September 21, 2024 • 35 mins
On November 24, 2014, Sony Pictures was hacked by a group calling themselves the “Guardians of Peace,” which the United States government later identified as being hackers from North Korea, taking vengeance on the studio for producing the film, The Interview, with Seth Rogen and Dave Franco, in which the two actors portrayed journalists hired by the CIA to assassinate Kim Jong-un. Using destructive malware, the attackers erased data from the company's servers and deployed ransomware. The breach exposed confidential internal emails, unreleased movies, and sensitive employee data, causing an estimated damage of $15 million in the immediate aftermath. The US government blamed North Korea for the hack. However, the cybersecurity industry was skeptical of the government's claim. The US government has never released the information supporting their claim of North Korean involvement. In his new book, INSIDE the Sony Hack: The Story Behind America’s Most Notorious Brink-of-War Cover-Up, New York Times Bestselling author Kent Heckenlively tells this story from the perspective of the most prominent of these cybersecurity companies, Norse Corporation, and exposes the massive cover-up.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Warning the following podcast might be too truthful for most liberals.
Listener discretion is therefore advised. Welcome to the Tea Party
Power Hour. My special guest today is mister Kent Heck
and Lively. He's been here a couple of times before.
(00:25):
He's talked to us about his book The King of Italy,
which I really enjoyed, and today he's here to talk
to us about his new book, Inside the Sony Hack,
the story behind America's most notorious brink of war cover up.
And we also want to talk to him about the
fact that the Biden administration pressured Amazon to downplay a
(00:47):
couple of his books, Plague of Corruption and Inoculated, so
we want to talk to him about that as well. Kent,
Welcome to the Tea Party Power Hour. It's great to
have you back. Thanks for having me, oh always always,
You're always welcome to here. Now, first of all, I
love the cover of the book. We've got Ki Kim
(01:08):
Jong Un and Barack Obama and it looks like they're
in some kind of a scare off or something.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
It's an homage to Godzilla versus cong.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Oh okay, right.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
So they are basically two giant Kaiju fighting in Hollywood. Okay,
helicopters circling around and buildings on fire and blowing.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Up, gotcha? All right? Well, I liked it anyway before
I fully understood it. Now that I understood it's understand it.
I like it all the more. Now, let's talk about
this hack. It occurred back on November twenty fourth of
two thousand and fourteen. It was it was a hack
of Sony Pictures, and tell us a little bit about
(02:01):
the damage that was done, what the demands of the
hackers were, and what the prevailing thought was at the
time as to who perpetrated this hack.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Yeah, So taking us back nearly ten years, so, Sony
was releasing a movie called The Interview by Seth Rogan
and James Franco and in which they portrayed to bumbling
journalists who were hired by the CIA to assassinate North
(02:36):
Korean leader Kim Jong on. And so that's kind of
a provocative premise to begin with, and the North Koreans
protested it, and then Sony Pictures got hocked. Now, the
question when they got hocked is a big part of
(02:56):
the book, because the information was released in November of
twenty fourteen. But the question is when did the hack
take place? And why was the United States government so
quick to blame North Korea for it? And what the
(03:19):
book is really an examination of is why is it
ten years later we still don't have evidence of who
did the hack? Now at the time, it was when
the cybersecurity industry was in its infancy. And to kind
of give you a flavor of the book, I call
it kind of a cyber cops and robbers story. Okay,
(03:43):
So you've got that the hackers who broke in, and
one of the things that I think the audience would
understand is that your cyber hackers tend to be the
smartest of the criminals, okay, and with some of the
best ways to hide their identity. So you really need
(04:06):
smart people looking into this. And so you've got the hackers,
you've got the government intelligence agencies, and then you've got
this private cybersecurity industry, which is which really wants to
get the reputation of being the smartest people out there.
(04:26):
So what the cybersecurity companies did and still do is
whenever there's a hack in the world, they all jump
onto the case because they want to solve it, because
they want to be able to go to big companies
and say, hey, we're the ones who solved this case.
(04:47):
The government didn't solve it. So you kind of got
a conflict between you know, the government intelligence agencies and
the cybersecurity industry. And so very quickly, the cybersecurity industry
have lots of questions about the claim that it was
North Korea. Some of the things that they that they saw. Well,
(05:09):
first of all, Sony Sony Pictures was in big trouble
in twenty fourteen. They'd had to take about one hundred
to two hundred million dollars in losses. They did that
by firing a lot of people, including a lot of
their IT staff. And so you know, you got to
wonder like, oh, okay, you just like laid off practically
(05:32):
your whole IT staff. They're upset. They know how to
get into your system. And so very quickly, like the
cybersecurity industry was saying, well, hold on a minute, this
wasn't North Korea. These guys knew your system. And so
(05:53):
think of the cyber the computer system is like a maize, okay,
and so you got to know where you're going. These
guys moved us through the system life they knew what
they were doing. It seems that they downloaded things much
more quickly, and you know, the first couple come, you
(06:15):
know messages. They didn't even call themselves guardians of peace.
They called themselves God's apostles. So you have this really
murky picture. What was also happening was that there was
a group called Lizard Squad out of Canada who had
(06:36):
actually hacked Sony PlayStation a couple of times and was
actively involved in this. And so there were a number
of players and it didn't really point the finger at
North Korea and what so in the book, I profile
two people who took the lead in this investigation from
(07:00):
Norse Corporation, who actually ended up presenting their findings to
the Pentagon in January of twenty fifteen as things were
out there their most contentious, you know, with North Korea
threatening a sea of fire on the West coast and hey, here,
I live on the West coast, so I really don't
(07:21):
like the idea that my little town might be a
sea of fire. And how did the Pentagon respond to
a very detailed accounting with evidence of what was going on.
