SAN FRANCISCO
WikiLeaks on Thursday published more than 30,000 documents and 170,000 emails leaked from a cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment last November.
The infamous whistle-blowing site ordered the documents into a searchable archive available to journalists, activists or anyone else.
The website, which rose to fame publishing damning documents regarding the U.S. military’s activities in Afghanistan, claims the documents are newsworthy because of the film studio’s international and domestic associations.
“Now published in a fully searchable format the Sony Archives offer a rare insight into the inner workings of a large, secretive multinational corporation,” WikiLeaks claimed in a release.
Sony executives and world-famous actors and actresses were embarrassed by a series of emails leaked in the weeks following the hacking, which has been largely attributed to the North Korean government. Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal resigned in the wake of the scandal.
WikiLeaks believes its Sony Archive is far more newsworthy, though, positing that the emails show ominous entanglements between Hollywood, Washington and beyond.
“The work publicly known from Sony is to produce entertainment,” WikiLeaks continued, “however, the Sony Archives show that behind the scenes this is an influential corporation, with ties to the White House (there are almost 100 U.S. government email addresses in the archive), with an ability to impact laws and policies, and with connections to the U.S. military-industrial complex.”
Amongst the documents in the archive, WikiLeaks contends, are lobbying pleas sent directly to politicians by Sony executives about online piracy battles and the studio’s reaction to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement.
"This archive shows the inner workings of an influential multinational corporation,” noted the site’s editor-in-chief Julian Assange. “It is newsworthy and at the center of a geopolitical conflict. It belongs in the public domain. WikiLeaks will ensure it stays there,” he added.
