Dec. 22, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:12
2869 The Truth About The Sony Hack | North Korea Opposition to 'The Interview' Movie?
Recently a group of hackers breached the Sony network and started leaking sensitive information about the company. According to the FBI and the media, the state of North Korea carried out the attack in an attempt to suppress the release of an upcoming film called The Interview. The film is starring Seth Rogen and James Franco and features a controversial scene in which the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un gets assassinated. Sony ultimately decided to pull the release the film, a move which President Obama condemned. What is the truth about the Sony hack? Sources: http://www.fdrurl.com/sonyhack
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
This is the truth about the Sony hack.
As doubtless you have heard, November 24th, Sony announced that there was a breach into its network, their computers had been somewhat fried, files had been deleted and so on, and a group of hackers took credit for the attack and they called themselves Guardians of Peace, or GOP, which was a good clarification for me because I thought maybe the Republicans were behind it.
Two days later, these hackers began leaking sensitive company data, emails, finances, employee information, and even four unreleased films, which they put out into the torrent planet.
And they claim to have collected about 100 terabytes of data from Sony's service, and only a tiny fraction of it has been made public.
So far.
What was in this was pretty devastating to people.
47,000 social security numbers, credit card information, passport details, and Sony raised the ire of people it had laid off by not informing them that their sensitive information had been leaked and by not giving them credit monitoring services, which it was giving current employees.
Now, we'll get into some of the whys, but let's go into some of the background.
These things almost never come out of nowhere.
Sony was warned about a year ago that hackers had infiltrated its network and were stealing gigabytes of data several times a week.
And this was a pattern of lapses predating the recent attack.
And the hackers from about a year ago, they haven't been identified in late 2013, they sifted through a bunch of data on the company's network, encrypted the information to cover their tracks, and Mind it on a regular schedule.
Even after discovering the infiltration and theft of data, Sony didn't conduct an audit to determine how much content was actually stolen.
And at the time, Sony blamed the breach on the hacktivist Anonymous group called Anonymous, and Anonymous, through their representatives, denied stealing the data.
Investigations within Sony found that at least three hacking groups had infiltrated the PlayStation networks during that time.
The group causing the most damage was the Russian Ring that had been inside Sony networks for about two years, stealing and selling video games.
They found the keys that decrypted the copyright protection of Sony products.
According to a message, and again, these things are always hard to confirm, but according to a message supposed to have come from Anonymous, December 19, 2014, they said, And did they?
So, Sony Pictures Entertainment and media outlets immediately began speculating that the hackers were related to or coming from or authorized by or paid by North Korea, and that these hackers had targeted Sony because, of course, there's a Seth Rogen James Franco comedy, I guess you'd say, called The Interview, which is a story about two journalists who are recruited by the CIA to assassinate Kim Jong-un, the dictator of North Korea.
The hackers told a reporter, and again, this is, I assume that there's some verification the reporters do, They said that our aim, said the hackers, is not at the film The Interview with Sony Pictures suggests, but it is widely reported as if our activity is related to the interview.
And so given that a bunch of hackers have been inside and wondering about the Sony networks for over a year, it seems to strike a blow against the recent hack as a result of The Interviews.
Graphically depicting the gruesome assassination of a head of state in North Korea.
On December 8th, after over a week of speculation, the Guardians of Peace, the GOP, finally made its first reference to the film in a public announcement.
So, once the media started saying, oh, it's about this movie called The Interview, after a while the hackers started to talk about it, but didn't talk about it initially or at the beginning.
So if the hack was designed to stop the release of the interview, why did they only first mention it two weeks after the Sony attack became known?
Also, if they intended to prevent people from seeing the movie, and in particular the death scene of Kim Jong-un, why would the hackers release that death scene, which is the most controversial thing?
I mean, it really doesn't make much sense.
If they find the murder of the foreign leader depicted in the film so offensive, why did they release just that part?
