Cyber-vandalism by North Korea

In a CNN interview aired yesterday, President Obama called what North Korea did to Sony Cybervandalism.  This is an odd and inaccurate term akin to somebody spraypainting a school wall or defacing a website, just for the hell of it.  The President is gettting bad advice from someone on this, maybe China who loves to pat North Korea on the head and say, "bad boy" and look the other way.  At the same time, they provide most of the fuel and food that the country needs to continue on this course of pushing the limits of war.  There is no doubt about why China allows North Korea to do these kinds of things.  They get to observe how the rest of world reacts to things they might want to do in the future, but they claim to be uninvolved in the activities - "It wasn't me", they would say.  Then, they watch and wait for us to do something.  

The President says what happened to Sony was not an act of war.  When someone asked Leon Panetta if we were at war with China, he said, "I guess it depends on your definition of war."  Here,we definitely need a new definition, because the one the President is using is dated.  The North Koreans have decided to attempt to influence a U.S. business (a U.S. subsidiary of a Japanese company) to give up distributing and showing a movie they say offends their government.  They call making the movie and attempting to show it, an act of war.  Somebody is not using the same definition.  Had The Interview been an attempt to actually influence some zealot to assassinate the leader of North Korea, it would have been an act of war, but this movie is far from that kind of effort.  It's a comedy, a concept some world leaders don't understand.  

When another country attempts to disrupt a business venture for the sole reason they don't like the content, we have the situation George Clooney alluded to when he said the studios were scared and backed down because of it.  The North Koreans did what they intended to do and that was a state-sponsored attack on a U.S. business, with the intent of disrupting their business operations and intimidating them into adopting a new course.  That is an act of war, whether this Administration understands it that way or not.  I thought China's disruption of the New York Times over a series of articles on the wealth of China's leadership was an act of war too.  They were trying to get a U.S. newspaper to stop publishing articles that China did not want to see in print.  They broke into computers in the U.S. and used information they collected there to go after the sources of the Times articles, and they have done the same thing to other businesses too.  Tell me the North Koreans are not following their handler's lead.  

We can't accept the definition of cyber vandalism.  This is much more serious and widespread than this administration wants to admit, though since they are so ill prepared to make a response, they need to delay until they can think of something.  This kind of characterization gives them some, and hands the North Koreans a clear victory.  Most of us will have forgotten about it by the time the Administration gets around to doing something.