How it was likely an insider who had contacted this
group called Lizard Squad. Well, the Pentagon responded by slapping
(07:46):
a five year you know, security clearance on all of
this information. So my guys couldn't talk for five years
about what was going on. But that's really the story
that gets told in this book.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Wow, and wasn't one of the five people that Norse
Corporation had identified at Sony as being one of the
potential people involved. Didn't she have a boyfriend that worked
for a lizard squad, Well.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
She certainly did. Yeah, so there were all these connections
and you know, actually, what we do in the book
is we actually name the most likely suspect the two
have been responsible for the hack. We you know, we
name this person, we provide the evidence of why we
(08:43):
think it was that person. You know, we're not saying
it was definitely this person. But here we are ten
years after the event. The government has not released their information.
As we're coming up upon the ten year anniversary, I
think this is a perfect time for the government to
release their evidence. And if we're wrong, or if I'm wrong,
(09:06):
I'm happy to issue an apology, but I really issue
a challenge for the government to produce the evidence showing
that it was North Korea, because we certainly do not
think it was. And the bigger question that needs to
be asked is if the evidence was so clear that
it was in North Korea, what the heck was our
(09:27):
government doing accusing North Korea? And who benefited from it? Well?
Speaker 1 (09:33):
I think you mentioned in the book that America, particularly
the Obama administration, did get some benefits out of saying
it was North Korea. Could you share those with our listeners?
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Yeah. So there were a number of factors, and you know,
this is always the struggle when you write a book
like this and you can't get the people to talk
to you, which is you got to come up with
the likely scenarios. So there are a couple likely scenario.
The first, and I think the most shocking, is that
early on in the Obama administration, President Obama made it
(10:08):
clear that he was looking for some excuse to launch
a surgical strike against the North Korean leadership at the
Capitation Strike. And so here his generals present him with this,
We detailed this in the book. They come to him
(10:29):
and say, this is cyber terrorism. It is the same
as if North Korea detonated a bomb inside of Sony Studios,
if they had done that, you would have no hesitation.
This was an act of war. And Obama, to his credit, says,
that's crazy. This is not cyber terrorism. That most is
(10:50):
cyber vandalism, and I'm not going to do that. So,
you know, I like to be fair and objective, and
I just have to say Obama made a decision not
to treat as an active war, which probably saved a
couple million lives in the Korean peninsula. So good job.
(11:11):
What else was going on, We were developing a whole
suite of cyber weapons. This was around the same time
as the stucksnat virus attacked the Iranian nuclear program. And
you know, we have developed a lot of cyber weapons ourselves,
and we're probably about the best in the world. So
(11:33):
what happens when you point the finger at somebody else, Well,
nobody looks too closely at you. So we're developing a
lot of cyber capabilities monitoring not just the world but
our own citizens. And so if you create a narrative that,
oh my god, these North Koreans, who you know are
kind of pathetic technologically, are threat well, nobody looks too
(11:57):
closely at what we're doing. The other thing that was
kind of interesting is in the week of nine to eleven,
probably around two thousand and three two thousand and four,
Congress passed this thing called the Terrorism Risk Insurance Program.
And what this did was it allowed the insurance companies
(12:22):
to charge companies for terrorism risks, and if the risk
was too big, then it would be backstop by the
federal government. Well, in the ten years since the program passed,
the insurance companies had collected about forty billion dollars from
(12:44):
American businesses without really any significant payouts, right, And so
a number of people, including Senator James Langford, had pointed
out that this program seemed to be more of a
boondoggle for the insurance companies. And you know, there was
some really good criticism going on of this program, and
(13:08):
there was a possibility that the program would not be reauthorized.
But lo and behold, the North Korean hack takes place.
Everybody is up in arms about the threat of terrorism
to American businesses, and lo and behold, the program is
reauthorized by huge margins and the insurance company get to
(13:33):
keep soaking American businesses.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
Yeah, and I wonder how much of that money made
it back into the form of campaign contributions exactly. Yeah,
that's it's it's horrible that life works that way, but
it does. You also point out in the book that
there were some rather unusual relationships between Sony executives and
the Rand Corporation.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Yeah, and this was really something that I do not
expect to find, but very quickly I ran across the fact.
In twenty sixteen, when Julian Assange released all of the
emails from the Democratic National Committee, he also released an
entire archive focused on Sony Pictures. And they're weird connections
(14:23):
with a Rand Corporation. So for people who don't know
the Rand Corporation, it's basically been described as America's University
of imperialism. It is where the views of the intelligence
agencies get wandered into American businesses. So there was this.
(14:43):
So two people were really in charge of Sony Pictures
at this time, a guy named Michael Linton. And when
you do a little background dive on him, you know,
and we think about these creative types, right, they're supposed
to be renegade and rebels, right, but so lo and behold,
(15:03):
you look at Michael Linton and you go, oh, you
find out his father was a spy for British intelligence. Okay,
that's in a New York Times article. He sits on
the Board of Directors of the Rand Corporation. He was
president of the of the Broadcasting Board of Directors, which
(15:23):
reported directly to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
So you find yourself going like, oh, wait, wait a minute.
I thought these artist types were supposed to be, you know,
anti authority. This guy is about, you know, as connected
the power as you can possibly be, you know. Then
you look at Amy Pascal. Amy Pascal's father was an
(15:49):
economist who worked for the Rand Corporation. So you got
these two people who are running your studio, They got
all these connections to the corporation. Sony does so many
nice things for the Rand Corporation, like putting together a
(16:10):
sixty years of Progress documentary on the Rand Corporation. And
who do they get to do the narration but Toby Maguire,
who is hot as hell because of his spider Man role.
And they do things like get George Clooney to show
up the Rand Corporation meetings and press the flesh with
(16:31):
the Rand company personnel and just go what the heck
is going on? Here, and the guy, the guy who
was most connected with Sony Pictures appears to have been
this guy, Bruce Bennett, who really is a piece of work.