Now, the hackers, at least one group, reportedly breached Sony's network over a year ago.
It's pretty unlikely that they would find a lot of information about the movie back then.
The North Korean government actually first expressed its outrage over the release of this film in June of this year, 2014.
So, the FBI and the US government has now said that the attack originated or was in North Korea.
So, how did they...
How did they figure that out?
Well, researchers found that four files which may have been used in the attack were compiled, which is when you take the quasi-human language of computer code and translate it into the ones and zeros of machine language.
The four files were compiled on a computer that was using the Korean language.
Wired Magazine has quite rightly pointed out, quote,"...an attacker can set the language on a compilation machine to any language they want." Can even manipulate information about the encoded language after a file is compiled to throw investigators off.
So the idea that, you know, you just change your locale to North Korea, you compile, and suddenly this is a smoking gun implicating North Korea seems, I'm not a lawyer nor a cybersecurity expert, seems to my amateur eye, let's just say thin at best.
Cybersecurity expert Mark Rogers pointed out another flaw in using the language of the computer's evidence, quote, the fact that the code was written on a PC with Korean locale and language actually makes it less likely to be North Korea.
Not least because they don't speak traditional, quote, Korean in North Korea.
They speak their own dialect, and traditional Korean is forbidden.
This is one of the key things that has made communication with North Korean refugees difficult.
And, of course, it is completely trivial to change the language and locale of a computer before compiling code on it.
So, if the FBI is saying, well, you know, he was using Korean, well, if they don't even speak that Korean in North Korea, not...
Fantastic.
And of course, hackers in general would alter the metadata of their malicious files.
Because look, these hackers are taking enormous risks.
I mean, they're in Aaron Swartz's 30 years in jail territory if they're caught.
And so they are not going to provide obvious clues.
If they're smart enough to do what they're doing, the idea that they would find obvious clues that a government agency could find within a couple of days to lead them back seems ridiculous.
So in this article, the security expert Rogers also suggested that an attack from within Sony was a more likely scenario.
Quote, It's clear from the hard-coded paths and passwords in the malware that whoever wrote it had extensive knowledge of Sony's internal architecture and access to key passwords.
While it's plausible that an attacker could have built up this knowledge over time and then used it to make the malware, Occam's razor suggests that the simpler explanation of an insider, it also fits with the pure revenge tack that this started out as.
So hard-coded paths and passwords, if you write code, you can say, well, go to this location on this complex network and get this data, and that would indicate, at least to me, somewhat of an inside job.
So, as we mentioned, December 19th, the FBI said North Korea was behind the Sony attack.
Three key points.
One, technical analysis, they said, of the data deletion malware used in this attack revealed links to other malware that the FBI knows North Korean actors previously developed.
For example, there were similarities in specific lines of code, encryption algorithms, data deletion methods, and compromised networks.
Two, the FBI also observed significant overlap between the infrastructure used in this attack and other malicious cyber activity the U.S. government has previously linked directly to North Korea.
For example, the FBI discovered that several Internet Protocol IP addresses associated with known North Korean infrastructure communicated with IP addresses that were hard-coded into the data deletion malware used in this attack.
Three, separately, the tools used in the SPE attack have similarities to a cyberattack in March of last year against South Korean banks and media outlets, which was carried out by North Korea.
Now, the deletion malware that the FBI mentions actually uses a driver from a commercially available product called RawDisk.
This driver has been used in previous attacks.
So the fact that this driver matches the signature of drivers used in other attacks, not that surprising at all.
Now, the IP addresses that were hard-coded, it means typed directly into the deletion malware, well, they're known proxies.
A proxy is a computer that shields or redirects information from another computer.
They're known proxies for hackers, spam, phishing, malware, and other malicious activities.
These IP addresses can be traced to seven, count them, seven different countries.
Bolivia, Cyprus, Italy, Poland, Thailand, Singapore, and the United States.
