WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama said Friday that Sony Pictures Entertainment “made a mistake” in shelving a satirical film about a plot to assassinate North Korea’s leader and vowed the United States will respond “in a place and manner and time that we choose” after a hack attack the administration blamed on the secretive Communist regime.
Speaking of Sony executives, Obama said at a year-end news conference, “I wish they had spoken to me first. … We cannot have a society in which some dictatorship someplace can start imposing censorship.”
Envisioning other potential flashpoints, he imagined situations in which dictators “start seeing a documentary that they don’t like or news reports that they don’t like.”
The president spoke a few hours after the FBI formally accused the North Korean government of being responsible for the devastating hacking attack against Sony, providing the most detailed accounting to date of a hugely expensive break-in that could lead to a U.S. response.
“Sony is a corporation. It suffered significant damage. There were threats against its employees. I am sympathetic to the concerns that they faced,” he said.