WikiLeaks makes senseless Sony emails public
April 20, 2015
WikiLeaks, the website of whistle blower Julian Assange, published more than 170,000 emails and 30,000 private Sony Pictures Entertainment documents in a searchable archive posted to the website, according to an April 16 National Public Radio article.
The mass amount of information was hacked from Sony last November. The hack is widely thought to have been carried out by North Korean government officials in reaction to the controversial Sony film, “The Interview.”
The hack brought to the public eye a slew of personal—in some cases embarrassing—email conversations that took place between Sony executives along with other personal material including such sensitive information as employees’ social security numbers.
One email conversation even revealed that a Sony employee had no idea who Rita Ora is, replying with “Do u know her” when reminded she would be introduced to the singer the following day.
After Sony’s information was posted to WikiLeaks, the website declared that, “the original ar- chives, which were not searchable, were removed before the public and journalists were able to do more than scratch the surface.”
The post also described the information as, “a rare insight into the inner workings of a large, secretive multinational corporation.”
Sony, of course, took matters very seriously and personally, releasing the following statement in response to the WikiLeaks posting of its data: “The cy- ber-attack on Sony Pictures was a malicious criminal act, and we strongly condemn the indexing of stolen employee and other private and privileged information on WikiLeaks.”
Assange claims the leak was organized to serve a greater purpose and inform civilians about just how intertwined Sony and the movie industry in general is with the government, namely the White House, according to the NPR article.
However, what Assange may not have predicted was that while plenty of people are turning to the site to see what it contains, those people are only doing so to feed their gossip with friends, plugging in such names as Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez and Beyoncé into the search engine.
It seems that what Assange envisioned as a trailblazing event in pursuit of justice is just another joking matter fueling more celebrity gossip, not the undoing of a corporate hierarchy that he sees as corrupt.
The leak has revealed an extensive amount of information, and that information is certainly telling of how overcompensated many
of Sony’s careless, uninformed employees are.
But the case with Sony’s employees is not uncommon; rather it is representative of countless corporations.
As disappointing as it is to hear how clueless a Sony employee can be about something as simple as who Rita Ora is, it’s worth noting that we wouldn’t want to live in a world where everyone hacked each other’s email accounts because they contained information that we were mildly curious about.
