WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama said Friday that Sony Pictures Entertainment "made a mistake" in shelving a comedy film about a plot to assassinate the leader of North Korea and pledged the U.S. would respond "in a place and manner and time that we choose" to the hacker attack on Sony that the FBI blamed on the communist government.
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."
Obama said 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 not long after the FBI accused the North Korean government of the hacking attack against Sony, providing the most detailed accounting to date of the digital break-in.
"Sony is a corporation. It suffered significant damage. There were threats against its employees. I am sympathetic to the concerns that they faced," Obama said. "Having said all that, yes, I think they made a mistake."
Sony Pictures Chief Executive Officer Michael Lynton, responding to Obama, told CNN the studio had "no alternative" but to cancel the Christmas Day release of the movie The Interview.
Lynton, who runs the Culver City, Calif.-based unit of Sony Corp., said the studio canceled the release because theaters said they wouldn't show the movie for safety reasons.
"The movie theaters came to us one by one over a very short period of time and announced them would not carry the movie," Lynton said. "At that point in time we had no alternative but to not proceed with the theatrical release."
The administration earlier in the day formally accused the North Korean government of hacking into Sony's computers but offered few hints about how it might retaliate. Its evidence: The U.S. detected communications between computer Internet addresses known to be operated by North Korea and hacking tools left behind at the crime scene, which the FBI said contained subtle clues linking them to that country's government.
North Korea has denied involvement but praised the hacking as a "righteous deed." On Friday, a North Korean diplomat to the United Nations, Kim Un Chol, declined to comment.
The decision to blame North Korea -- which involved the State Department and U.S. intelligence agencies -- escalated a global game of brinkmanship. It included the disclosure of confidential Sony emails and business files and threats of terror attacks against U.S. movie theaters until Sony agreed to cancel the release of The Interview. The hackers had demanded the withdrawal partly over a scene depicting the assassination of North Korea's leader.
"The FBI now has enough information to conclude that the North Korean government is responsible for these actions," said the U.S. statement, which was not attributed to any official by name. It added: "North Korea's actions were intended to inflict significant harm on a U.S. business and suppress the right of American citizens to express themselves."
The statement included a general promise to impose "costs and consequences" on any person, group or government using cyberattacks to threaten the U.S. or its interests. Obama wasn't any more specific.
"They caused a lot of damage, and we will respond," Obama said. "We will respond proportionally, and we'll respond in a place and time and manner that we choose. It's not something that I will announce here today at a press conference."
In a new email, the hackers told Sony that executives were "very wise" to cancel the movie's release and said they planned no further disclosures of Sony's confidential materials "as long as you make no more trouble." The message warned Sony never to release the film "in any form," including on DVD.
The evidence implicating North Korea previously was described as largely circumstantial, including unspecified clues in the hacking tools left behind and the involvement of at least one computer in Bolivia previously traced to other attacks blamed on North Korea. Now, the FBI said, clues included similarities to other tools developed by North Korea in specific lines of computer code, encryption algorithms and data deletion methods. More significantly, the FBI discovered that computer Internet addresses known to be operated by North Korea were communicating directly with other computers used to deploy and control the hacking tools and collect the stolen Sony files.
Much of the data stolen from Sony's networks passed through Chinese servers and Internet providers on the way to the hackers, said a person familiar with investigation who wasn't authorized to speak on the record.
There is no evidence of direct Chinese participation but the country does keep a close eye on data moving through its networks, suggesting it may have been aware of the North Korean attack and did nothing to alert officials in the U.S., the person said.
When asked if China assisted in the Sony attack, Obama said the U.S. has "no indication that North Korea was acting in conjunction with another country."
U.S. options for acting against North Korea are limited. The U.S. already has trade sanctions in place. Even if investigators could identify and prosecute individual hackers, there's no guarantee that any located overseas would ever see a U.S. courtroom. Retaliatory hacking by U.S. government experts could encourage further attacks against American targets.
Evans Revere, a former State Department official and specialist on Korea, said if U.S. officials connect North Korea not only to the hacking attack but also to the threats to attack movie theater crowds, a case could be made to put North Korea again on a list of state sponsors of terrorism.
That designation now is held by Iran, Sudan, Syria and Cuba. North Korea was on the list for 20 years until it was taken off in 2008 by President George W. Bush's administration during nuclear negotiations.
Minutes after the FBI announced its conclusion that North Korea was behind the online attack, the Motion Picture Association of America stepped in with a public condemnation of the hacking -- and of media outlets for their handling of it.
In a statement Friday, Christopher Dodd, chief executive of the association, called the assault "a despicable, criminal act."
He added: "Disappointingly, that fact has been lost in a lot of the media coverage of this over the past few weeks. This situation is larger than a movie's release or the contents of someone's private emails."
Since the attack became public Nov. 24, Sony's business data and private emails have been broadcast, printed and posted in hundreds of news reports, many of them focused on the details of executive dealings with stars such as Seth Rogen, Adam Sandler, Kevin Hart and Angelina Jolie, or racially tinged remarks about Obama's supposed film-viewing choices.
Information for this article was contributed by Eric Tucker, Ted Bridis, Jake Coyle and Cara Anna of The Associated Press; by Lucas Shaw of Bloomberg News; by Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes of The New York Times; and by Chris Strohm of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 12/20/2014