Sony Pictures Entertainment “made a mistake” when it pulled the plug on a movie that offended North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and sparked a massive, cyber-terror attack, President Obama said Friday.
“I wish they had spoken to me first,” Obama told reporters at his year-end news conference.
“We cannot have a society in which some dictatorship someplace can start imposing censorship,” he said.
Sony quickly fought back, insisting it had shelved the Seth Rogen-James Franco screwball satire, “The Interview,” only after the majority of the nation’s theater owners chose not to screen the film.
“This was their decision,” Sony execs said in a statement.
“Without theaters, we could not release it in the theaters on Christmas Day. We had no choice,” the studio said.
“After that decision, we immediately began actively surveying alternatives to enable us to release the movie on a different platform,” they added.
“It is still our hope that anyone who wants to see this movie will get the opportunity to do so,” Sony execs claimed, retreating from their insistence Wednesday night that they had no plans of releasing “The Interview” in any format.
Obama spoke two hours after the FBI confirmed that North Korea was indeed responsible for the campaign of embarrassing data leaks and terror threats that brought Sony to its knees.
The links between Pyongyang and the so-called Guardians of Peace — the hacker group that raided and then wiped the hard-drives of tens of thousands of Sony computers — include the “malware,” or malicious software, used in the latest hack matches one used in previous cyber attacks by North Korea.
A 2012 attack attributed to North Korea wiped the hard drives of some 30,000 computers of the Saudi-based oil company Saudi Aramco.
Last year, a similar number of hard drives were wiped on the computers of South Korean media and banking companies.
Additionally, several Internet protocol, or “IP” addresses used in the Sony hack were also used in the previous North Korean attacks, the FBI said.
“Imagine if producers and distributors and others start engaging in self-censorship because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be offended,” Obama said.
“That’s not what America is about.”
Sen. John McCain on Friday called the cyber attacks “an act of war” and says he will hold a hearing in the first two weeks of the next Congress.
“We have to respond in kind,” with a cyber attack, he told an Arizona radio station.
The administration has only said its response will be “proportional.”
“We’ll respond in a place and time and manner that we choose,” Obama said. “It’s not something that I will announce here today at a press conference.”
Also Friday, new leaked e-mails showed Sony Pictures co-chair Amy Pascal wanted the dashing British actor Idris Elba to star as the next James Bond.
“Idris should be the next bond,” Pascal wrote in an e-mail to Elizabeth Cantillon, former executive VP for Sony subsidiary Columbia Pictures, The Daily Beast reported.