You know, he's in North Korean Hawk and you know,
(16:54):
he touts himself as this great diplomat from the time
that he he worked for the government. But in his
own bio he brags about putting together proposals to North
Korea that he knew they wouldn't accept. And I find
myself going, you know, hey, I'm no diplomat, but I
(17:17):
was always under the impression that a diplomat's job was
to figure out areas of agreement with other countries, not
put together proposals that they would never accept. And so
he is, you know, communicating with with Michael Linton as
(17:39):
this movie is getting ready to come out. And the
movie itself was also kind of interesting because when you
do it a dive onto the creation of this movie,
you find come to find out that Seth Rogan and
his writing partner originally conceived the movie to be very
much like Sasha Baron Cohen's To Dictate, which featured Sasha
(18:02):
Baron Collin as this anonymous Middle Eastern dictator. Okay, so
you can put you know, you can make him a
little bit of Kadafi, you can make him a little
of Saddam Hussein, and you know it's it's nobody who's
real in the world, right right. That was the same
thing that was going to be with the interview. But
(18:22):
at some point during the process Seth Rogan says, an
executive from Sony suggested, what if you made it Kim
Jong Un? And so I'm saying to myself, well, geez,
we got Rand Corporation all over Sony Pictures, We got
(18:44):
this history of provocative action towards North Korea. You know,
I'm not saying North Korey is a great place. Hey,
I ever gone to North Korea? But there is a
way that you could coexist, right And you know Trump
showed that, y. Yeah, you know there's a way that
(19:06):
we can get along. And you're not feared nuclear conflict.
I'm hey, I'm anti nuclear conflicts. You know, call me crazy.
So you look at all of this and you go,
what was really going on here? You have to ask
your yourself the question was the interview movie itself a
(19:28):
provocation designed to make something happen? And then you know,
you had Sony pictures laying off a whole bunch of people.
Somebody decided to do a hack. There's a history of
hacks against you know, Sony, whether it's PlayStation or or whatever,
and so you know, I'm not necessarily saying the hack
(19:52):
was done by the intelligence agencies, although you got to
keep that one in the mix. But it seems like
they took took advantage of an opportunity to make a
situation much more serious than it was and to put
people like me on the West Coast under an increased
(20:14):
risk of nuclear war, which I really don't take that
kindly to.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
I understand completely. Now if I'm reading your book right,
you seem to be leaning toward it's it was done
by It was carried out by some insiders, one particular
insider who was ticked off that she had been fired
with the help of her boyfriend who worked for the
Lizard Squad. Am I getting that wrong or do?
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Yeah? I think it's that simple, And I think that
they saw like, oh my god, what a wonderful thing
to do here, and to realize this is the opportunity,
because who's going to stand up for North Korea? Right?
You know, it's the perfect it's the perfect cover up
because every bud he hates North Korea already, and so
(21:02):
I think that they were probably surprised that so many
in the cybersecurity industry came out and said, hey, this
was this was, this was not North Korea. And because
these cybersecurity companies, you know, they want to get a
reputation for accuracy, right, they did it for being you know,
crime solvers. And they're like, wait a minute, you know
(21:25):
the intelligence agencies are telling us a bunch of garbage here.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
Yeah, that had to drive them crazy. We need to
take a quick break to do a little business with America.
And when we get back with kent Tech and Lively,
I want to explore just how close to a brink
of war event this was.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
We'll be right back after.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
This message, and we are back with mister kent Heck
(22:05):
and Lively, the author of Inside the Sony Hack, the
story behind America's most notorious brink of war cover up.
And as I was saying, just before we went to break,
do you think that we really were on the brink
of war with North Korea? Because of the film the interview?
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Well, here's the thing. I think a really interesting book
David Sanger. He's a national security correspondent for the New
York Times. Okay, so about as mainstream as you can get.
And so, you know, the story that he tells is that,
(22:50):
you know, the generals were telling Obama that this was
the opportunity, you know, this was the time to strike
North Korea. And so I'm thinking to myself, you know,
and then you've got Kim Jong un publicly saying that,
you know, the West coast is going to be a
sea of fire, and I'm thinking, and you know, one
(23:12):
of the things that was shocking to me is to
find out that there is publicly available documentation that US
estimates from the nineteen eighties suggests that North Korea has
one hundred to three hundred nuclear bombs and they've got
(23:36):
their missiles. And so I'm thinking to myself, if you're
in North Korea and you're thinking, hey, these guys are
getting ready to do surgical strike against the leadership, and
you're sitting on three hundred nuclear weapons and you've got
your missiles that can do stuff, do you know what
(23:59):
decision are you going to to make? How long are
you going to wait for something to happen? Now, I
think that North Korea, you know, to some extent, has
shown remarkable restraint. I mean, we're always told that there's
this Madman of Asia theory, and when you find out
that the North Koreans have had nuclear weapons since the
(24:20):
mid eighties, you know, it puts a little different spin
on what we think is going on there.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
So how irresponsible was Barack Obama to be antagonizing Kim
Jong on with this, with this movie and blaming him
for the you know, for the hack.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
One of the things that I think is that and
this is something I've actually got another book coming out
in October called Twilight of the Shadow Government, which I
have co authored with a former CIA officer, seventeen year
guy who Turn Blower, And sort of the perspective that
(25:03):
I think you need to have is that whoever the
president is is to some extent a coptive of their
intelligence agencies and what their intelligence agencies tell them. Very
early on, Harry Truman, in actually nineteen sixty three had
written that one of the things that he wanted to
(25:26):
that he thought people should know about is that he
thought that they should understand that because our CIA is
in charge of both intelligence and operations, overseas that what
they often do is they shade the intelligence to get
the presidents to pursue a certain course of action. So
(25:49):
the question becomes, what did Obama really know the weapons.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
Of mass destruction thing?
