WASHINGTON — U.S. President Barack Obama rebuked Sony Corp. Friday for caving into North Korea’s cyber attacks by cancelling the release of the satirical film The Interview.
“I think they made a mistake,” he said. “We cannot have a society in which some dictator some place can start imposing censorship here in the United States because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don’t like or news reports that they don’t like or even worse, imagine if producers or distributors and others start engaging in self censorship.”
Obama said he wished Sony had spoken to him before making the decision to cancel the movie.
“I would have said to them do not get into a pattern in which you are intimidated by these kind of criminal attacks,” he said.
Sony’s decision, he said, “is not what America is about.”
Sony President Michael Lynton told CNN that Sony officials had been speaking with senior White House officials prior to cancelling the film’s Christmas Day release. However, he appeared muddled about whether Sony discussed withdrawing the film. He also said it was the movie theatres that cancelled the release and not Sony.
Obama made the comments Friday afternoon at his final news conference of the year before flying off to Hawaii for a family holiday.
He also addressed the issue of the Keystone XL pipeline, pouring cold water on what he called a “hyped” project of little benefit to Americans.
Obama confirmed the attack on Sony’s computer system came from North Korea, adding that no other country was involved.
“I think it says something interesting about North Korea that they decided to have the state mount an all-out attack on a movie studio because of a satirical movie,” he said.
“I think all of us have to anticipate that there will be breaches like that,” he said. “Occasionally they will be costly … But we can’t stop changing our patterns of behaviour any more than we might stop going to a football game because there might be the possibility of a terrorist attack.”
The Interview is a slapstick comedy by Canadian filmmaker Seth Rogen and it depicts an attempt to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
He promised that the U.S. will retaliate proportionally and in a manner, place and time chosen by the administration.
U.S. President Barack Obama speaks to members of the media during his last news conference of the year in the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House December 19, 2014 in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“More broadly, though, this points to the need for us to work with the international community to start setting up some very clear rules of the road in terms of how the Internet and cyber world operates,” he said.”Right now it’s sort of wild west.”
In the absence if international standards, he said, the danger is that cyber attacks will affect entire economies.
Appearing relaxed and confident as he fielded a short list of questions, he indicated his support for the $8-billion US Keystone project is, at best, lukewarm. The proposed pipeline, which is highly controversial in the U.S. where it has become the bete-noire of climate change activists, will bring oilsands bitumen to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico.
“I think there has been this tendency to really hype this thing as some magic formula to what ails the U.S. economy and it’s hard to see on paper where exactly they are getting that information from,” he said.
He said the pipeline will have little benefit for the U.S. and won’t reduced oil prices “which is what the average American consumer cares about by having this pipeline come through.”
“It’s very good for Canadian oil companies and it’s good for the Canadian oil industry, but it’s not going to be a huge benefit to U.S. consumers,” he said.
Construction of the pipeline will create only a few thousand jobs and not the 40,000 claimed by Keystone proponents, he said.
“Those are temporary jobs,” he continued. “There is probably some additional jobs that can be created in the refining process down in the Gulf. Those aren’t completely insignificant, but when you consider what we could be doing rebuilding our roads and bridges around the country, something the congress could authorize, we could probably create hundreds of thousands of jobs or a million jobs.”
He said that he wants to assure people that if the project goes forward it will not add to the problem of climate change, “which I think is very serious and does impose serious costs on people, some of them long term.
“If we got more flooding, more wildfires, more drought, there are direct economic impacts on that,” he said.
He said a final decision on the pipeline will have to wait as a Nebraska judge determines whether the new pipeline route is appropriate. Then the State Department will have to decide if it has enough information to make a recommendation. The Keystone proposal has been in the works for six years.
Republicans, who overwhelmingly support the pipeline along with many Democrats, have expressed impatience over the approval process and have promised to make Keystone the first item on their legislative agenda in January.
Obama refused to predict what he will do if congress approves the pipeline over his opposition.
“We’ll take that up in the new year,” he said.
Source:: canada.com
