I don't understand this statement. Sony is not a person, it's a company comprised of the people who are earning a living working there. This is true from CEO down to the temp workers. Did you mean just the executive team? The employee roster in any company is a state that is constantly shifting as people leave and join new places. There has been a lot change in who works at sony since 2005. Do you have no sympathy for the people who did not leave after 2005? Do you have no sympathy for new executives? Like what are you even saying? Maybe you just dislike all executives and managers.
IMO the higher up the chain you are, the more responsibility you have to secure the systems you are responsible for.
I feel like it's a perceived lack of accountability (from the perspective of the hackers) of the executive team that leads to these kinds of leaks. When they feel they aren't seeing justice - as defined by them - then I think they're more motivated to do something about it themselves.
Of course you can have sympathy for a company. What is a person if not a bunch of semi-autonomous systems working together to make decisions and perform actions? What is a company if not the same thing?
There are the people who work at Sony. There is Sony as an organization. They are not the same thing, but they can each be described independently. The decisions and actions of a company is a product not of individual humans but of a group of humans working in conjunction to do more than one could do by itself. You can't blame the person. That's not fair. You have to blame the organization.
However, blame is exactly the job role of the executive team, since a company can't be fired. You blame Sony. You fire their CxO.
So we can never again blame a CEO (or other executive) for the actions of the company? If the organization is a separable entity from the people it must be so?
The higher up the chain of command you are the more accountable you should be, but harming the poor folks at the bottom isn't doing anyone any favours.
Companies can and should die. That's their secret superpower, that they can die without destroying and killing of all they consisted of.
That's why economy works. Companies that make bad decisions die and resources (human and the other kind) are absorbed by other entities. Sure it might hurt, but keeping alive company that makes bad decisions causes much more hurt to the world. Pissing off lots of competent people to the point that some of them did what they did is not a good decision for a company to make in XXI century.
I'm torn. On one hand, I want to see Sony the company suffer, but it still feels unfair to attack and expose the people who work there - the folks who are just trying to pay their bills.
I wonder at what point it becomes necessary for a person to judge the risk that joining a company with a questionable history will have on their privacy and personal security. I think the sad fact is though, in all likelihood Sony didn't have especially poor security, they likely had moderate to good security but failed when facing a persistent threat. I get the impression many other companies (large to small) would have failed a lot sooner.
Is there anything employees can do to protect themselves from these kinds of breaches? Is the answer to sue our employers who fail to protect this info?