LOS ANGELES — For three weeks, the Sony hacking case has titillated Hollywood and the trade and tabloid press with its exposure of the indiscreet and ill-advised private emails of overpaid dueling production divas and egocentric actors, and the release of reams of confidential financial and personal information to every corner of the Internet.

Stars and moguls alike have lived in fear and trembling at each fresh revelation from a cache that the hackers claim contains 100 terabytes of data — or roughly 10 times the printed matter in the 26 million books in the Library of Congress in 2000. Salaries, Social Security numbers — even the aliases that famous actors use to travel incognito — have all been spread about, while the crash of studio computers and security systems forced employees to line up around the block simply to get handwritten passes for admission to their own lot.


But Sony’s decision to scrap the release of “The Interview,” its crude comedy about an assassination plot against North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, suggests the affair is not just a colossal theft of intellectual property or a troubling criminal retaliation against free speech but a bona fide national security issue — one that has compelled the attention of the White House itself.

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The studio may have had little choice but to pull the Seth Rogen film in response to vague but ominous threats — invoking the Sept. 11 attacks — by a group of hackers believed to be linked to North Korea against theaters that would dare to show it. For one thing, theater chains representing some 20,000 screens across the country announced that they would simply refuse to show the film.

Perhaps not since pro-German audiences in Milwaukee burned the local Warner Bros. theater in 1939, after the premiere of the studio’s pioneering anti-Hitler film, “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” has a mere Hollywood movie prompted such an international incident. The ramifications now clearly stretch far beyond whether Angelina Jolie is a “minimally talented, spoiled brat,” as the producer Scott Rudin complained to studio chief Amy Pascal in one leaked email.

That’s an argument that the Hollywood hotshots embarrassed by the attack have had trouble getting mere mortals to take seriously — at least until senior American officials concluded that North Korea was “centrally involved,” as The New York Times put it. President Barack Obama himself has called the attack “very serious” and is said to be weighing some kind of “proportional” response.

Nevertheless, Sony’s decision to abandon the film, without so much as a direct-to-DVD release, has sparked outrage from Hollywood Boulevard to Capitol Hill, with such unlikely allies as Jimmy Kimmel and Newt Gingrich agreeing that it sets a bad precedent. Kimmel called the move “an un-American act of cowardice that validates terrorist actions,” while Gingrich tweeted, “With the Sony collapse America has lost its first cyberwar.”

( Also on POLITICO: State Department pushes back on claim it blessed The Interview)

The Sony attack is different in scale and kind from those on companies like Target or Home Depot, which were aimed at stealing credit card information, or on financial institutions aimed at disabling ATMs. But it is not altogether unprecedented. An attack two years ago on Saudi Aramco, the Saudi national oil company — believed to be the work of Iran — destroyed data on 30,000 of the company’s computers and disrupted the global oil market.

And the worried stars and studio executives can now take at least some comfort from the views of national security experts.

“I guess I would consider this a little less of a national security issue than having one country wipe out most of Saudi Aramco’s computers in an afternoon,” said Daniel Benjamin, the former State Department counter-terrorism coordinator in the first Obama administration and now a scholar at Dartmouth. “Because that’s a grave threat to international trade. But, yeah, it’s a significant deal.”

Benjamin said the case would doubtless prompt calls in Congress for returning North Korea to the State Department’s list of official state sponsors of terror, a designation that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice scrapped at the end of the Bush administration. “It’s an interesting question whether this will qualify as an act of terrorism,” he said. “The Hill has been eager to re-designate them as state sponsors and never really forgave Condi Rice for taking them off. Maybe Cuba will go off and North Korea will go on.”

Michael O’Hanlon, a national security expert at the Brookings Institution, agreed — to a point. “It shows a vulnerability, and in that sense is significant,” he said. “Also, it’s a nuisance attack for which there should perhaps be an economic penalty of some sort, the national security equivalent of a civil suit.” But he said he did not so far believe the case called for direct retaliation against Pyongyang.

Nicholas R. Burns, a former undersecretary of state for political affairs and now a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, said, “Unfortunately, I think it’s a window into our future. When a rogue state like this appears to have the capacity to intimidate a corporation — much less a government — it’s a new world, and we’ve got to be prepared for it.” He said the issue was complex and should be considered in two phases: immediate public safety concerns and a longer-term fight against authoritarian regimes that would stifle free expression, whether in entertainment or on the Internet.

