US must act prudently, swiftly to prevent full-scale cyber war

As most all Americans know, our sacred First Amendment freedoms do know some clearly defined boundaries. As in threatening the life of a sitting president or yelling fire in a crowded theater illustrate, one person’s freedom of speech and assembly ends where risks to another person’s physical safety begins.

And so it goes with the recent cyberattack on Sony Corp. computers, purportedly committed by Asian terrorists in retaliation for the movie giant’s planned release Thursday of its satiric comedy, “The Interview,” in which North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is assassinated by implosion.

Sony’s action to pull the Seth Rogen film from its much hyped Christmas Day release is troubling and sets a dangerous precedent. But it is nonetheless understandable.

Like yelling fire in a crowded theater, showing the film potentially could elicit a fiery response from hackers and hacker sympathizers outraged over the theme — albeit satiric — of killing the much maligned and enigmatic president of North Korea. Coming as it does in the aftermath of the Auroro, Colo., theater shootings of 2012 in which 12 people were killed and 70 were injured, theaters cannot be blamed for exercising caution in the wake of physical threats against patrons of the movie. The U.S. government, after all, shut down the entire civilian air space for days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on this country.

And just as this nation responded aggressively and speedily to the airliner attacks 13 years ago, this act of cyberterrorism demands an equally firm and rapid response to punish the perpetrators and to prevent similar and potentially more dangerous cyberattacks by America’s enemies in the future.

Thus far, the administration of President Barack Obama has responded prudently. Obama has promised to respond “proportionately” to the attack that law enforcement blames squarely on North Korea. “We’re not going to be intimidated by some cyberhackers,” the chief executive said over the weekend in an interview with CNN.

Careful review

In the short term, we urge careful review of all potential options, including placement of North Korea back on this country’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, heightened economic sanctions, and formation of an international panel to investigate the attack and demand condemnation of it by the United Nations Security Council.

In the long term, fallout from the hacking over the comedic film must elicit a dramatic response. The U.S. government, the international community and private companies must spare no energies toward thwarting future threats to our security and to our First Amendment freedoms. This month, computer criminals hacked a major motion picture company to produce mayhem. Imagine the far greater dangers and impact of a similar or larger attack on the nation’s utility grids, telecommunication networks, financial institutions or highly classified government intelligence. To be sure, the increasingly Internet-dependent culture in which we live has opened a vast new battlefield for terrorists to wage war.

That’s why the federal government, private companies and individuals all must play a role in lessening the potential for harmful intrusions into their small pieces of cyberspace. For companies, that could mean ensuring maximum safeguards are in place to prevent access to hackers. For individuals, it could mean routinely changing passwords to accounts and purging suspicious files, as employees of Sony rival Warner Brothers were ordered to do last week.

Although the exact protocols for protecting U.S. citizens from the potentially cataclysmic effects of state-sponsored cyberterrorism remain works in progress, doing nothing is clearly not an option.