UK Government’s Copyright Tsar Blames ISPs for Facilitating Sony Hack

The UK Prime Minister’s (David Cameron) sometimes controversial Intellectual Property Advisor, Mike Weatherley (Conservative MP for Hove and Portslade), has somewhat bizarrely blamed broadband ISPs for helping to “facilitate” major hacks like the recent once that took place against Sony.

As any seasoned IT person knows, tracing hackers, whom more often than not know precisely how best to exploit the Internet’s underlying weaknesses, is an incredibly difficult thing to do. Indeed from the ISPs perspective there would be virtually no way of knowing what a hacker (e.g. one of their customers) was actually doing without breaking various privacy rules and even then hackers always mask their activity.

Never the less Mr Weatherley, who once also called for seemingly casual Internet pirates to be put in prison (we’re not sure the prison service could handle that one), has reacted to the serious hack of Sony’s servers (among other things this resulted in several pre-release films being leaked onto the Internet) by putting some of the blame onto the shoulders of ISPs.

Mike Weatherley said (TorrentFreak):

“Piracy is a huge international problem. The recent cyber-attack on Sony and subsequent release of films to illegal websites is just one high-profile example of how criminals exploit others’ Intellectual Property.

Unfortunately, the theft of these films – and their subsequent downloads – has been facilitated by web-hosting companies and, ultimately, ISPs who do have to step-up and take some responsibility.”

Funnily enough there’s no mention of Sony’s failure to correctly secure their infrastructure against attackers, as demonstrated by several high-profile hacks against their servers over the past couple of years. Not to mention that all reputable ISPs have strict rules against abuse of their networks, although the nature of the Internet makes those very difficult to enforce.

Blaming ISPs is also a bit like blaming the road network because some of those who drive on it might be planning criminal activity, but you can never be sure who and even then the hacker would be the one driving an almost completely invisible car.

No doubt this all falls into the Government’s growing push towards the development of an even tougher Internet Snooping law than currently exists, which has twice been defeated in the past due in part to significant opposition and public distrust of the Government’s motives / politicians in general.

Lest we not forget that in Sony’s case one of the current suspects is North Korea, which is rather different from looking at a domestic individual.