In other words, they can be used by just about everyone, not just North Korea.
Cybersecurity expert Robert Graham responded, quote, The FBI has posted a press release describing why they think it's North Korea that carried out the attack on Sony.
While there may be more things we don't know on its face, it's complete nonsense.
The reason it's nonsense is that the hacker underground shares code.
They share everything.
Tools, techniques, exploits, owned systems, botnets and infrastructure.
Different groups even share members.
It's implausible that North Korea would develop its own malware from scratch.
So a lot of this malware stuff is like FrankenCode.
You just stitch a whole bunch of stuff together that you shared with other people so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel.
And so the idea that there's some stuff in this FrankenCode that was used in other attacks would be natural.
Adam Kuyawa, head of malware intelligence at Malwarebytes, noted, quote, So the FBI is either completely incompetent...
A possibility we can't rule out, given its terrible track record, or two I've noted in the past in terms of foreign intelligence, is the U.S. foreign intelligence had zero idea whatsoever that the Soviet Union was about to collapse, one of the biggest events in geopolitical world history, and it also had no advanced knowledge apparently of...
So, by the FBI trying to pin this on North Korea despite very thin evidence, they're either completely incompetent, could be, or they're pushing a dangerous political agenda, which is even more, I think, of concern.
Now, a day after the FBI announced, ooh, it's North Korea, the Guardians of Peace responded, quote, The result of investigation by FBI is so excellent that you might have seen what we were doing with your own eyes.
We congratulate you, success.
FBI is the best in the world.
You will find the gift for FBI at the following address.
The address was a link to a YouTube video, not Rick Rowling, but here's an excerpt for your enjoyment.
So does this excerpt seem like the modus operandi of a paranoid and dictatorial nation state or a bunch of online trolls?
levels.
As Brian Krebs of Krebs on Security commented,"...it just doesn't smell right.
Too many inconsistencies in motivation, action, and reaction.
Whoever is responsible seems to understand Western media culture." Quite well.
Despite what has been said in the media, this does not appear to be a sophisticated attack, and with a little inside help, this could have been done by an amateur group initially for the lols, which means just for the fun and damage, and later for more political reasons that match the media frenzy about all of this.
So, of course, the jury's still out, but let's say that the hackers are not related to North Korea.
So, who are they and what could their motive be?
So on November 30th, responding to an inquiry from the American International Data Group news service, the hackers described themselves as, quote, an international organization, including famous figures in the politics and society of several nations, such as United States, United Kingdom, and France.
And they denied any relationship to a nation state.
And we'll talk about cyber states at the end of this conversation, because it's really important to understand just how geography is being superseded by digital relationships.
So the hacker group claims to be similar to the notorious anonymous hacktivists.
The GOP also noted, quote, Sony and Sony Pictures have made terrible racial discrimination and human rights violation.
Indiscriminate tyranny and restructuring in recent years.
It has brought damage to a lot of people.
Many of them are among us.
Sony Pictures' recent plan to make another indiscriminate restructuring is the motive of our hack attack.
We required Sony Pictures to stop this and pay proper monetary compensation to the victims.
So many of them are among us.
So what does that mean?
A member of the GOP identifying as Lina stated, quote, We don't want money.
We want equality.
Sony left their doors unlocked and it bit them.
They don't do physical security anymore.
She said, he or she said, Sony doesn't lock their doors physically, so we worked with other staff with similar interests to get in.
Which would indicate that part of the data transfer or part of the data theft was because somebody was on-site, was physically on-site.
And this, of course, would be much less likely to show up, of course, in any network traffic monitoring if you're just USB-ing it somewhere out.
There's a lot of data for USB, but...
So Sony laid off 10,000 people back in 2013, has announced a plan to lay off another 5,000 by the end of March next year.
So there's no shortage of disgruntled employees who may want to take revenge on the company.
