In a press conference yesterday, Obama talked about how the recent hacking of Sony highlights a need for the government to increase its cyber security. There has been talk about the development of a large scale framework that has been worked on for the past few years with which this will be accomplished. But let's address the obvious elephant in the room here, which is that the attack was actually launched by the NSA. The US government claims that North Korea perpetrated these attacks. At least in the article I read, there were four particular pieces of evidence they cited: 1) Korean language artifacts in the code used in the attacks 2) Evidence in the code that shows it was compiled on a computer with its language set to korean 3) Code snippets and techniques known to have been used by the North Koreans in the past 4) The attacks came through a proxy server known to have been used by the North Koreans in the past The government knew about all of these things long before the attacks happened, so it would have been trivial for the NSA to develop code with these characteristics and then launch the attack using this proxy server. The FBI and Sony claim that this attack would have worked on 90% of US corporations, so the NSA most likely had this ready to go for a long time and were simply waiting for the right moment to strike. Why Sony and why now? For the same reason that the government claims North Korea did the attack: it is the perfect cover. With this particular movie, they can give the North Koreans the perfect motive that everyone will believe: that the Norks are some crazy motherfu­ckers who will launch a major cyber attack over a movie. But are the North Koreans really that petty, that they would waste this likely one time capability on a film studio rather than using it on something that would cause more significant damage? I doubt it. While they force the common people to practically worship their leader as a god, in higher circles, Kim Jong Un is not revered nearly as much, so it seems unlikely that they would lose their cool to this extent. But surely Sony would know, so why would they keep quiet? Three reasons. 1) The US government still hold terabytes of secret data with which they can blackmail Sony. 2) Pissing off the US government would obviously have a detrimental effect on the profitability of their US operations 3) It's no coincidence that the US chose to target a Japanese company. Japan is still dependent on the US for defense, and as conflicts with China increase, that defense becomes ever more important. Japan knows better than to start shit with the NSA, so they won't say anything. What does this mean for Five Eyes countries? You can bet that within the next few months, the governments of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand will vote to increase the power of their respective security agencies. There will be more surveillance of the common person, less transparency, and zero accountability. We now know for sure that the US government is willing to torture people with no evidence, so you do the math about what will happen to people who speak out too much.