Such an action would likely be legal under the intelligence community’s covert action authority provided the hackers didn’t damage North Korea’s critical infrastructure along the way, experts said.
It would also strike at the very ideological divide that the Sony hack exposed: For North Korea, “The Interview” — the film that apparently motivated the attack and that portrays the nation’s hereditary dictator, Kim Jong Un, as a buffoonish tyrant who’s ultimately assassinated — is an act of war; for the U.S., it’s free expression, a right enshrined in the constitution.
“On diplomacy … you can’t do much more with public isolation and you can’t do much more with sanctions,” said McConnell, now senior vice president at the EastWest Institute think tank. A response like the information campaign he described is attractive partly because “I don’t think the U.S. has a lot of options here,” McConnell said.
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