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Yeah? Yeah, And so you know, I kind of give
you know, maybe somebody will get mad at me, but
I kind of give a little bit of credit to
a number of people in this story. I give some
credit to Barack Obama. I also have to give a
shout out to Seth Rogan, who has been very public.
(26:19):
He did a twenty nineteen interview in Vulture magazine in
which he said that he hired his own cybersecurity guys
take a look at the hack. They were absolutely convinced
there was not North Korea. Seth Rogan also revealed some
shocking information that even though this hack supposedly happened in
(26:40):
November of twenty fourteen, he was actually told in like
June or July that Sony had been hacked, and also
that Sony had done some bizarre thing when the hack happened,
which is they instructed Seth Rogan and James Franco to
(27:02):
go out and say and pretend that they were just
stoner filmmakers who didn't understand they were making a provocative film.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
Okay, And so you know, I actually have to take
my hat off to Seth Rogan for saying very publicly
he doesn't believe this this, you know.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
This claim. He doesn't think it was North Korea. He
also says that his cybersecurity guy had said, no, somebody
actually had to plug something into the Sony system. This
was not something that was done at a distance. And
for those of you who remember the name CrowdStrike.
Speaker 4 (27:47):
As being the d N, Yeah, so so we we've
got CrowdStrike in this here, and it's CrowdStrike.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
That's saying, oh, yeah, it was North Korea. So if
you think CrowdStrike lied about the Russians, Hack and the
DNC and I know they're lion here. And you know,
we've also got you know, a starring role for America's
most notorious liar, James Clapper in all of this. So
(28:23):
if you want to know how the big criminals got
their start, this is kind of like a smaller story,
but you see the same kind of stuff going.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
On, right, and by the way, really the same kind
of stuff because there was a group of retired intelligence
agents that looked at the data from the DNC hack
and the Tony Podesta hack and they they were able
to look in the metadata and see the speed at
which it was downloaded, and they said there was absolutely
no way that could have occurred over the Internet. It
(28:57):
would have had to be someone sticking a jump drive
into a device at the DNC. And it sounds like
you're telling me it's the same thing here. It was
downloaded so fast that there's no way this happened all
the way from North Korea via the Internet. So when
you say it's similar, I mean it's similar.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Yeah. So it's kind of like a seth Rich situation,
except in this instance, seth Rich doesn't end up dead
because whoever did this hat, you know, it played right
into the hands of the deep state and the intelligence
community and allowed them to really, you know, keep poking
(29:39):
North Korea. You know. One of the things that there
was also is kind of interesting. Maybe this is a
little bit you know, too deep into the woods. But
I looked at as sort of like the history of Korea,
and and you know, most people don't realize that basically,
in eighteen sixty six, America invaded Korea, you know, through
(30:01):
this ship called the General Sherman because we were doing
our gunboat diplomacy. So the same way that we sailed
into Tokyo Harbor and said trade with US is what
we did, you know, and you know, to realize that
North Korea was at the Korea was brutalized by the
(30:23):
Japanese from nineteen ten to nineteen forty five. And then
you know, where do we put the Korea Command, which
you know United Nations Command, which is still kind of
in charge of supervising the armacist We put it in
freaking Tokyo. So this is not something that is designed
(30:45):
to lower tensions. And I think, you know, for those
you know, people who are listening to are more conservative,
I think that this is kind of a Trump's credit
and his genius of going to North Korea and just
saying like, hey, you know, I have no idea of
what they actually talked about, but I kind of think
that Trump knows a bunch of the same things that
(31:05):
I'm saying, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was
part of the conversations about. Okay, the United States has
been doing a lot of crap to North Korea over
the years, blaming them for self that they didn't do,
and you know, hey, let's stop it and see if
we can get along.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Well, when you talk about Japan, you mentioned in the
book how so many people there were put into forced labor,
forced sexual type jobs. And there's no love loss between
Japan and North Korea, that's for sure.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yeah, So couldn't have liked the United Nations done something
like Okay, it put the Korea Command into Philippines for
God's sakes, you know, which is not going to be
so provocative.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
You made that point well in the book. We are
out of time, but I really would like to get
an update on what's going on two of your books.
According to a list put out by Jim Congressman Jim Jordan,
showed that the Biden administration was encouraging Amazon to downplay
the sale of two of your books. I believe let's
(32:16):
see Plague.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
Of the original, the Regional Plague book. So I'm and inoculated.
So I have consulted with an attorney who's taking a
look at that. And I've also got some people in
Congress who are doing all little work for me. So
so that that's the latest update.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Okay. Well, and you'd also mentioned that there might in
fact be a lawsuit, a class action lawsuit involving a
lot of the other people's, a lot of other people
who had books on the list.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Well that that would make great sense because I mean,
you talk about violation of First Amendment rights during the pandemic.
I mean that, I can't imagine how much you lost
in sales because they did that to you.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Yeah. Yeah, I think we've got a really good case
for damages.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
All right, Well, I'll keep asking about it from time
to time because I don't think it's something we should
forget about. And I think it's interesting that they keep
calling they being the left, keep calling us book banners,
I know, when in fact, you know, it was the
Body administration who was doing that to you and to
forty other books. And then you know, they call us Nazis.
(33:33):
But they seem to have a bigger problem with Jews
and anti Semitism than the rest. Oh oh no, we're
not anti Semitic, We're just anti Zionist. Right then, Why
in the hell, why in the hell to college kids
who are Jews, why are they afraid for their lives
and asking for security?
Speaker 2 (33:52):
You know, we're not We're not saying words anti Jewish.
We're just saying humous will save us.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
So that's uh, yeah, that's another thing. But I think
this book banner thing needs to be followed, and I'm
really shocked it's not getting more press than it is. Ye,
So anyway, I'll shut up now. But I assume, like
all your other books, that this particular book, Inside the
(34:20):
Sony Hack, is available wherever good books are sold. All right,
and then we've got Twilight of the Shadow Government coming
out what October fifteenth? October fifteenth, All right, Well we'll
want to have you back for that one too, so
i'll start pestering your publicist now. All right, once again,
Kent heck and Lively the author of Inside the Sony Hack,
(34:46):
also the author of The King of Italy, a book
I enjoyed very much, and the author of Twilight of
the Shadow Government, which will be out on October fifteenth.
