STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Was the Sony Hack a Domestic Ploy?
By Staff News & Analysis - December 26, 2014

Obama Urges Congress To Renew Push For "CISPA-style" Internet Laws After Sony Hack … This week, Obama announced a renewed push for tighter internet regulations in congress, citing the need for additional cyber-security in light of the recent hack on Sony. The White House has been taking this opportunity to initiate strategies that had already been planned for years. … During the press conference Obama also said that, "We have been correlating with the private sector but a lot more needs to be done," and urged congress for "stronger cybersecurity laws in the new year." – TheAntiMedia

Dominant Social Theme: We have to respond via regulations to grave Internet threats.

Free-Market Analysis: Our suspicions about the Sony hack were raised when North Korea accused the US of involving its CIA. By then the story had been continuously presented by the mainstream media, always a sign that some sort of promotion was underway.

And now the next shoe has dropped – predictably. The administration is calling for "stronger cybersecurity laws."

So who was responsible for this hack that revealed so much about internal Sony workings and supposedly raised the ire of the North Koreans – as the movie that started it all portrayed the murder of Korean leader Kim Jong Un?

Here's more:

Many internet freedom activists actually expected for these types of suggestions to be coming out of the White House after any type of internet incident or irregularity. At a press conference on Friday, President Obama said that he had assigned a "cyber agency team to look at everything we could do at the government level to prevent these kinds of attacks."

Other government representatives such as White House Economic Council Director Jeff Zient are also pushing for tighter cyber-security laws. At a Politico breakfast on Friday, Zients said that the President would take executive action to pass internet regulations "if federal government assets were at risk."

"In order to take this to the next level we need legislation," Zients told Politico.

As we have been covering this week, the US government has been attempting to lay the blame on North Korea for the Sony hack, but many experts and Sony employees actually believe that it was an inside job, possibly carried out by a disgruntled employee.

While government officials are talking about how to respond to this alleged transgression from North Korea, the FBI is actually thoroughly investigating Sony's IT department for suspects in the case.

Our take is even more suspicious. We think the issue is deeper than whether the hack came from North Korea or inside Sony. We would suggest that the CIA or other US intel agencies might have been involved from the beginning.

The Internet itself has shown us clearly once a crisis has been manufactured, certain sought-after legislation can be rushed through Congress.

The results are usually the same – a restriction of liberties among civilian populations. Why is this desired or necessary? Because more and more power is being transferred to international facilities as nation-states lose power.

This transfer of power is an elite policy; the Internet, with its fractious alternative media, is providing a lot of information on a process that was supposed to proceed with a modicum of secrecy.

Thus, in the West, the reduction of information freely shared over the Internet has become of primary importance to governments and those interested parties that stand behind government.

In Britain, David Cameron has generated a regulatory authority that forces people into an affirmative obligation via "pornography." These websites are withheld until people ask for them.

What the Cameron administration has done is added numerous alternative media websites to the "pornography" – attempting to create an effective "quasi ban" for sites that make the administration uncomfortable.

In Spain, the current administration has helped pass a law that demands companies must charge a certain minimum amount of news aggregators and others that link to a company site. Google has announced it is ceasing news operations in Spain as a result.

Here's how Wikipedia explains CISPA:

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA H.R. 3523 (112th Congress), H.R. 624 (113th Congress)) is a proposed law in the United States which would allow for the sharing of Internet traffic information between the U.S. government and technology and manufacturing companies. The stated aim of the bill is to help the U.S. government investigate cyber threats and ensure the security of networks against cyberattacks.

This is the legislation, in one form or another, that the US administration and elements of Congress want to push through. Described in the above manner, it sounds fairly innocuous. But nothing is especially innocuous when it comes to government "investigations" of cyber threats or "ensuring the security" of networks.

All this is likely a veiled attempt to give the federal government the ability to insist on transparency when it comes to private networks. Essentially, CISPA and other such gambits would strip away remaining privacy from users of the 'Net.

Of course, we'd also argue that it is too late for these attempts that seek to generate transparency and thus further avenues for intimidation as necessary.

As with the Gutenberg press that came before, the explosion of shared information has revealed government and business manipulations of modern society. Now the more "pushback" that is generated by authoritarian forces to try to control the flow of information, the more controversy is generated.

It is a self-fulfilling feedback loop. The very efforts of government to reduce the flow of damning information provide posts that expose these efforts. The government doesn't end up with more secrecy. Such efforts actually produce more PUBLICITY.

It's hard to say exactly what's taking place when it comes to the Sony hack. But we would tend to believe that more of the alternative ´Net media will begin to speculate, as we have, that the US government is somehow behind this monumental privacy breech to push forward laws that will retard the progress and utility of the ´Net.

If this is the case, the finagling will at some point be exposed, at least to a degree, and the US government and its apparatchiks will be revealed. This just happened when it came to torture and the CIA. The outcome has been embarrassing.

After Thoughts

The Internet Reformation is a process not an episode.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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