A message posted by GOP, presumably the same Guardians of Peace that is claiming responsibility for the crippling Sony Pictures hack, sends an ominous threat to the Hollywood studio about impending bigger data leaks.
The message, which has been removed from text-sharing website Pastebin, also asks Sony to "tell us what you want in our Christmas gift" and instructs the company to send their messages to one of five anonymous addresses.
"We are preparing for you a Christmas gift," the message says. "The gift will be larger quantities of data. And it will be more interesting. The gift will surely give you much more pleasure and put Sony Pictures into the worst state."
The message comes just one day before Sony Pictures, through heavyweight lawyer David Boies, demanded media outlets to stop publishing information retrieved from the gigabytes of internal Sony files released online by the hackers.
In a letter sent to news organizations including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg as well as technology news publications such as The Verge and Re/code, Boies tells [pdf] news outlets that Sony "does not consent to your possession, review, copying, dissemination, publication, uploading, downloading, or making any use of the stolen information."
The letter further requests that news outlets destroy their copies of any information downloaded from the data dump and to notify Sony once the copies have been destroyed.
Should media organizations fail to comply with Sony's request, Boies says the company "will have no choice but to hold you responsible for any damage or loss arising from such use or dissemination."
The cease-and-desist letter comes on the same day as Sony Pictures held a 20-minute meeting with employees in Los Angeles, where staff were updated on what the company was doing in response to the cyber intrusion and the chaos that ensued.
According to a source cited by AFP, staff applauded their bosses at the 20-minute meetings where Sony vowed it will not be destroyed by the cyberattack.
"This will not take us down," Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton reportedly said. "You should not be worried about the future of this studio."
Sony co-chairman Amy Pascal also appeared before employees to apologize again for a series of "thoughtless and insensitive" emails she had with top producer Scott Rudin about President Obama's imagined preference for movies starring African-American actors.
"You all are the backbone of this company," Pascal said. "And it is your incredible efforts and perseverance that will get us through this."
While Sony's staff appears to be working with their employer, the media generally seems to be uncooperative with Sony's demand to refrain from publishing information gleaned from the leaked files.
Legal experts specializing in First Amendment rights believe Sony will not get far in court as far as suppressing freedom of speech in media outlets that report about the files leaked by the hackers, citing legal precedents where the Supreme Court ruled that journalists had the right to publish stolen information in cases where they "played no part in the legal interception."
"When information is on a matter of public concern, the court held, the fact that it was illegally leaked doesn't make publishing it an invasion of privacy," says UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, summarizing the court's ruling on the 2001 Bartnicki v. Vopper case and the 1969 case by then Sen. Thomas J. Dodd against two investigative reporters.