Kent as allway, thank you so much for coming on
the show. You'll always have a home here whenever you want.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
Thanks so much. I have a great day. You've been
listening to The Tea Party Power Hour with Mark Gillar
Warning the following podcast might be too truthful for most liberals.
Listener discretion is therefore advised. Welcome to the Tea Party
Power Hour. My special guest today is mister Kent Heck
and Lively. He's been here a couple of times before.
(00:25):
He's talked to us about his book The King of Italy,
which I really enjoyed, and today he's here to talk
to us about his new book, Inside the Sony Hack,
the story behind America's most notorious brink of war cover up.
And we also want to talk to him about the
fact that the Biden administration pressured Amazon to downplay a
(00:47):
couple of his books, Plague of Corruption and Inoculated, so
we want to talk to him about that as well. Kent,
Welcome to the Tea Party Power Hour. It's great to
have you back. Thanks for having me, oh always always,
You're always welcome to here. Now, first of all, I
love the cover of the book. We've got Ki Kim
(01:08):
Jong Un and Barack Obama and it looks like they're
in some kind of a scare off or something.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
It's an homage to Godzilla versus cong.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Oh okay, right.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
So they are basically two giant Kaiju fighting in Hollywood. Okay,
helicopters circling around and buildings on fire and blowing.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Up, gotcha? All right? Well, I liked it anyway before
I fully understood it. Now that I understood it's understand it.
I like it all the more. Now, let's talk about
this hack. It occurred back on November twenty fourth of
two thousand and fourteen. It was it was a hack
of Sony Pictures, and tell us a little bit about
(02:01):
the damage that was done, what the demands of the
hackers were, and what the prevailing thought was at the
time as to who perpetrated this hack.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Yeah, So taking us back nearly ten years, so, Sony
was releasing a movie called The Interview by Seth Rogan
and James Franco and in which they portrayed to bumbling
journalists who were hired by the CIA to assassinate North
(02:36):
Korean leader Kim Jong on. And so that's kind of
a provocative premise to begin with, and the North Koreans
protested it, and then Sony Pictures got hocked. Now, the
question when they got hocked is a big part of
(02:56):
the book, because the information was released in November of
twenty fourteen. But the question is when did the hack
take place? And why was the United States government so
quick to blame North Korea for it? And what the
(03:19):
book is really an examination of is why is it
ten years later we still don't have evidence of who
did the hack? Now at the time, it was when
the cybersecurity industry was in its infancy. And to kind
of give you a flavor of the book, I call
it kind of a cyber cops and robbers story. Okay,
(03:43):
So you've got that the hackers who broke in, and
one of the things that I think the audience would
understand is that your cyber hackers tend to be the
smartest of the criminals, okay, and with some of the
best ways to hide their identity. So you really need
(04:06):
smart people looking into this. And so you've got the hackers,
you've got the government intelligence agencies, and then you've got
this private cybersecurity industry, which is which really wants to
get the reputation of being the smartest people out there.
(04:26):
So what the cybersecurity companies did and still do is
whenever there's a hack in the world, they all jump
onto the case because they want to solve it, because
they want to be able to go to big companies
and say, hey, we're the ones who solved this case.
(04:47):
The government didn't solve it. So you kind of got
a conflict between you know, the government intelligence agencies and
the cybersecurity industry. And so very quickly, the cybersecurity industry
have lots of questions about the claim that it was
North Korea. Some of the things that they that they saw. Well,
(05:09):
first of all, Sony Sony Pictures was in big trouble
in twenty fourteen. They'd had to take about one hundred
to two hundred million dollars in losses. They did that
by firing a lot of people, including a lot of
their IT staff. And so you know, you got to
wonder like, oh, okay, you just like laid off practically
(05:32):
your whole IT staff. They're upset. They know how to
get into your system. And so very quickly, like the
cybersecurity industry was saying, well, hold on a minute, this
wasn't North Korea. These guys knew your system. And so
(05:53):
think of the cyber the computer system is like a maize, okay,
and so you got to know where you're going. These
guys moved us through the system life they knew what
they were doing. It seems that they downloaded things much
more quickly, and you know, the first couple come, you
(06:15):
know messages. They didn't even call themselves guardians of peace.
They called themselves God's apostles. So you have this really
murky picture. What was also happening was that there was
a group called Lizard Squad out of Canada who had
(06:36):
actually hacked Sony PlayStation a couple of times and was
actively involved in this. And so there were a number
of players and it didn't really point the finger at
North Korea and what so in the book, I profile
two people who took the lead in this investigation from
(07:00):
Norse Corporation, who actually ended up presenting their findings to
the Pentagon in January of twenty fifteen as things were
out there their most contentious, you know, with North Korea
threatening a sea of fire on the West coast and hey, here,
I live on the West coast, so I really don't
(07:21):
like the idea that my little town might be a
sea of fire. And how did the Pentagon respond to
a very detailed accounting with evidence of what was going on.
How it was likely an insider who had contacted this
group called Lizard Squad. Well, the Pentagon responded by slapping
(07:46):
a five year you know, security clearance on all of
this information. So my guys couldn't talk for five years
about what was going on. But that's really the story
that gets told in this book.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Wow, and wasn't one of the five people that Norse
Corporation had identified at Sony as being one of the
potential people involved. Didn't she have a boyfriend that worked
for a lizard squad, Well.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
She certainly did. Yeah, so there were all these connections
and you know, actually, what we do in the book
is we actually name the most likely suspect the two
have been responsible for the hack. We you know, we
name this person, we provide the evidence of why we
(08:43):
think it was that person. You know, we're not saying
it was definitely this person. But here we are ten
years after the event. The government has not released their information.
