Obama Calls for Cybersecurity Legislation After FBI Confirms North Korean Link to Sony Data Breach

Meanwhile, Google filed a lawsuit Friday against Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, charging that Hood tried to censor the Internet in an administrative subpoena he filed against the company in October. Google’s complaint alleges that Hood took those actions “following a sustained lobbying effort” by MPAA. One of the stolen documents recently made public in the Sony breach purports to show MPAA’s involvement in a letter Hood sent to Google last year, blasting the company for a number of alleged consumer violations.

Obama said Sony made a “mistake” by canceling the theatrical debut of The Inter­view once set for Dec. 25. The president said he “wished” Sony had consulted him before making the decision. He said “some dictator” shouldn't impose "censorship” in the U.S. and raised the possibility of “self-censorship” if media companies begin worrying about offending the “sensibilities of someone whose sensibilities need to be offended.”

Obama said he was sympathetic to Sony and the U.S. would “respond proportionally” to North Korea in a “place and time and manner that we choose.” The Sony attack underscores the need for the U.S. to work with foreign governments to develop “very clear rules of the road” for the Internet and cybersecurity, Obama said. “Right now [the Internet] is sort of the Wild West,” he said. If Congress can’t pass a cybersecurity bill that allows for appropriate information sharing, such attacks won’t be limited to the film industry but to the “entire economy in ways that are extraordinarily significant,” Obama said.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and ranking member John Conyers, D-Mich., issued a joint statement Friday, saying “we will not allow terrorists or a narcissistic dictator to dictate what products can or cannot be created and distributed in America.” They said the Judiciary Committee, which has oversight of the FBI and Justice Department, will “continue to monitor this investigation and support efforts by the U.S. to thwart these intrusive attacks.” Regardless of one’s opinion of The Interview, “every American has a stake in ensuring that our collective freedom of speech is not abridged by either our own government or a foreign government,” it said.

Google is “deeply concerned” about reports that the MPAA “led a secret, coordinated campaign to revive the failed SOPA [Stop Online Piracy Act] legislation through other means, and helped manufacture legal arguments in connection with an investigation by Mississippi State Attorney General Jim Hood,” said General Counsel Kent Walker in a blog post Thursday. Google is suing Hood because his subpoena “constitutes an unjustified attack that violates well-established U.S. laws governing Internet platforms and online intermediaries,” Walker said in a blog update Friday.

MPAA fired back Thursday. "Google's effort to position itself as a defender of free speech is shameful," a spokeswoman said. "Freedom of speech should never be used as a shield for unlawful activities and the internet is not a license to steal," she said. Google’s Thursday blog post is a "transparent attempt to deflect focus from its own conduct and to shift attention from legitimate and important ongoing investigations by state attorneys general into the role of Google Search in enabling and facilitating illegal conduct -- including illicit drug purchases, human trafficking and fraudulent documents as well as theft of intellectual property," she said. "We will seek the assistance of any and all government agencies, whether federal, state or local, to protect the rights of all involved in creative activities."

In response to the administrative subpoena, “Google sent more than 99,000 jumbled, unsearchable documents in a data dump,” Hood said in a statement Friday. “I agreed to give Google additional time to comply with our request and hoped we could reach an agreement,” he said. But after the Sony breach, Google’s Walker “began blogging and feeding the media a salacious Hollywood tale,” said Hood. “Now, feeling emboldened with its billions of dollars, media prowess and political power, some of its more excitable people have sued trying to stop the State of Mississippi for daring to ask some questions,” he said. “We expect more from one of the wealthiest corporations in the world.”

Hood’s subpoena covers an “extremely wide range of topics,” Sherwin Siy, Public Knowledge vice president-legal affairs, said in a news release Friday. “Recent revelations about the source of those investigations could suggest that the subpoena is being used not merely as an investigative tool, but as a weapon in itself,” he said. “We’ve seen copyright trolls abusing the harsh penalties for copyright infringement to conduct fishing expeditions in dragnet demands, or patent trolls leveraging the cost of patent litigation to extract settlements,” Siy said. “As we look next year towards the review of copyright law and potential reforms to patent and telecommunications law, it’s important that Congress recognize the potential for procedures to be used as cudgels instead of for their intended purpose, and to work to make sure that our laws can be used by everyone,” he said.

“In an attempt to resolve some of the problems the states’ chief law enforcement officers have raised, I am calling a time out, so that cooler heads may prevail,” Hood said. He said he plans to reach out to Google's board of directors to "negotiate a peaceful resolution to the issues affecting consumers that we attorneys general” have previously pointed out.