The official reason behind the latest job cuts is restructuring costs which fits the complaints voiced by the Guardians of Peace.
Mark Rogers comments, Sony.
He explains, of course, why Sony has an interest in painting itself as a victim of North Korea.
Quote, if it is a nation state, people shrug their shoulders and say that they couldn't have stopped it.
It lets a lot of people off the hook.
When the lawsuits come and...
Well, the BBC says when the lawsuits come and at least one has already been filed, Sony's defense will almost certainly be that it did everything it reasonably could.
But, of course, what can you do when you're up against the resources of an entire nation?
Now, Sony's history with regards to security is not ideal, according to many experts.
And this is all just opinion-based.
The truth about the Sony hack is that we don't have the truth about the Sony hack yet.
So, in the context of securing credit card transactions, a former executive director of information security at Sony Pictures Entertainment claimed that he, quote,"...will not invest $10 million to avoid a possible $1 million loss." So, what he's basically saying is always spend $10 million to secure our networks in order to contain a potential $1 million loss.
That doesn't make any sense from a pure numbers standpoint, but of course, loss of data can result in lawsuits, and of course, there is employee morale, there is public perception, there is annoyance as part of consumers.
It's just looking at a spreadsheet, but there's a lot of soft costs in business that a lot of propeller heads don't really get.
So if this is the outlook on security, you know, it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, so on, or it's easier to clean up a mess than prevent it, or cheaper.
If this is the company's general philosophy around security, it's not that impossible to understand why Sony servers have been breached over 50 times in the last 15 years.
In 2011, you may remember, hackers took down the company's PlayStation Network for 23 days and stole the information contained within over 100 million user accounts, including credit card numbers.
Sony wasn't even following basic security protocols for storing sensitive data and had only encrypted the credit card information, which left its customers vulnerable, of course, to identity theft.
Now, preventing a similar loss of customer trust, probably a top priority for Sony execs dealing with the current situation.
And of course, from a PR standpoint, if you are attacked by a nation state that is going to oppose your freedom of speech and freedom of artistic impression and so on, that's a lot better from a PR standpoint than being hacked by a ragtag group of online hacktivists.
So, in general, estimates for IT, average company dedicates about a quarter of 1% of its revenues to IT security.
And since Sony's reported revenue for fiscal year 2013 was a little over $75 billion, this would put a cybersecurity budget in the ballpark of $190 million.
The leaked files show that out of a list of nearly 7,000 employees, there are only three cybersecurity analysts on staff, including managers and directors.
There are only 11 people working on cybersecurity within the company.
And employees have problems with the way security is handled within the company.
One former employee complained, Sony's information security team is a complete joke.
We'd report security violations to them and our repeated reports were ignored.
For example, one of our Central European website managers hired a company to run a contest, put it up on the TV network's website and was collecting personally identifying information without encrypting it.
A hack of our file server about a year ago turned out to be another employee in Europe who left himself logged into the network and our file server in a cafe.
Another former employee says, the real problem lies in the fact that within Sony, there was no real investment in or real understanding of what information security actually is.
So, why Sony?
Again, if we say, and it may be the case, may not be the case, we'll find out over time, but if we say it was a group of activists or hacktivists rather than a government-run infiltration, why do hackers dislike Sony so much?
Oh, they do.
They seem to hate Sony with the burning fire of a white-hot heart of an exploding star.
Sony has been at the forefront of what's called digital right management, which is the goal of making sure that people can't copy, say, music or movies from one device to another or burn them or anything like that.
And back in 2005, Sony released a bunch of CDs which inserted rootkits, which is basically software that does stuff without the user knowing and tries to hide itself and for which there's no uninstall.
And it inserted these rootkits even if you declined the end-user license agreement in some situations.
And the rootkits prevented you from copying CDs and would also, even though Sony execs denied it at the time, turned out to be true, it would, what's called phone home.
