio honchos to Sony’s confidential corporate information.

This hack, and America’s private and public sector response, show how the character of conflict is getting harder and harder to define as it changes faster than governments and the private sector can keep up with. The hack was not an act of war, but it was a preview of the low-intensity and non-kinetic conflicts to come, teasing its national security audience with a blockbuster cast of a camera-ready ruthless dictator and the entertainment world elite, yet delivered frame by frame rather than on a smoothly running reel. Russia’s “hybrid warfare” has employed a similar approach to Ukraine by keeping an array of drawn-out actions below a threshold that would trigger a military response by the West. China takes this tack with the slow metabolism of its highly targeted cyber operations.

Heeding threats to some 18,000 theaters, Sony’s snap decision to spike “The Interview” further highlights the pressure points that can be exploited for economic, political, and cultural damage by an adversary willing to rethink how to conduct conflict. Entertainment and media is a $546 billion industry in the United States alone. America’s ability to shape its narrative in the 21st Century depends on it. It is easy to dismiss the attack as one primarily concerned with popping Hollywood egos, but major attacks to pilfer secrets and gum up the works of American companies are disturbingly routine. Wall Street has been hit hard. The defense industry has too. These are matters of national security. But how do we address them without securitizing everything we do as Americans?

As with most cyber attacks, attribution, or identifying the bad guys, is going to be very difficult no matter the confidence of the U.S. government in tracing the attack back to the North Korean regime. Without a target, it is hard to strike back. Imagine the pressure, though, if instead of targeting Sony, the hackers had incapacitated the electrical grid for Hollywood and Burbank and further misdirected investigators? Longstanding tenets of foreign policy like deterrence are upended when online attacks or theft can be veiled or concealed in ways that conventional attacks cannot.

Tomorrow’s conflicts are getting harder and harder to understand, and sometimes even more abstract for policymakers. This is an era when conflict will sometimes not look like war, and it is worth asking if the word itself will someday be outmoded to describe the way that nations, groups and individuals coerce and control to achieve their ends. As is often the case, the arts can make this evolution in conflict and warfare more real. If policymakers and the public now better understand this realization, then Sony’s $44 million investment in making “The Interview” may not entirely have been wasted.

As Steve Carell hinted, however, it is a paradigm shift that should be squarely confronted, not feared. We still need a hashtag for that.

 

August Cole is the director of the Atlantic Council’s Art of Future Warfare project and a non-resident senior fellow at the Council. He is a writer, consultant and analyst. His first novel, GHOST FLEET, co-written with Peter W. Singer, will be published in 2015.

 

Photo credit: kim jong un looking at things

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