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North Korea Tag

There are some narratives that not even MSNBC should be expected to screw up---and yet, here we are. Today, Tamron Hall hosted former New Mexico Governor and UN Ambassador Bill Richardson to talk about Kim Jong Un's barely-precedented call for a summit between between the leadership of North Korea and South Korea. Throughout the interview, Richardson did a good job of pointing out how erratic the actions of North Korean regime has been, and was quick to put a damper on hopeful expectations that this proposed summit could mean a change in how the divided countries interact with one another. Then, of course, whatever is in the water over at MSNBC's studios seeped in to Richardson's consciousness and took the wheel. When asked about the possibility of Kim Jung Un wanting to define himself as a leader, Richardson went off the rails and blamed the media for North Korea's problems: Politico has the money quote:
“He has been the victim, Kim Jong Un, of a lot of bad press, a lot of bad international attention, with the Sony hacking, with [being] taken to the International Criminal Court by some U.N. countries, a number of other very destabilizing moves that he has made, shooting the missiles, nuclear testing,” Richardson said on Friday on MSNBC’s “News Nation with Tamron Hall.”
Watch it here:

Despite widespread media and social media claims that the North Koreans were not behind the Sony hack, the U.S. government stands by the assertion that North Korea is the culprit. Obama signed an executive Order today imposing sanctions, as The Washington Post reports:
President Obama, while vacationing in Hawaii, signed an executive order authorizing the sanctions, saying the repressive government was trying to stifle freedom of speech by American artists and businesses. The Treasury Department imposed financial measures on 10 North Korean officials and three government agencies. They include the country’s main intelligence agency, believed to have orchestrated major cyber operations, as well as agencies responsible for weapons deals and military research and development. The newly sanctioned officials include those operating out of Namibia, Iran, Syria and China....

And the penny drops: Of course. From Bloomberg:
“We have never given up on releasing ‘The Interview’ and we’re excited our movie will be in a number of theaters on Christmas Day,” Michael Lynton, chief executive officer of Sony Entertainment, said in a statement today. “We are continuing our efforts to secure more platforms and more theaters so that this movie reaches the largest possible audience.” The studio scrapped the Dec. 25 debut after the four biggest U.S. theater chains took the movie off their schedule, a response to threats from hackers linked to North Korea. President Barack Obama said last week the studio’s capitulation to terrorists would hinder freedom of expression. “As the President made clear, we are a country that believes in free speech, and the right of artistic expression,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said today in a statement. “The decision made by Sony and participating theaters allows people to make their own choices about the film, and we welcome that outcome.”
Of course, everything Sony is saying here is complete garbage. I don't believe for a second that it was Sony's intention to get creative with its release strategy; I give credit for this not to the execs involved but to the owners and operators of independent theatres like the Alamo Drafthouse, who took matters into their own hands, offered to screen the film, and when that didn't work out, attempted to screen something just as subversive and rude as "The Interview."

Remember the time when North Korea threw a cyberterror party---and EVERYBODY showed up with bottles of wine and things in hopes that they would stop? Well, not everybody, but everybody actually involved bent the knee to the World's Worst Country and brought shame upon the heads of freedom-lovers everywhere. Fortunately for the future of the Western world, the rest of us got together and took a stand against psychological cyberwarfare and for the principles of free speech, free expression, and the freedom to watch Seth Rogen bumble around on screen. Oh, and the freedom to troll the hell out of North Korea.

Could it be that the United States has finally hit back against North Korea's cyberaggression? All 1,024 of North Korea's Internet protocol addresses have gone dark, and internet monitors are calling the outage one of the worst network failures in years. From the Washington Post:
The connectivity problems are coming just days after President Obama warned of a "proportional response" to North Korea, which is suspected of breaking into Sony's network in a major cyber hack. It's not yet known whether the United States is responsible for the downtime. But according to Dyn Research — which earlier this year bought the respected network analysis firm Renesys — North Korea's Internet is currently showing unusual amounts of instability. ... Is this an attack? The chances aren't zero, considering that the few North Koreans who can actually get online tend to be government and military officials. Even if the outages are the result of somebody's deliberate act, proving that the United States did it would be difficult.
According to the New York Times, if this was us (and it had better be us, even if we'll never admit it) it would mean that US intelligence is trying something completely different. Normally, American cyberwarfare (that we know about) goes the "espionage" route and focuses on data grabs.

Hijacking someone's Twitter account and putting up stupid pictures or political statements might reasonably be called cyber-vandalism, and a criminal one at that. Like this: rothschild-hacked-old But the Sony hack allegedly by North Korea which led to terrorist threats against movie theaters and a national self-censorhip? Is that really all it was, "cyber-vandalism"? According to Obama, yes, Obama: North Korea hack ‘cyber-vandalism,’ not ‘act of war’:
President Obama said in an interview broadcast Sunday that he does not think a recent North Korean cyberattack against Sony Pictures Entertainment was "an act of war." "No, I don't think it was an act of war," Obama said on CNN's "State of the Union." "I think it was an act of cyber-vandalism that was very costly, very expensive. We take it very seriously. We will respond proportionately."