So it would contact Sony and say, well, this is the music you're listening to on Consumed System Resources and attempts to uninstall this rootkit that was put in by Sony without the user's knowledge or without much user knowledge.
Attempting to uninstall this could cause Windows to...
Well, not recognize your drives, which is, you know, obviously a problem.
Also, in the 2000s, there was a blogger who was trying to get into and loosen up the architecture of the PS3 to allow, if people wanted, to jailbreak it to allow it to play games not coming through the Sony network and so on.
And Sony sued this guy for running this blog, and they forced him to show the IPs of everyone who'd ever visited his blog and so on, and this was a big problem.
Now, as a result of someone trying to jailbreak the PS3 and Sony suing them, this was the claimed reason as to why in 2011 the PS3 network went down.
Now, of course, if you've done a lot of things that really annoy hackers, and DRM is just like a fun weekend project for hackers to figure out, if you've done a lot of things to annoy hackers and hackers are targeting you, you'd think that investing in security might be a good idea.
Sony, of course, has been taking some significant hits of late.
They're looking at spinning off their TV division and their PC division, and one of the I'm not an expert on Sony, but one of the reasons, I think, is that Sony has a digital media group that has, of course, a movie theater.
They have rights to huge amounts of music, to some of Michael Jackson's, the Beatles, Eminem, and so on.
And when you pay a lot of money for music rights, the way that you justify that purchase is to say, well, here's how much money we can make off this music.
And then naturally, you want to protect that music.
You want to make sure that it can't just be copied and given around and shared and, oh, here's a USB of all of the Beatles and whatever and people just...
So, Sony has put a lot of effort into what are called digital rights management.
Or, you know, you buy it, you can only play it on your PC. And this has, of course, prevented them from developing things like the iPod and so on.
And DRM has been falling away.
Google doesn't use it.
iTunes stopped using it a couple of years ago.
It has fallen away.
But one of the things that's happened is that Sony has become increasingly political.
So in 2000, they spent only a quarter of a million dollars on lobbying.
By 2007, it was almost four million, which is, of course, a massive, massive increase, a 16-fold increase.
In 2005, the first non-Japanese CEO was installed, and he went pretty hog-wild on this.
And they are involved in a bunch of Activities designed to control the media that they are originating.
So these are all significant problems.
Let me give you, so in August 2000, statements by Sony Pictures Entertainment U.S. Senior VP Steve Heckler foreshadowed the events of late 05 when the rootkits were in there and so on.
He told attendees at the American Conference on Information Systems, quote, The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams.
It will not lose that revenue stream no matter what.
Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this.
We will develop technology that transcends the individual user.
We will firewall Napster at source.
We will block it at your cable company.
We will block it at your phone company.
We will block it at your ISP. We will firewall it at your PC. These strategies are being aggressively pursued because there's simply too much at stake.
For those who don't recall or haven't seen the social network, Napster was a file-sharing program that mostly peer-to-peer used for the sharing of music.
Sony has, of course, admitted that putting DRM into its music players was a mistake that cost it the personal stereo market.
I mean, this is going way back, I think, to the late 70s.
Sony introduced the Walkman, which was a cassette player that allowed you to take your music with you.
I mean, I loved it.
I used to use it all the time.
And so it was originally the portable music champion.
It started of course with transistor radios in the 50s and it was just monstrous and then it completely fell behind because it was focusing so much on trying to protect the investment it made in music and movie rights.
It just really began to annoy a lot of people.
Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, said he and other Sony employees have been frustrated for years with management's reluctance to introduce products like Apple's iPod because the Tokyo company had music and movie units that were worried about content rights.
High-ranking Sony officials have rarely publicly said their proprietary reviews were a mistake.
This guy who's long been viewed as a candidate to head up Sony was direct, unusually direct, in acknowledging Sony had made an error and blaming proprietary concerns for its entertainment division.
So...
A lot of hackers are, you know, information should be free and so on.