As we're coming up upon the ten year anniversary, I
think this is a perfect time for the government to
release their evidence. And if we're wrong, or if I'm wrong,
(09:06):
I'm happy to issue an apology, but I really issue
a challenge for the government to produce the evidence showing
that it was North Korea, because we certainly do not
think it was. And the bigger question that needs to
be asked is if the evidence was so clear that
it was in North Korea, what the heck was our
(09:27):
government doing accusing North Korea? And who benefited from it? Well?
Speaker 1 (09:33):
I think you mentioned in the book that America, particularly
the Obama administration, did get some benefits out of saying
it was North Korea. Could you share those with our listeners?
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Yeah. So there were a number of factors, and you know,
this is always the struggle when you write a book
like this and you can't get the people to talk
to you, which is you got to come up with
the likely scenarios. So there are a couple likely scenario.
The first, and I think the most shocking, is that
early on in the Obama administration, President Obama made it
(10:08):
clear that he was looking for some excuse to launch
a surgical strike against the North Korean leadership at the
Capitation Strike. And so here his generals present him with this,
We detailed this in the book. They come to him
(10:29):
and say, this is cyber terrorism. It is the same
as if North Korea detonated a bomb inside of Sony Studios,
if they had done that, you would have no hesitation.
This was an act of war. And Obama, to his credit, says,
that's crazy. This is not cyber terrorism. That most is
(10:50):
cyber vandalism, and I'm not going to do that. So,
you know, I like to be fair and objective, and
I just have to say Obama made a decision not
to treat as an active war, which probably saved a
couple million lives in the Korean peninsula. So good job.
(11:11):
What else was going on, We were developing a whole
suite of cyber weapons. This was around the same time
as the stucksnat virus attacked the Iranian nuclear program. And
you know, we have developed a lot of cyber weapons ourselves,
and we're probably about the best in the world. So
(11:33):
what happens when you point the finger at somebody else, Well,
nobody looks too closely at you. So we're developing a
lot of cyber capabilities monitoring not just the world but
our own citizens. And so if you create a narrative that,
oh my god, these North Koreans, who you know are
kind of pathetic technologically, are threat well, nobody looks too
(11:57):
closely at what we're doing. The other thing that was
kind of interesting is in the week of nine to eleven,
probably around two thousand and three two thousand and four,
Congress passed this thing called the Terrorism Risk Insurance Program.
And what this did was it allowed the insurance companies
(12:22):
to charge companies for terrorism risks, and if the risk
was too big, then it would be backstop by the
federal government. Well, in the ten years since the program passed,
the insurance companies had collected about forty billion dollars from
(12:44):
American businesses without really any significant payouts, right, And so
a number of people, including Senator James Langford, had pointed
out that this program seemed to be more of a
boondoggle for the insurance companies. And you know, there was
some really good criticism going on of this program, and
(13:08):
there was a possibility that the program would not be reauthorized.
But lo and behold, the North Korean hack takes place.
Everybody is up in arms about the threat of terrorism
to American businesses, and lo and behold, the program is
reauthorized by huge margins and the insurance company get to
(13:33):
keep soaking American businesses.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
Yeah, and I wonder how much of that money made
it back into the form of campaign contributions exactly. Yeah,
that's it's it's horrible that life works that way, but
it does. You also point out in the book that
there were some rather unusual relationships between Sony executives and
the Rand Corporation.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Yeah, and this was really something that I do not
expect to find, but very quickly I ran across the fact.
In twenty sixteen, when Julian Assange released all of the
emails from the Democratic National Committee, he also released an
entire archive focused on Sony Pictures. And they're weird connections
(14:23):
with a Rand Corporation. So for people who don't know
the Rand Corporation, it's basically been described as America's University
of imperialism. It is where the views of the intelligence
agencies get wandered into American businesses. So there was this.
(14:43):
So two people were really in charge of Sony Pictures
at this time, a guy named Michael Linton. And when
you do a little background dive on him, you know,
and we think about these creative types, right, they're supposed
to be renegade and rebels, right, but so lo and behold,
(15:03):
you look at Michael Linton and you go, oh, you
find out his father was a spy for British intelligence. Okay,
that's in a New York Times article. He sits on
the Board of Directors of the Rand Corporation. He was
president of the of the Broadcasting Board of Directors, which
(15:23):
reported directly to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
So you find yourself going like, oh, wait, wait a minute.
I thought these artist types were supposed to be, you know,
anti authority. This guy is about, you know, as connected
the power as you can possibly be, you know. Then
you look at Amy Pascal. Amy Pascal's father was an
(15:49):
economist who worked for the Rand Corporation. So you got
these two people who are running your studio, They got
all these connections to the corporation. Sony does so many
nice things for the Rand Corporation, like putting together a
(16:10):
sixty years of Progress documentary on the Rand Corporation. And
who do they get to do the narration but Toby Maguire,
who is hot as hell because of his spider Man role.
And they do things like get George Clooney to show
up the Rand Corporation meetings and press the flesh with
(16:31):
the Rand company personnel and just go what the heck
is going on? Here, and the guy, the guy who
was most connected with Sony Pictures appears to have been
this guy, Bruce Bennett, who really is a piece of work.
