Late last year, a mysterious group that may or may not have been working for the North Koreans hacked into Sony’s internal computer network and stole a bunch of private emails and copies of unreleased movies. Supposedly, this attack was meant to dissuade Sony from releasing The Interview, and it said it wouldn’t, but then did anyway. Everybody got wrapped up in this big patriotic fervor for a while, and, in retrospect, it was pretty weird.
Now WikiLeaks is allowing all of us to re-experience the thrill of the Sony hack by publishing more than 170,000 emails and 30,000 documents obtained by the hackers last year. None of these files are new, they’re just now being hosted at a place that won’t take them down when Sony sends some angry letters. But WikiLeaks has added a search function to the files that will allow you to look up whatever specific (stolen) information you want. Or you could type in your own name and see if Sony ever talks about you. (It doesn’t, unless you’re Barack Obama.)
As for Sony, it is, unsurprisingly, pissed about this. According to Variety, Sony has accused WikiLeaks of “assisting” the hackers who stole the information by publishing it, and says that continuing to spread the information in these emails will endanger Sony employees. WikiLeaks argues that the stolen items “belong in the public domain,” because that’s WikiLeaks’ whole ethos, but Sony—obviously—disagrees. The MPAA has also stepped in, and it says that WikiLeaks’ decision to publish the information is a “despicable act” that is “further violating the privacy of every person involved.”
Unfortunately for Sony, there’s probably not much it can do now. Now that WikiLeaks has this stuff, it’s officially “out there,” and it’ll be hard to stop it from spreading even more.