So Much for SONY

One has to wonder: how could such a good company go so bad? No, wait. I was thinking of the old SONY. The one that made all those great electronics. The New SONY is in the movie business, and to call a film studio a good company is an oxymoron. I should know, I've worked for several of them, and in order to be at the business end of that business one has to be morally immune.

That said, all the finger pointing is going so far afield as to be ludicrous. I'm talking about North Korea. The notion that North Korea is somehow behind the hacking of SONY Pictures is about as rational as the notion that North Korea invented the Peace Corps.

To back up a little, I spent 30 months working inside North Korea's only friend and sponsor on the planet: the People's Republic of China, which really ought to know better by now. North Korea to the Chinese is like a really bad nephew who, on account of a common uncle or grandpa still skulking around, must still be regarded as 'family.'

My job was teaching American English at a state university: one of eleven in Harbin. It fell on my shoulders to answer questions like "Sir, what does it mean, 'a chip on your shoulder?' And 'Sir, what does 'pissed off' mean? And what is 'whole nine yards?'" Harbin is a mid-sized city of six million or so, located in the center of Heilongjiang Province, which might be regarded as possibly the least hospitable place on Earth to be, if one counts in centuries. Heilongjiang, which means Black Dragon River (what a wonderful name!) is the northernmost province of China, once regarded as the Chinese Outback: the place Chairman Mao used to send 'undesirables' to be 're-educated.' My wife's family were just such targets, but that's another story. The point is, if you look at Heilongjiang Province (also most of the former Manchuria) you will see that it is virtually surrounded on five of six sides by hostile territory, which has been more than a little hostile, at times, over the eons--never mind the Japanese occupation of the 1920's, which was as brutal as they get. Due North and East are Siberia, and Vladivostok. Due West is Mongolia. 700 kilometers or so southwest is the Great Wall--built to keep the Manchu raiders out (it didn't work). And finally, due South is North Korea.

When I worked in Harbin teaching American English and working as a publishing consultant for textbook publishers, all commercial flights to Harbin had to be routed around this bad nephew's territory, by a safe margin of two hundred miles, because the North Koreans were regarded--by the Chinese--as crazy enough to shoot down any airliner they could see. Including Chinese airlines. So after a stopover in Seoul, you had to fly 200 miles due west to Dalian, and then back north over the Wall from Beijing to Harbin, adding an extra four or five hundred miles (and added time) to your flight.

It's hard to understand what the Chinese see in their nephews north of the 49th Parallel, but there you are. And now, here's why I am so certain the North Koreans had nothing to do with hacking SONY. They simply wouldn't have a clue. The technological skills, maybe. But the cultural sophistication to get what's what and what it all means going on inside a Hollywood movie studio? Puh-leeze. Fix an NBA game, maybe. But put an American movie studio in a fix? Ridiculous.

When I was working in Harbin I had frequent encounters with North Koreans on my campus because China, in its wisdom, was trying to educate North Korean students on their campuses and several were my upstairs neighbors (very polite), and I shared a seat with the grandparents of some of them once, on a flight to Seoul. While charmingly naive (they insisted on sharing their airline meal with me) they were noted targets of some rather rude capitalist young people (Chinese) across the aisle.

But here's the clincher: I once shared a meal with the director of the English language TV station in Harbin (yes, they had one) and it's news bureau. This guy was Israeli, as it happened, and more than a little paranoid (far be it for me to blame him for that). He kept insisting that the Chinese were spying on me. But I was dealing with their very best English speakers--students--all eager to learn American English in order to do business with America. These were the ones who couldn't comprehend 'pissed off.' And in my 30 months in Harbin, I only met one person with the language skills adequate to comprehend, say, the dialogue in your average Hollywood movie, and he was unemployed. And no he wasn't spying on me, and even if he was, no way in the world he could have read all my daily blogs and emails and monitored my phone conversations and had a clue what I was talking about.

So the idea that some hackers in Pyonyang would have a clue as to what SONY's emails and gossip were all about is so hilarious to me that I'm in grave danger of breaking several ribs ROFL.