If you close your eyes you can imagine the hackers sitting in a room, combing through the documents to find the ones that will draw the most blood. And in a room next door are American journalists doing the same thing. As demented and criminal as it is, at least the hackers are doing it for a cause. The press is doing it for a nickel.
— Aaron Sorkin, screenwriter and producer, in an op-ed in the New York Times. Sorkin, creator of the TV series The Newsroom, slams the media coverage of the leaks from the Sony hack. After the hack three weeks ago, the media has reported on email exchanges about upcoming movies, a conversation about spoiled brat Angelina Jolie, at least one racially tinged email thread about President Obama s movie preferences and more. Sorkin s name also comes up in the emails; he wrote the screenplay for the upcoming movie Steve Jobs. He accuses journalists of helping the hackers by writing about the hacked emails.
I understand that news outlets routinely use stolen information, Sorkin wrote. That s how we got the Pentagon Papers, to use an oft-used argument. But there is nothing in these documents remotely rising to the level of public interest of the information found in the Pentagon Papers.
In other news about the hack on Sony Pictures, which involves hackers unhappy with The Interview, an upcoming movie about a plot to kill the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un:
- Sony is asking the media to stop disseminating the hacked information, and is threatening to sue. Sony Pictures does not consent to your possession, review, copying, dissemination, publication, uploading, downloading or making any use of the information, Sony lawyer David Boeis in a letter published over the weekend.
- The hackers, who continue to release information they accessed, have offered the Sony division s employees the chance to have their information deleted if they write and ask.
- The reports that the emails include communications among the Motion Picture Association of America and movie studios including Sony about a common enemy they call Goliath, which looks to be their code name for Google.
- And Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Michigan, says U.S. investigators are getting close to pinning the hack on North Korea. As we wrote last week, North Korea did not claim responsibility for the attack, but called it .
Photo: Movie posters for the premiere of the film The Interview at The Theatre at Ace Hotel in Los Angeles, California on December 11, 2014. The film, starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, is a comedy about a CIA plot to assassinate its leader Kim Jong-Un. (AFP/Getty Images)
