I don’t know why everyone is so worried about who hacked Sony in Hollywood. Does it really matter who hacked a movie studio or even an entertainment company? I’m more concerned about my local water provider.
The truth is that every day thousands of cyber-attacks hit our country from either government sponsored hackers or private sector hackers. And while they are hacking us, we are hacking them. It’s more likely that we hacked them first.
Where the actions of the movie company to pull the movie from public release is being represented as an affront to someone’s First Amendment rights, I don’t agree. On the one hand, every business that operates today is forced to consider political correctness in how they interact with people at every level. Business decisions regarding risk management take place every day. The way we allow people to litigate everything makes the lawyers and insurance companies the power brokers as usual. If you want to talk about violating rights, lawyers and insurance companies are the biggest violators. The decision to not release the movie is not subject to judicial review.
There is no connection between an act of cyber-theft and our Constitutional rights. Unless we can definitively identify the individual or individuals who did the deed, we don’t know whether North Korea was a player or not. It’s most likely that China is the guilty party since they attack us so frequently but we really don’t know.
If hacking networks in cyber-space is the battleground of the future then our brightest minds should be working on both defensive and offensive tools. I have no doubt that they are already and their success may well be protecting some government installations now. The problem in our country and around the world is that the potential of the internet has expanded faster than our ability to control it.
For some reason we thought we could develop the productivity aspects without the corresponding defensive measures. All these companies that sell us software to protect our personal computers could very well have come from people who created the viruses in the first place. First you create a peril then you offer protection from it for a price. It sounds like racketeering to me.
It could be that businesses should reconsider how they are connected to the net. If there are aspects of your business you don’t want exposed to hackers, keeping the proprietary data on a physically separated network may be necessary.
The fact that it took an attack on a do-nothing entertainment company to get the headlines about cyber-attacks is both disappointing and not a bit surprising. It just exposes the shallowness of the press. This topic has been a story for quite a while. It will be interesting to see if the national media companies are still covering this topic in six months.
What I want our governments to do is develop plans to protect the public infrastructure from cyber-attacks just like they do to plan for disasters. At every level of government, the needs are a little different and the efforts to address them should be tailored appropriately. If protection comes from newer more effective firewalls then that’s where the resources should be focused. If the protection comes from removing the power grid from the public internet then that should be done. Since the impact of cyber-warfare is likely to affect us all, it should be a good opportunity to have a cooperative dialog between the parties and a plan developed.
Private companies need to make business decisions based upon the best available science and technology to protect their individual interests.
If the internet as we know it is the only way to conduct business today then we’re screwed.
No Loss for Words 
The New Heresy: When Questioning Becomes a Crime
by Steve DanaThe New Heresy: When Questioning Becomes a Crime
There was a time when science was the language of curiosity. It invited questions, welcomed challenge, and saw debate as the oxygen of discovery. That was the old school — the one I grew up admiring. Today, something quieter and more troubling has crept in: a growing fear that questioning authority, even in the name of truth, marks you as dangerous.
We saw it during the pandemic. People who asked honest questions about origins, treatments, and policies were shamed or silenced. Doctors were censored. Journalists were de-platformed. Social media companies became referees of scientific opinion. Yet, years later, many of those “conspiracy theories” turned out to contain inconvenient pieces of truth. The problem wasn’t that the public lost faith in science. It’s that science allowed itself to be managed by politics.
This new orthodoxy extends far beyond medicine. In the climate debate, for example, legitimate questions about policy design are treated as moral sins. You can agree that the climate is changing and still ask whether the proposed solutions make sense. But too often, that nuance gets lost. The message from the self-anointed guardians of truth is clear: “You may question the details, but never the narrative.”
Real science doesn’t behave that way. It doesn’t blacklist dissent or exile those who see the data differently. Science at its best is a humble companion of reason — not a pulpit from which elites preach certainty to the rest of us. When debate becomes forbidden, science turns into dogma. And once dogma takes hold, truth becomes whatever those in power decide it is.
The deeper issue isn’t about data; it’s about power. When government officials, corporate sponsors, and political foundations all profit from the same set of “approved” truths, it’s no wonder skepticism feels subversive. The pandemic showed how fear can justify sweeping authority, and how economic winners always seem to emerge from moral crusades. Policies built on partial truths can still inflict very real harm — to livelihoods, education, mental health, and basic freedom. And when citizens ask for accountability, they’re told to “trust the science.”
But science doesn’t ask for trust; it earns it. It earns it by being transparent, by admitting uncertainty, and by treating every challenge as a chance to get closer to the truth. The moment we treat questioning as heresy, we turn science into a faith — one enforced not by evidence, but by power.
This isn’t about relitigating the past few years. It’s about remembering that free societies depend on doubt. We are supposed to test ideas, expose errors, and speak freely about the motives of those who govern. When the powers that be suppress questions, the people will start looking for answers elsewhere — and sometimes, that search leads them down darker roads. The cure for misinformation is not censorship; it’s open, honest debate.
So let’s bring back the spirit of old-school science — the kind that believes truth is strengthened, not weakened, by challenge. Let’s respect expertise, but not worship it. Let’s ask hard questions, not because we reject knowledge, but because we want it to mean something again. If that makes us heretics in the age of managed truth, then maybe heresy is exactly what democracy needs.
Because when questioning becomes a crime, truth becomes a casualty. And a nation that punishes doubt has already decided it prefers obedience to wisdom.
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