Frequent, high-profile hacks by the Free Syrian Army and their ilk are little more than momentary defacements, the modern equivalent of graffiti. The attacks on Target and Home Depot saw the theft of monumental amounts of customer and credit card information, but the inner workings of the companies remained as opaque as ever.
The Sony hack is something else entirely.
Even if not another byte is ever released, we’ve still been granted an unparalleled view inside the inner working of a vast corporation: Internship schemes, sexual harassment policies, the squabbling and fretting of executives—it’s all there, an immortal snapshot of how a billion-dollar company operates.
The closest comparison to the Sony hack isn’t the 2007 TJ Maxx attack, or the 2013 Adobe hack, it’s the WikiLeaks Cables—an explosive, unredacted look at a historically secretive industry, that will be still be read hundreds of years from now by historians and sociologists trying to understand the inner workings of power in our era.
randomWalks
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