Yesterday the FBI announced that the North Koreans were behind the Sony hack. Now the North Koreans are denying it, via BBC:
North Korea has offered to hold a joint inquiry with the United States into a cyber-attack on Sony Pictures, strongly denying US claims that it is behind it. Its foreign ministry accused the US of "spreading groundless allegations", which the joint probe would refute. Without addressing Pyongyang's idea, a US spokesman insisted that North Korea must admit "culpability" ... On Saturday, the North Korean foreign ministry said: "As the United States is spreading groundless allegations and slandering us, we propose a joint investigation with it into this incident." "Without resorting to such tortures as were used by the US CIA, we have means to prove that this incident has nothing to do with us." The statement said there would be "grave consequences" if the Americans rejected their inquiry proposal.
If not North Korea, then who? Here are four possibilities via NY Mag:

The speculation as to who the U.S. government thinks was behind the Sony hack is over. The FBI now is on record blaming North Korea, via NBC News:
The FBI on Friday formally accused the North Korean government of the hacking attack that led Sony Pictures Entertainment to cancel the movie "The Interview." "North Korea's actions were intended to inflict significant harm on a U.S. business and suppress the right of American citizens to express themselves," the bureau said in a statement. "Such acts of intimidation fall outside the bounds of acceptable state behavior." U.S. officials had said privately earlier in the week that they suspected North Korea. The FBI said Friday that technical analysis had revealed links to North Korean-developed malware, including lines of code and encryption algorithms.
Here is the full FBI statement (via Business Insider):

It seems North Korea has been spending a lot of time monitoring American news channels. After being singled out by a scathing United Nations report, which declared the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea to have committed human rights violations "without any parallel in the contemporary world," North Korea decided it needed to make its own Human Rights report. The report revealed an elementary understanding of hot topics in American news, and ultimately concluded, "[t]he U.S. is the world's worst human right abuser and tundra of a human being's rights to existence." Coming out of the nation whose leader (allegedly) recently executed an alleged counterrevolutionary conspirator by FLAMETHROWER, the North Korean human rights report was somehow deemed to be less than credible. Still, it is interesting to see a dictator use American events in an effort to bolster his credibility as a man of the people. In traditional dictatorial fashion, the report was critical of the second amendment:

When I saw this circulating on Twitter, I thought it had to be a hoax. And it still might be. But it's being fairly widely reported, with a Singaporean newspaper the primary English language source. Via The Strait Times, Jang's execution bodes ill for China:
THE execution of Jang Song Thaek, the No. 2 man in North Korea, took Beijing by surprise and will adversely affect bilateral relations. Beijing's displeasure is expressed through the publication of a detailed account of Jang's brutal execution in Wen Wei Po, its official mouthpiece, in Hong Kong, on Dec 12. According to the report, unlike previous executions of political prisoners which were carried out by firing squads with machine guns, Jang was stripped naked and thrown into a cage, along with his five closest aides. Then 120 hounds, starved for three days, were allowed to prey on them until they were completely eaten up. This is called "quan jue", or execution by dogs. The report said the entire process lasted for an hour, with Mr Kim Jong Un, the supreme leader in North Korea, supervising it along with 300 senior officials. The horrifying report vividly depicted the brutality of the young North Korean leader. The fact that it appeared in a Beijing- controlled newspaper showed that China no longer cares about its relations with the Kim regime.

Friday the 13th is an appropriate day to report that the North Koreans may have taken a lesson from Syria, which seemingly built up its chemical weapons supply "in plain sight." Satellite imagery shows that North Korea appears to have restarted a reactor capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium.

North Korea Nuclear Plant Satellite

White steam can be seen rising from a building near the hall housing steam turbines and electric generators at Yongbyon nuclear complex in an image taken on 31 August, said the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. ...The US-Korea Institute said the gas-graphite reactor was capable of producing 6kg of weapons-grade plutonium a year. It believes that the North already has 34-36kg, sufficient for around a dozen weapons.
How will the Obama Administration respond? With a strongly worded message, of course!
The United States scolded North Korea on Thursday over reports indicating the reclusive nation has restarted a plutonium-producing nuclear reactor, emphasizing that such a move would violate U.N. Security Council resolutions. ...."Suffice to say, if it was true, it would be a violation of the relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions and, of course, contrary to North Korea's commitments under its September 19, 2005, joint statement," said State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf.
Its this kind of strong stance that has inspired neighboring Japan to build up its national defense, despite an economy still suffering from the impact of a deadly earthquake/tsunami combination in 2011. However, at least one South Korean thinks this Friday the 13th is very lucky:
More than 40 years after he was abducted from a fishing boat and taken to North Korea, a South Korean fisherman has returned to his home in Seoul, state-run Yonhap news agency reported Friday, citing a government official.