printBeing part of major US media—the Fourth Estate—means moving into a Third Dimension of your own making and taking the country with you. What was it that the Bush neoconservative Karl Rove once asserted at the heights of that regime’s manipulation of reality?
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
As was suggested over these pixelated pages, the “Hollywood hack hysteria” was a media event, not a journalistic investigation, as all news reporting should be. Accordingly, “the moron media shared speculations but not much credible evidence as to the source of the hack.”
It was left to an unconventional citizen-journalist-cum-blogger using conventional journalistic methods to uncover Jonathan Gruber’s utterances. Ditto the Sony hack attack. A blog called North Korea Tech by Martyn Williams did the digging. It
details inconsistencies in the Sony attack and past attacks by North Korea.
“Computers at Sony displayed a message threatening the release of internal documents if undisclosed demands were not met. North Korean hackers have never made such public demands,” Williams writes.
He also notes that little is known about Guardians of Peace, the group that claimed responsibility for the attack. No group has claimed credit in past North Korean hacks.
Williams said that the hackers stole sensitive information about movie stars, staff, and Sony management. In an apparently personal attack, the hackers posted a message on the Twitter accounts of Sony employees. This gives credence to the growing theory that the attack was an inside job.
Tommy Stiansen, the chief technology officer for Norse, a hacker-tracking company, told Bloomberg that he plans to approach the FBI and Mandiant, the private company researching the attack, with information that implicates a disgruntled Sony employee in Japan in the attack.