“I understand the caution that Sony had to exercise,” he said. “They get a threat that’s very general. It’s very hard to calculate North Korea’s behavior. I think there’s an argument for erring on the side of caution in the interest of public safety.” But in the longer term, he added, “We have to be acutely conscious of efforts by authoritarian governments to clamp down on freedom of thought and expression. It’s a big issue, and here’s an opportunity for leadership by the president — and I think he can do this — to focus in his last two years on rallying democratic countries to this cause.”

International retribution against creative content is hardly unheard of. In 1980, Saudi Arabia was outraged by “Death of a Princess,” a British docudrama about a young Saudi princess who was executed with her lover for adultery. The Saudi regime sent the British ambassador packing from Riyadh, placed restrictions on Saudi visas for British businesspeople and banned British Airways’ Concorde from its airspace.

The most celebrated case of such retaliation in Hollywood history probably dates to 1939, when Warner Bros. became the first studio to make an overtly anti-Hitler picture, “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” a ripped-from-the-headlines drama starring Edward G. Robinson. Nazi sympathizers in Milwaukee burned down the local Warner theater shortly after the film opened, and theater owners who dared to show the film in Nazi-occupied Poland were hanged. Industry censors and rival studios all tried to dissuade Warners from releasing the film, but the studio refused to bend.

“We have disregarded, and we will continue to disregard, threats and pleas intended to dissuade us from our purpose,” studio president Harry Warner said at the time. “We have defied, and we will continue to defy, any elements that may try to turn us from our loyal and sincere purpose of serving America.”

Some in Hollywood are now accusing Sony of just such a cave-in to political pressure. “Saw @Sethrogen at JFK,” the actor Rob Lowe tweeted. “Both of us have never seen or heard of anything like this. Hollywood has done Neville Chamberlain proud today.”

Steve Carell, whose own planned North Korea-related thriller for another studio was canceled in the wake of the Sony affair, called Sony’s move, “a sad day for creative expression.”

Other comic films have sparked geopolitical controversy. In 1940, “The Great Dictator,” Charlie Chaplin’s unsparing satirical sendup of Adolf Hitler — in which the dictator “Hynkel” dances with a giant globe in the form of a toy balloon — was banned in Spain, Italy and even Ireland, but Chaplin later said he could never have made the Nazis a laughing matter if he had known the full extent of their atrocities.

Analyst O’Hanlon said the stakes with “The Interview” were not quite so high as its Hollywood defenders may think.

“I can’t get excited about the specifics of this case,” he emailed POLITICO. “Not that the North Korean attack was justifiable in any way. But Sony releasing a film depicting the assassination of an actual foreign leader is not only in such poor taste — however reprehensible the North Korean regime — and so potentially incendiary in international affairs (predictably so, with no benefit to justify the risk and no real right of political speech being relevant because this wasn’t intended as political speech or messaging), that I simply can’t get excited about it.”

The hack has been slow to draw serious analysis, in part because Hollywood has always been a convenient political whipping boy, whether for excessive violence or sexuality in films or for the sometimes self-seriousness of its most politically active stars and executives. That people who are paid millions of dollars, and should know better, committed impolitic words to digital paper has sparked widespread schadenfreude among both left and right in the blogosphere.

But whatever the political implications, the economic implications of the breach are stark. By coincidence, the International Intellectual Property Alliance, a coalition of trade groups representing the nation’s copyright industry — films, television, books, software, music and publications — released a report showing that the industry contributed more than $1.1 trillion to the national economy in 2013, and employed more than 5.5 million people.

International film piracy has long been a huge concern for the industry, but the Sony hack is an especially chilling case, in which at least five feature films and the draft script for the next James Bond movie were stolen. It’s a calamity that industry experts say has long just been waiting to happen.

“In principle, we’ve had this warning earlier,” said Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and himself a former studio executive and screenwriter at Disney. “This can happen to anyone, for any level of perceived infraction, or solely out of some perverse glee that people have in bringing down the powerful of pumping up the powerless. You don’t need to commit some sin in order to bring this upon you. All you need to do is have anybody who knows how to hack into servers decide that you’re the victim of the day.”

And, he added, “In a previous era, there could be a gentleman’s agreement not to publish something that everybody knew. Those barriers don’t exist anymore. Everybody can find anything, and I don’t see how there’s any way to truly put a finger in the dike when someone wants to breach it.”

Correction: An earlier version referred imprecisely to the circumstances under which theater owners were hanged in Nazi-occupied Poland.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: Nick Gass @ 12/19/2014 02:28 PM CORRECTION: An earlier version referred imprecisely to the circumstances under which theater owners were hanged in Nazi-occupied Poland.