Lacking Evidence, Obama Mulls Action Against North Korea

North Korea Urges US to Agree to Joint Investigation

Lacking any real evidence of North Korean culpability in the Sony Pictures hack, the Obama Administration has gone with the allegation, and continues to threaten unspecified action against them.

The US threats were reiterated today as North Korea’s entire Internet presence went down to a DDoS attack, though it was a brief outage and North Korea recovered fairly quickly. It’s unclear if the US was involved, and the White House refused to comment.

The FBI’s only evidence was that the code used in the hack looked similar to code used in previous attacks that they similarly had blamed on North Korea, which is far from decisive proof, and a number of experts say they think it was more likely an inside job from a disgruntled Sony employee.

Sony seemed to be investigating in that direction too early on, until the FBI started playing up the North Korea possibility. Since then, they’ve let the inside job theory drop, and are willing to accept whatever the FBI says it thinks happened.

North Korea, for its part, denied involvement, and it’s not like them to not take credit for things they’ve done. They’ve been pushing the US to agree to a joint investigation into the hack, though with the FBI having already declared the matter settled, there seems to be no US eagerness to investigate further.

The threatened US “retaliation” against North Korea is still on the table though, so long as the matter remains unresolved, and that’s got North Korea threatening to retaliate against the potential retaliation for something they may well not have done in the first place.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.