You know, he's in North Korean Hawk and you know,
(16:54):
he touts himself as this great diplomat from the time
that he he worked for the government. But in his
own bio he brags about putting together proposals to North
Korea that he knew they wouldn't accept. And I find
myself going, you know, hey, I'm no diplomat, but I
(17:17):
was always under the impression that a diplomat's job was
to figure out areas of agreement with other countries, not
put together proposals that they would never accept. And so
he is, you know, communicating with with Michael Linton as
(17:39):
this movie is getting ready to come out. And the
movie itself was also kind of interesting because when you
do it a dive onto the creation of this movie,
you find come to find out that Seth Rogan and
his writing partner originally conceived the movie to be very
much like Sasha Baron Cohen's To Dictate, which featured Sasha
(18:02):
Baron Collin as this anonymous Middle Eastern dictator. Okay, so
you can put you know, you can make him a
little bit of Kadafi, you can make him a little
of Saddam Hussein, and you know it's it's nobody who's
real in the world, right right. That was the same
thing that was going to be with the interview. But
(18:22):
at some point during the process Seth Rogan says, an
executive from Sony suggested, what if you made it Kim
Jong Un? And so I'm saying to myself, well, geez,
we got Rand Corporation all over Sony Pictures, We got
(18:44):
this history of provocative action towards North Korea. You know,
I'm not saying North Korey is a great place. Hey,
I ever gone to North Korea? But there is a
way that you could coexist, right And you know Trump
showed that, y. Yeah, you know there's a way that
(19:06):
we can get along. And you're not feared nuclear conflict.
I'm hey, I'm anti nuclear conflicts. You know, call me crazy.
So you look at all of this and you go,
what was really going on here? You have to ask
your yourself the question was the interview movie itself a
(19:28):
provocation designed to make something happen? And then you know,
you had Sony pictures laying off a whole bunch of people.
Somebody decided to do a hack. There's a history of
hacks against you know, Sony, whether it's PlayStation or or whatever,
and so you know, I'm not necessarily saying the hack
(19:52):
was done by the intelligence agencies, although you got to
keep that one in the mix. But it seems like
they took took advantage of an opportunity to make a
situation much more serious than it was and to put
people like me on the West Coast under an increased
(20:14):
risk of nuclear war, which I really don't take that
kindly to.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
I understand completely. Now if I'm reading your book right,
you seem to be leaning toward it's it was done
by It was carried out by some insiders, one particular
insider who was ticked off that she had been fired
with the help of her boyfriend who worked for the
Lizard Squad. Am I getting that wrong or do?
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Yeah? I think it's that simple, And I think that
they saw like, oh my god, what a wonderful thing
to do here, and to realize this is the opportunity,
because who's going to stand up for North Korea? Right?
You know, it's the perfect it's the perfect cover up
because every bud he hates North Korea already, and so
(21:02):
I think that they were probably surprised that so many
in the cybersecurity industry came out and said, hey, this
was this was, this was not North Korea. And because
these cybersecurity companies, you know, they want to get a
reputation for accuracy, right, they did it for being you know,
crime solvers. And they're like, wait a minute, you know
(21:25):
the intelligence agencies are telling us a bunch of garbage here.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
Yeah, that had to drive them crazy. We need to
take a quick break to do a little business with America.
And when we get back with kent Tech and Lively,
I want to explore just how close to a brink
of war event this was.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
We'll be right back after.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
This message, and we are back with mister kent Heck
(22:05):
and Lively, the author of Inside the Sony Hack, the
story behind America's most notorious brink of war cover up.
And as I was saying, just before we went to break,
do you think that we really were on the brink
of war with North Korea? Because of the film the interview?
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Well, here's the thing. I think a really interesting book
David Sanger. He's a national security correspondent for the New
York Times. Okay, so about as mainstream as you can get.
And so, you know, the story that he tells is that,
(22:50):
you know, the generals were telling Obama that this was
the opportunity, you know, this was the time to strike
North Korea. And so I'm thinking to myself, you know,
and then you've got Kim Jong un publicly saying that,
you know, the West coast is going to be a
sea of fire, and I'm thinking, and you know, one
(23:12):
of the things that was shocking to me is to
find out that there is publicly available documentation that US
estimates from the nineteen eighties suggests that North Korea has
one hundred to three hundred nuclear bombs and they've got
(23:36):
their missiles. And so I'm thinking to myself, if you're
in North Korea and you're thinking, hey, these guys are
getting ready to do surgical strike against the leadership, and
you're sitting on three hundred nuclear weapons and you've got
your missiles that can do stuff, do you know what
(23:59):
decision are you going to to make? How long are
you going to wait for something to happen? Now, I
think that North Korea, you know, to some extent, has
shown remarkable restraint. I mean, we're always told that there's
this Madman of Asia theory, and when you find out
that the North Koreans have had nuclear weapons since the
(24:20):
mid eighties, you know, it puts a little different spin
on what we think is going on there.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
So how irresponsible was Barack Obama to be antagonizing Kim
Jong on with this, with this movie and blaming him
for the you know, for the hack.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
One of the things that I think is that and
this is something I've actually got another book coming out
in October called Twilight of the Shadow Government, which I
have co authored with a former CIA officer, seventeen year
guy who Turn Blower, And sort of the perspective that
(25:03):
I think you need to have is that whoever the
president is is to some extent a coptive of their
intelligence agencies and what their intelligence agencies tell them. Very
early on, Harry Truman, in actually nineteen sixty three had
written that one of the things that he wanted to
(25:26):
that he thought people should know about is that he
thought that they should understand that because our CIA is
in charge of both intelligence and operations, overseas that what
they often do is they shade the intelligence to get
the presidents to pursue a certain course of action. So
(25:49):
the question becomes, what did Obama really know the weapons.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
Of mass destruction thing?
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Yeah? Yeah, And so you know, I kind of give
you know, maybe somebody will get mad at me, but
I kind of give a little bit of credit to
a number of people in this story. I give some
credit to Barack Obama. I also have to give a
shout out to Seth Rogan, who has been very public.
