U.S. imposes new sanctions on N Korea for nonexistent Sony hack

The United States is hitting North Korea with a new economic sanctions despite evidence that points instead to former employees of the studio.

What an embarrassing series of moves by the U.S. government! Even mainstream media has been reporting that North Korea was likely not involved in the recent Sony hack–yet the propaganda wheels keep spinning. The best way to paint the picture (think Jackson Pollock) of how silly President Obama and U.S. government officials look, is to simply quote from recent headlines. Starting with this, today from CNN:

The United States is hitting North Korea with a new set of economic sanctions after determining the country was behind last month’s computer hack at Sony…Federal Bureau of Investigation has maintained that North Korea was behind the broad computer breach at Sony, despite evidence from some technology experts that points instead to former employees of the studio…

THE INTERCEPT nails the story:

The identity of the Sony hackers is still unknown. President Obama, in a December 19 press conference, announced: “We can confirm that North Korea engaged in this attack.” He then vowed: “We will respond. . . . We cannot have a society in which some dictator some place can start imposing censorship here in the United States.”…(The) campaign to blame North Korea actually began two days earlier, when The New York Times – as usual – corruptly granted anonymity to “senior administration officials” to disseminate their inflammatory claims with no accountability. These hidden “American officials” used the Paper of Record to announce that they “have concluded that North Korea was ‘centrally involved’ in the hacking of Sony Pictures computers.” With virtually no skepticism about the official accusation, reporters David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth deemed the incident a “cyberterrorism attack” and devoted the bulk of the article to examining the retaliatory actions the government could take against the North Koreans.

From CNBC:

North Korea has never before demonstrated any advanced hacking capabilities. More important, it has hardly any way of acquiring those capabilities. It has no high-tech business sector or local hacker community from which it can recruit talent. It doesn’t let its people attend courses and conferences outside its borders, where they could learn the necessary skills….The cyber attacks carried out against Sony required a much higher level of skill than North Korea could manage…Most of the things the attackers were actually doing don’t point to North Korea. None of their activity inside Sony’s networks was focused on the film North Korea wanted to suppress. In fact, the demand for the film to be suppressed came relatively late in the communications that seem to have come from the attackers. It seems to have been added as an after-thought.