North Korea hardly even has an Internet, as you might expect in a country that doesn't allow anyone to know anything. So when word came down yesterday that the terror hell nation's connection had gone down, it wasn't surprising that speculation immediately commenced: Ooooh, maybe this is Obama's response to the Sony hack!
According to the Washington Post, the State Department at least wants to leave the impression that we might have been behind it:
On Monday, a State Department official issued a somewhat coy non-denial when asked about U.S. involvement in North Korea’s blackout. The official wouldn’t comment on how the government plans to avenge North Korea’s alleged attack on Sony but added, “As we implement our responses, some will be seen, some will not be seen.”
Let's hope this wasn't our response, because if it was, it was one of the lamest responses imaginable. As Reuters explains, attacking North Korea's Internet for any length of time - let alone a mere nine hours - ain't attacking much:
With barely 1,000 Internet addresses, one Internet service provider and one connection to the outside world via China, North Korea's cyberlinks are negligible - barely one percent of that of Afghanistan, a similarly impoverished country with a roughly comparable population.
By the same token, closing down the links wouldn't have had much of an effect within North Korea. For internal online communications it uses a closed Intranet network, but that was apparently not affected, according to officials across the border in the South.
North Korea is "one of the least connected countries in the world," said Matthew Prince, CEO of U.S.-based CloudFlare, which, among other services, protects websites against web-based attacks.
It's also one of the most vulnerable, said Jim Cowie, chief scientist at Dyn, a U.S.-based Internet performance company.
"North Korea, historically, is fairly fragile," he said after Internet access to North Korea was restored at 0146 GMT on Tuesday. Internet links to the country remained snapped for several hours, but Cowie said the country had experienced outages of similar length this year.
So not only does the Internet in North Korea hardly exist, but our real enemies there - the Kim regime and its cronies - don't even use it. Think about that: In a nation that is determined to deny information acceess to everyone but the government, it was shut off for everyone but the government. Some response that is.
Now it's entirely possible that this is just a coincidence. Like the story says, North Korea's Internet is so fragile that yesterday's nine-hour outage wasn't even that unusual an event. It's just that before the Sony hacker incident no one would have thought such an event noteworthy.
But this is the problem when you have a president who vows to response "proportionally" instead of massively to an attack on the United States. Obama is really not interested in exacting a serious price from an enemy nation that attacks us. If he absolutely has to do something, it will be something allows him to say he's evened the score so he can call it good and go back to running roughshod over the Constitution with executive orders and memoranda.
Maybe Obama will surprise us and do something worthwhile to the Norks for the attack on Sony. I hope he does. But his pattern has been to dither and prevaricate, not to take strong and decisive action. And even his rhetoric - that he will respond "proportionally" to what he sees as a mere act of "cybervandalism" - doesn't suggest he's up for much of a fight.
Then again, unless the enemy is the Republican Party or the Tea Party, he never is.
