Cyber crime is one of the fastest growing (and most lucrative) illegal activities in the United States. Figures from the FBI put overall damages as a result of cyber crime activities at around 0.2 to 0.8 of the US GDP (somewhere between 24 and 120 billion dollars annually).
Due to these factors, cybercrimes like digital piracy are among the most heavily prosecuted in the country (although there is a concurrent low rate of arrests due to the nature of the crime and the sheer volume of people involved even as accessories).
Given that cybercrime and digital piracy are theft, I will allege that I don’t approve. This is, after all, related to peoples’ livelihoods. However, there are circumstances where not only do I approve of it, I would argue that it’s a civic duty to pirate the heck out of something. Case in point: Seth Rogen’s latest travesty, “The Interview.”
One of the first life lessons the average person learns, either via firsthand experience or watching some other poor idiot try, is that poking a hornet’s nest with anything is a very bad idea. Smashing an individual hornet is fine; there are very rarely repercussions for it. It’s when you get bolder after smacking the first hornet and decide to go after the nest that it becomes a problem. Usually, you’ll get stung so many times that you regret being alive–if the stings don’t kill you as an example to everyone else.
In this scenario, the hornet’s nest is North Korea, and Seth Rogen, James Franco, and Randall Park are the collective moron with a stick. And, carrying through with the hornet analogy, the stings are the capability for nuclear warfare. If you can imagine that, you’ll realize just how bad of a very bad idea “The Interview” was.
The Sony hack that almost ended the release of the aforementioned movie was a case of civic responsibility in an attempt to prevent World War III, rather than an attack on the freedom of speech. Here’s a tip: There’s freedom of speech, and there’s being an idiot. And then there’s Seth Rogen and James Franco.
“The Interview” makes fun of a man who is painted by the media as a silly buffoon and who is great for being the butt of a joke, while simultaneously forgetting that he has nuclear capability and is suspected of more military attacks than most neighboring countries (with the caveat that no one can prove it because he’s supposed to be a silly little comedic figure who threatens nuclear war but doesn’t do it because he’s after something).
Kim Jong-un looks and acts like a buffoon. He is a great source of comedic news for the rest of the world to laugh at. His leadership and how he acts allows the rest of the world to point and laugh while forgetting that North Korea is a perpetrator of one of the longest on-going series of human rights abuses in the modern world.
Instead of going to see “The Interview” in theaters and supporting two morons who make fun of a country where people are literally tortured, imprisoned, and subsequently worked to death in labor camps alongside three generations of their family for doing things like listening to even a few notes of the wrong music, spend the money you’ve saved on Liberty in North Korea (LINK), a group that helps North Korean refugees, instead.
“The Interview” is not freedom of speech. It is not a comedy. It is a travesty.
Don’t make an effort to see it, and spend the money you saved on something worthwhile.