So by the way, when and how will Sony be held liable for criminal negligence?<p>Their security track record is equivalent to a bank storing its customers, partners and employees crown jewels in a wooden bikeshed with no doorlock. Repeatedly.<p>Stomping your feet, blaming evil North Korea and launching lawsuits against unrelated bystanders may be a convenient way to distract the mainstream media.<p>But it's also completely missing the point and a little bit embarrassing...
This seems like fairly standard procedure to be honest, I'm not entirely sure what the issue is here...?<p>Especially given quotes such as "To the extent that Twitter has previously suspended the accounts of users publishing the Stolen Information, SPE and its employees are sincerely grateful to you"
Though I understand Sony probably feels compelled to at least try to stifle links to the stolen data, I am a little bothered by their legal reasoning they are using to support their argument. That said, they seem to be wording their accusations towards Twitter very cautiously. It also does not seem to be worded as a threat, but more of a strongly-worded request, so I'm not sure saying that they're threatening to sue them is accurate.
Should SONY's response been DMCA takedown notices? Does DMCA cover unpublished copyrighted work? If the DMCA applies to trade secrets and personal email, it seems like Twitter would be legally in the clear and particular users would be liable.
For some reason I always find it amusing to see US lawyers title themselves with a middle ages term such as "Esquire". It seems so incongruous.
This letter seems like a blanket that Sony's lawyers are laying out across @BikiniRobotArmy and pinning Twitter with a wall of federal and state law violation claims. Does anyone have information on what material @BikiniRobotArmy actually "published" ??? Did he upload the 26GB Sony dump into a Tweet? Did he upload a picture he found on Google Images? Did he retweet Greenwald?
Is Sony requesting that twitter not shut down just this one account but keep up with every account that pops up for this purpose? If they are that naive then no wonder they hacked, no idea how technology works. If I can write a script to create a different twitter account every few seconds, imagine what these guys can do.
So, from this now I know 1) that Sony pays celebrities to do gray advertising, 2) name of such person that does it, 3) that Sony uses lawyer threats to stop people from talking about it. It's hard to hurt Sony's public image any more at this point, but they certainly keep digging with vigor.
You start with feeling bad for Sony and its employees. You see a letter like this and my response goes from feeling bad to "Screw you Sony. You first show immense stupidity in how you handle your security and then flex your muscle around."
In a way, they are right about it being against the twitter terms of use, and twitter should comply because it's their rules anyway. Still, can twitter be "held responsible"? It kind of sounds like you holding a bar tender responsible for drugs being traded in her bar. Even if she was aware of it, why not arrest the actual culprits?<p>Any lawyers care to comment?
If twitter deletes that account it would take the owner a few seconds to create another one. Better to have this one account than for many to pop up. I think it is pretty clear that Sony was lax in their security and are now paying a huge security debt.
How about a comeback of 1990s style action movies like: Die Hard, Air Force One, Beverly Hills Cop, Lethal Weapon, etc.<p>Instead Sony plans new movies like Captain America, Avenger, Ants Man. They milk the Marvel brand to death. Sad and boring.
Hmm. Up until now the Sony/NK thing has been confusing from a technical standpoint - there's lots of good reasons to be curious about and skeptical whether NK had anything to do with the SONY hack (see the bazillion threads on HN and elsewhere that cover it). Now for some conspiracy.<p>Here are some facts. One of the primary journalists responsible for announcing that the government had determined NK was responsible for the SONY hack is the same one responsible for falsely declaring the US had confirmed locations of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq on behalf of the State Department (Judith Miller), who hadn't yet gotten the public support it needed to go into Iraq.<p>But what could the US's motivation for falsely fingering North Korea in this attack, if that's in fact what was done?<p>First, either instability or regime collapse in North Korea would mean very good things for the United States. Not just because it would advance human rights or because NK represents a black mark on US military operations. But also because instability threatens China. A regime collapse would mean China would have to deal with a flood of millions of starving and brainwashed immigrants at its border, and in fighting due to power vacuums. The downside is that the US would need to spend a lot of money and man hours supporting their ally South Korea, as they would also be forced to handle the instability, and because of US military presence in the region.<p>But second - and this is where the conspiracy theorizing comes in - we've seen the US make several attempts to get Twitter to censor certain types of information. The US, through the NSF, wants to study 'social pollution' on Twitter (<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/truthy-project-is-unworthy-of-tax-dollars/2014/10/17/a3274faa-531b-11e4-809b-8cc0a295c773_story.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/truthy-project-is-unw...</a>). However, it already has studies on social contagion and memetic social influence and these are used in political campaigns today (<a href="http://enga.ge/download/Inside%20the%20Cave.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://enga.ge/download/Inside%20the%20Cave.pdf</a> & <a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/how-obamas-internet-campaign-changed-politics/" rel="nofollow">http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/how-obamas-internet...</a> & <a href="http://theweek.com/article/index/256160/how-obama-won-the-internet" rel="nofollow">http://theweek.com/article/index/256160/how-obama-won-the-in...</a>). Moreover, the United States uses these tactics to influence public opinion in enemy nation states, such as the use of Twitter this year to cause insurrection and organize riots to overthrow the Cuban government earlier this year (search Cuban Twitter CIA), the use of Twitter messages in Jordan, Egypt, Syria and others to spread US propaganda (<a href="http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf</a>), and the US contracts with companies that are used to do the same thing (e.g. www.marayamedia.com).<p>The conspiracy here would be that since the US has so far lacked legal traction in giving it the ability to influence other nations with adversarial messages but preventing others from influencing US citizens in the same way, that it is using the traction of the NK/SONY event to create a civil law precedent for content curation in Twitter that can later be expanded to federal law. This creep from civil to federal law has happened before - notably with Youtube - which now removes content that the federal government wants it to (known examples include ISIL recruitment videos and US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki's political messages).