(26:19):
He did a twenty nineteen interview in Vulture magazine in
which he said that he hired his own cybersecurity guys
take a look at the hack. They were absolutely convinced
there was not North Korea. Seth Rogan also revealed some
shocking information that even though this hack supposedly happened in
(26:40):
November of twenty fourteen, he was actually told in like
June or July that Sony had been hacked, and also
that Sony had done some bizarre thing when the hack happened,
which is they instructed Seth Rogan and James Franco to
(27:02):
go out and say and pretend that they were just
stoner filmmakers who didn't understand they were making a provocative film.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
Okay, And so you know, I actually have to take
my hat off to Seth Rogan for saying very publicly
he doesn't believe this this, you know.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
This claim. He doesn't think it was North Korea. He
also says that his cybersecurity guy had said, no, somebody
actually had to plug something into the Sony system. This
was not something that was done at a distance. And
for those of you who remember the name CrowdStrike.
Speaker 4 (27:47):
As being the d N, Yeah, so so we we've
got CrowdStrike in this here, and it's CrowdStrike.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
That's saying, oh, yeah, it was North Korea. So if
you think CrowdStrike lied about the Russians, Hack and the
DNC and I know they're lion here. And you know,
we've also got you know, a starring role for America's
most notorious liar, James Clapper in all of this. So
(28:23):
if you want to know how the big criminals got
their start, this is kind of like a smaller story,
but you see the same kind of stuff going.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
On, right, and by the way, really the same kind
of stuff because there was a group of retired intelligence
agents that looked at the data from the DNC hack
and the Tony Podesta hack and they they were able
to look in the metadata and see the speed at
which it was downloaded, and they said there was absolutely
no way that could have occurred over the Internet. It
(28:57):
would have had to be someone sticking a jump drive
into a device at the DNC. And it sounds like
you're telling me it's the same thing here. It was
downloaded so fast that there's no way this happened all
the way from North Korea via the Internet. So when
you say it's similar, I mean it's similar.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Yeah. So it's kind of like a seth Rich situation,
except in this instance, seth Rich doesn't end up dead
because whoever did this hat, you know, it played right
into the hands of the deep state and the intelligence
community and allowed them to really, you know, keep poking
(29:39):
North Korea. You know. One of the things that there
was also is kind of interesting. Maybe this is a
little bit you know, too deep into the woods. But
I looked at as sort of like the history of Korea,
and and you know, most people don't realize that basically,
in eighteen sixty six, America invaded Korea, you know, through
(30:01):
this ship called the General Sherman because we were doing
our gunboat diplomacy. So the same way that we sailed
into Tokyo Harbor and said trade with US is what
we did, you know, and you know, to realize that
North Korea was at the Korea was brutalized by the
(30:23):
Japanese from nineteen ten to nineteen forty five. And then
you know, where do we put the Korea Command, which
you know United Nations Command, which is still kind of
in charge of supervising the armacist We put it in
freaking Tokyo. So this is not something that is designed
(30:45):
to lower tensions. And I think, you know, for those
you know, people who are listening to are more conservative,
I think that this is kind of a Trump's credit
and his genius of going to North Korea and just
saying like, hey, you know, I have no idea of
what they actually talked about, but I kind of think
that Trump knows a bunch of the same things that
(31:05):
I'm saying, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was
part of the conversations about. Okay, the United States has
been doing a lot of crap to North Korea over
the years, blaming them for self that they didn't do,
and you know, hey, let's stop it and see if
we can get along.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Well, when you talk about Japan, you mentioned in the
book how so many people there were put into forced labor,
forced sexual type jobs. And there's no love loss between
Japan and North Korea, that's for sure.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yeah, So couldn't have liked the United Nations done something
like Okay, it put the Korea Command into Philippines for
God's sakes, you know, which is not going to be
so provocative.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
You made that point well in the book. We are
out of time, but I really would like to get
an update on what's going on two of your books.
According to a list put out by Jim Congressman Jim Jordan,
showed that the Biden administration was encouraging Amazon to downplay
the sale of two of your books. I believe let's
(32:16):
see Plague.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
Of the original, the Regional Plague book. So I'm and inoculated.
So I have consulted with an attorney who's taking a
look at that. And I've also got some people in
Congress who are doing all little work for me. So
so that that's the latest update.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Okay. Well, and you'd also mentioned that there might in
fact be a lawsuit, a class action lawsuit involving a
lot of the other people's, a lot of other people
who had books on the list.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Well that that would make great sense because I mean,
you talk about violation of First Amendment rights during the pandemic.
I mean that, I can't imagine how much you lost
in sales because they did that to you.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Yeah. Yeah, I think we've got a really good case
for damages.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
All right, Well, I'll keep asking about it from time
to time because I don't think it's something we should
forget about. And I think it's interesting that they keep
calling they being the left, keep calling us book banners,
I know, when in fact, you know, it was the
Body administration who was doing that to you and to
forty other books. And then you know, they call us Nazis.
(33:33):
But they seem to have a bigger problem with Jews
and anti Semitism than the rest. Oh oh no, we're
not anti Semitic, We're just anti Zionist. Right then, Why
in the hell, why in the hell to college kids
who are Jews, why are they afraid for their lives
and asking for security?
Speaker 2 (33:52):
You know, we're not We're not saying words anti Jewish.
We're just saying humous will save us.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
So that's uh, yeah, that's another thing. But I think
this book banner thing needs to be followed, and I'm
really shocked it's not getting more press than it is. Ye,
So anyway, I'll shut up now. But I assume, like
all your other books, that this particular book, Inside the
(34:20):
Sony Hack, is available wherever good books are sold. All right,
and then we've got Twilight of the Shadow Government coming
out what October fifteenth? October fifteenth, All right, Well we'll
want to have you back for that one too, so
i'll start pestering your publicist now. All right, once again,
Kent heck and Lively the author of Inside the Sony Hack,
(34:46):
also the author of The King of Italy, a book
I enjoyed very much, and the author of Twilight of
the Shadow Government, which will be out on October fifteenth.
Kent as allway, thank you so much for coming on
the show. You'll always have a home here whenever you want.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
Thanks so much. I have a great day. You've been
listening to The Tea Party Power Hour with Mark Gillar
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