No Laughter Allowed - North Korea and the Age of Cyber Retaliation (2014)

No Laughter Allowed - North Korea and the Age of Cyber Retaliation (2014)

In 2014, the American film production company Sony Pictures was preparing to release the comedy The Interview. The film, which tells the fictional story of the assassination of North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un during a televised interview and stars Seth Rogen and James Franco, was supposed to be passed off as a B-grade comedy, but the film would soon spark the biggest crisis Hollywood has ever experienced. The film, which was supposed to be taken lightly as a B comedy, eventually triggers the biggest crisis Hollywood has ever experienced.

In North Korea, the supreme leader is a symbol of the state and is deified as if he were a religious being. In a system of three generations of succession that began with Kim Il Sung, satirizing the man is considered a desecration of the nation itself. When the content of the film was revealed, North Korea reacted violently. In order to protect the "dignity" of the nation, unprecedented retaliation was prepared.

In November of that year, Sony Pictures' internal network suddenly stopped functioning. Tens of thousands of internal e-mails, unreleased movies, and actors' salary information were leaked, and Hollywood was shaken. The criminal was a mysterious organization called "Guardians of Peace (GOP). However, an FBI investigation revealed that it was the work of the Lazarus Group, North Korea's national hacker force.

The attack was not limited to data leakage. The hackers warned that they would "retaliate like they did on 9/11" if the film's release was not halted, leading major U.S. movie theater chains to cancel screenings one after another. The Interview" was abandoned for theatrical release and switched to online distribution. President Obama condemned Sony's decision, saying that "freedom of expression has bowed to foreign pressure.

This incident highlights that cyberspace is the new "battlefield" where the state interferes with the entertainment industry and threatens free speech. An abnormal view of the state, in which "laughter," not missiles or guns, was seen as the greatest threat, overstepped the boundaries between culture and politics. After the incident, the Lazarus Group repeatedly stole virtual currency and attacked international financial institutions, serving as the "Ministry of Economy behind the scenes" to support North Korea's sanctioned economy.

The uproar over "The Interview" was not just a film controversy. It is one of the new Cold Wars of the 21st century, where laughter and authority, freedom and fear collide head-on. We first learned of it when a fictional assassination play depicted on screen triggered a real-life cyberwar off-screen. The modern threat was no longer hidden behind tanks and fighter jets; an era had indeed arrived in which nations sought to control even the whereabouts of laughter.