Hmm. Up until now the Sony/NK thing has been confusing from a technical standpoint - there's lots of good reasons to be curious about and skeptical whether NK h

Hmm. Up until now the Sony/NK thing has been confusing from a technical standpoint - there's lots of good reasons to be curious about and skeptical whether NK had anything to do with the SONY hack (see the bazillion threads on HN and elsewhere that cover it). Now for some conspiracy. Here are some facts. One of the primary journalists responsible for announcing that the government had determined NK was responsible for the SONY hack is the same one responsible for falsely declaring the US had confirmed locations of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq on behalf of the State Department (Judith Miller), who hadn't yet gotten the public support it needed to go into Iraq. But what could the US's motivation for falsely fingering North Korea in this attack, if that's in fact what was done? First, either instability or regime collapse in North Korea would mean very good things for the United States. Not just because it would advance human rights or because NK represents a black mark on US military operations. But also because instability threatens China. A regime collapse would mean China would have to deal with a flood of millions of starving and brainwashed immigrants at its border, and in fighting due to power vacuums. The downside is that the US would need to spend a lot of money and man hours supporting their ally South Korea, as they would also be forced to handle the instability, and because of US military presence in the region. But second - and this is where the conspiracy theorizing comes in - we've seen the US make several attempts to get Twitter to censor certain types of information. The US, through the NSF, wants to study 'social pollution' on Twitter (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/truthy-project-is-unworthy-of-tax-dollars/2014/10/17/a3274faa-531b-11e4-809b-8cc0a295c773_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/truthy-project-is-unw...). However, it already has studies on social contagion and memetic social influence and these are used in political campaigns today (http://enga.ge/download/Inside%20the%20Cave.pdf http://enga.ge/download/Inside%20the%20Cave.pdf & http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/how-obamas-internet-campaign-changed-politics/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/how-obamas-internet... & http://theweek.com/article/index/256160/how-obama-won-the-internet http://theweek.com/article/index/256160/how-obama-won-the-in...). Moreover, the United States uses these tactics to influence public opinion in enemy nation states, such as the use of Twitter this year to cause insurrection and organize riots to overthrow the Cuban government earlier this year (search Cuban Twitter CIA), the use of Twitter messages in Jordan, Egypt, Syria and others to spread US propaganda (http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf), and the US contracts with companies that are used to do the same thing (e.g. www.marayamedia.com). The conspiracy here would be that since the US has so far lacked legal traction in giving it the ability to influence other nations with adversarial messages but preventing others from influencing US citizens in the same way, that it is using the traction of the NK/SONY event to create a civil law precedent for content curation in Twitter that can later be expanded to federal law. This creep from civil to federal law has happened before - notably with Youtube - which now removes content that the federal government wants it to (known examples include ISIL recruitment videos and US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki's political messages).