And when you try to really control rights and files and so on, you present a good challenge to hackers.
And hackers were also pretty outraged that Sony inserted rootkits in an attempt to Protect copyright, but at the same time, apparently, according to some experts, violated the copyrights of third-party tools that it used to create its phone home rootkit stuff.
So that kind of hypocrisy can be a challenge for hackers.
Well, anyone, really.
So, what's the reality?
Look, the hackers didn't appear to have used the film as a political statement until they saw the hype generated by the mainstream media.
And the mainstream media, of course, oh, North Korea, North Korea, it's about the interview, it's about the movie, and so on.
And they're sort of like, okay.
And the mainstream media's role in this, I think, is very, very important.
People aren't afraid of the hackers.
They're not afraid of North Korea.
They're afraid of the mainstream media sniffing out the leaked information.
It's like blood in the water and then blowing it into the stratosphere.
It's a feeding frenzy of unimaginable proportions.
And this is really, really important to understand.
If it wasn't for the mainstream media, the leaked information wouldn't probably have hurt Sony's sales that much.
And it wouldn't have exposed company plans to its competitors.
It wouldn't turn into a top news story about Sony's dirty laundry.
It wouldn't draw more attention and giving the hackers an even bigger platform.
And the mainstream media also, of course, helped ISIS create a publishing platform for its terrorist message by hyping up the beheading videos, which I'm sure you've heard of as well.
So, you know, if some guy breaks into your house, steals a picture of you having naked hot sex with a goat, are you terrified of the criminal having that picture or the media putting it on the front page of, right?
And, like, a thief broke into the house of a local man.
You wouldn't believe what he found and so on, right?
Now...
Is this going to have a chilling effect on the media, the idea that if it is North Korea, is the media going to, like, not want to do negative stories in North Korea and so on?
Well, the important thing to remember is that mainstream media really hasn't been doing real reporting for decades.
The reporting investigative journalism and so on for legal concerns and for cost and expense concerns and so on has largely fallen by the wayside.
The NSA spying story, which should have been hot, all the mainstream media should have been hot in the tail, is broken by Ed Snowden.
And the American mainstream media largely broadcast messages from U.S. politicians calling for his murder.
Independent and alternative news outlets are the real drivers behind key stories in the modern age, I would say.
So, there is...
A fascinating aspect of disproportionality.
When attack and defense become disproportionate, human history really changes.
The invention of the longbow, gunpowder, and so on changes history and allows for ideologies to spread much more rapidly without the overhead and equal slaughterhouse of egalitarian or evenly matched warfare like World War I and so on.
The trenches just stayed in the same place for the most part.
When you look at disproportionate warfare, costs and benefits, things really change.
So, for instance, the Mujahideen trade by the CIA in the 1980s in Afghanistan to take out the Soviet Empire were partly able to do so because you could take out a $20 million MiG fighter with a $15,000 Stinger missile, which, you know, you just keep adding up the costs and is one of the things that broke the back of the Soviet Empire.
Hmm.
Invading Afghanistan being bad for the economy.
Hmm.
Maybe that will happen at some point in the future.
It's always really hard to tell these things.
Let's say it was North Korea.
If North Korea invested this money, who knows, $50,000, $100,000, and produced potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to Sony, that is disproportionate conflict.
And where these very low costs of investment versus very high costs of damage occur, then you have a fundamental sea change in human history.
This is when things really change.
We also, of course, grow up with geography, and I mentioned earlier That it is a cyber nation that is the growing reality in the world.
People who have commonly aligned interests.
People who have commonly aligned goals.
They can, of course, use Google Translate to even supersede language barriers and difficulties.
And because they're a bunch of tech heads, they speak the same language at the bits and bytes level anyway.
And these online tribes are significant power forces in the world.
I mean, in terms of their ability to get into government databases, nuclear power plants, the power grid and so on, they are a significant threat to the traditional nation state.
