During his annual year-end press conference today, United States president Barack Obama spoke out about Sony Pictures' recent decision to cancel controversial Seth Rogen/James Franco movie The Interview in the wake of widespread cyberattacks, saying the film company "made a mistake."
"Sony is a corporation. It suffered significant damage," Obama explained, as reported by The Associated Press. "There were threats against its employees. I am sympathetic to the concerns that they faced. Having said all that, yes, I think they made a mistake."
"I wish they had spoken to me first," Obama went on to say about Sony executives who made the decision to scuttle movie, a satire about an attempt to assassinate North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un. "We cannot have a society in which some dictatorship someplace can start imposing censorship."
Obama went on to suggest that Sony's cancellation of the movie could lead to other, similarly damaging situations if leaders of other nations "start seeing a documentary that they don't like or news reports that they don't like."
The president's speech came just hours after the FBI officially pointed the finger at the North Korean government for the massive hack against Sony Pictures.
"As a result of our investigation, and in close collaboration with other U.S. government departments and agencies, the FBI now has enough information to conclude that the North Korean government is responsible for these actions," the FBI said in a statement on its website this afternoon.
The statement goes on to say that the FBI will pursue and "impose costs and consequences" on any person, group, or nation state that launches cyberattacks against the US or its interests.
For its part, North Korea has denied any involvement in the widespread hacking. The perpetrators have leaked troves of internal documents, ranging from executive salaries to the script for 2015 James Bond movie Spectre.
