WASHINGTON — The Obama administration imposed sanctions Friday on three entities and 10 individuals tied to the North Korean government, describing it as the first step in response to the devastating cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment.
White House officials said there was no evidence that the 10 officials took part in ordering or planning the attack, but they described them as central to a number of provocative actions against the United States.
“It’s a first step,” one of the officials said. “The administration felt that it had to do something to stay on point. This is certainly not the end for them.”
The sanctions, designed to isolate North Korea from the global financial system, are the first issued in direct response to a cyberattack on a U.S. corporation, and North Korea was to blame, the officials said.
The administration alleges that North Korea or people acting on its behalf hacked into Sony’s emails and private data to avenge the planned Christmas Day release of The Interview, a movie comedy about a plot to kill North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
In an executive order, President Barack Obama authorized the Treasury Department to block the individuals and agencies from accessing the U.S. financial system and banned U.S. citizens from engaging in business with them.
Sony initially canceled the film’s release after major theater chains balked at showing it following threats to theatergoers, a step Obama criticized. Sony then allowed a smaller number of theaters to show the film and released it widely on the Internet and through on-demand services.
The Obama administration’s assertion of a North Korean connection to the Sony hack remains controversial. Some cybersecurity experts say there’s compelling evidence that the break-in was the work of a disgruntled former Sony employee. An official of Norse Corp., a cybersecurity company in San Mateo, Calif., told the Los Angeles Times that it believed the hacking was an inside job.
Another security expert, Marc Rogers, summed up the sentiment with a widely circulated blog post Dec. 21 in which he concluded that “we don’t have any solid evidence that implicates North Korea, while at the same time we don’t have enough evidence to rule North Korea out.”
Administration officials said those analysts do not have access to the evidence that persuaded the president to blame North Korea. They continue to insist that they cannot explain the basis of the president’s declaration without revealing some of the most sensitive sources and technologies at their disposal.
The Treasury Department said the sanctions were part of an executive order that Obama signed against both the North Korean government and the Workers’ Party, which has complete control of North Korea’s politics.
In a statement, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew suggested that the sanctions were intended not only to punish North Korea for the hacking of Sony but also to warn the country not to try anything like it again.
“Today’s actions are driven by our commitment to hold North Korea accountable for its destructive and destabilizing conduct,” he said. “Even as the FBI continues its investigation into the cyberattack against Sony Pictures Entertainment, these steps underscore that we will employ a broad set of tools to defend U.S. businesses and citizens, and to respond to attempts to undermine our values or threaten the national security of the United States.”
The three entities hit with sanctions Friday were already under other sanctions tied to rights abuses and North Korea’s successful nuclear weapons program. They are the spy agency known as the Reconnaissance General Bureau, the state procurement company Korea Tangun Trading Corp. and the Korea Mining Development Trading Corp., known by its acronym Komid.
While these agencies are already treated as international pariahs, the senior administration officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the new executive order made it easier in the future to go after government entities, representatives or members of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea.
“What this does is really expand the aperture of our authorities” to sanction, one administration official said.
Eight of the 10 individuals sanctioned were Komid representatives: one in Russia, two in southern Africa, two in Iran, two in Syria and one who serves as an external affairs officer for Pyongyang. The Treasury Department also targeted a North Korean government official and sanctioned Kim Kwang Chun, a government official and representative of the trading company in the Chinese city of Shenyang, near the North Korean border.
“In some sense, this is a game of Whac-a-Mole,” said Marcus Noland, an expert on North Korea and executive vice president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “We go after the North Korean individuals and entities, the North Koreans respond by expanding” the number of front companies.
There’s also a practical reason for making it easier to sanction North Korean companies and representatives, he said. Since taking power in late 2011, Kim Jong Un has moved aggressively to replace his late father’s loyalists at the tops of state agencies with his own confidants.
“He does just seem to go through people quickly. He’s been through four defense ministers,” said Noland, adding that all the rotation means “the U.S. would have to add names to keep current.”
The new sanctions came a day after a New Year’s Day speech by Kim Jong Un in which he appeared to offer direct talks about unification with South Korea, peppered with hostile rhetoric aimed at the United States. South Korea quickly proposed preparatory talks to explore a summit.
“One way to interpret this is that the North Koreans have finally gotten the message that the road to Washington runs through Seoul,” Noland said.
McClatchy Newspapers,
The New York Times,
Bloomberg News
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