So the cyber nation is an emerging power and force within the existing power structures in the world.
And who knows where it's going to head, but it means that power structures have a vulnerability.
That they have never in history previously had.
And I think that's a very fascinating thing.
You know, from an amoral, observing the human experiment standpoint, it's really fascinating.
I think this, of course, is even more speculation and so on.
But I think there's some value in trying to figure out what's happening in Sony.
Why is there all this lack stuff?
Well, some of these tech companies, like Google and so on, have a pretty young workforce.
And I would imagine Sony's workforce is a little bit older.
When I grew up, I mean, I remember getting a 300 board modem in the 90s.
No, 80s, late 80s.
And they really didn't have to worry.
You just logged on to some message board.
You didn't have to worry that much about security.
But, of course, kids these days are growing up.
And, you know, it's considered to be a cool thing to get someone else's email for a lot of kids, email password or Facebook password.
And you do that by hanging out with them when they're logging in and trying to figure out what they're typing on their keyboard and stuff like that.
So online security is a big deal for younger people.
I'm not sure that older people get it quite so much.
If you look at the emails flying around, the movie division, you know, kind of racist remarks about Obama's preferences in movies and dissing Angelina Jolie and Adam Sandler and so on.
If you look at those kinds of things, then These are people who don't really get that you pretty much have to live a public life if you're at all in the media.
And I just don't think they really get how security is a fundamentally important issue.
I mean, when Google was hacked, they reverse hacked and got into the hackers' computers and so on.
I mean, they really get this kind of stuff, I think, very, very well.
And I think all the companies don't.
There is, of course, a death spiral in companies when they start to do poorly.
The most competent employees will usually look at their options and get out, which means that you have less competent employees and you keep shaving off the top of the pyramid until you end up with the deadbeats and the deadwood and the layabouts and the walking dead of the remaining employees, which causes this sort of death spiral.
I think that the Japanese work ethic has decayed considerably, like between a quarter and a third of young Japanese men in particular, the dry fish ladies, also the women, they're not that interested in getting married and having families.
And a lot of human ingenuity and capitalism growth and growth in the economy, growth in productivity, innovation, creativity, a lot of that is driven by egg hunting, by wanting to gather resources so that you can get the woman that you want.
Right or wrong, that's just the way that the biology works.
And I think that the fact that the younger Japanese men and women don't really care to be the 80-hour-a-week, Kiroshi-threatened suicide or death-by-overwork-threatened company man, they don't want the lives that their dads had.
So they're, you know, hanging out.
They're going to do karaoke.
They're playing video games.
They're not interested in getting married and having kids.
And that means that, you know, come 4.30, they're going home.
They're not going to be as driven.
So there's lots of factors.
The fact that Japan has finally admitted that they're in a recession after over 20 years of anemic growth, despite pretty much the largest bailouts in recorded history.
Well, probably because of the largest bailouts in recorded history.
So the Japanese economy as a whole is doing badly.
The former Japanese company man give you a job guaranteed for life stuff, I think, has been kind of cruelly violated or, you know, for whatever economic reasons driven by bad government economic policies.
A lot of Japanese men and women, but in particular the men, made huge sacrifices in their family life.
Worked, traveled, were complete slaves, disposable males on the corporate gears.
And I think what happened was when they then got laid off, They didn't have any emotional connections because they've been workaholics and pursued that ideal of being a work-to-the-bone company man.
And I think then they kind of pissed, right?
So maybe that would be some incentive or motive for the inside job.
So I think it's fascinating to see what is going on.
My sympathy and heart goes out to all of those, of course, who've been negatively affected by this hack.
The fact that people's medical information and their children's medical information has been leaked online.
It's absolutely reprehensible.
This is, of course, theft.
And it is absolutely wrong.
But I think it's premature at this point to jump to we know who did it.
And I'm, of course, always concerned when an enemy with an army is identified on flimsy evidence.
