It's certainly true that a ransom was demanded first, giving Sony a few days to respond, and then only after the compromise was completed were demands made to remove 'The Interview'.

It truly is difficult to attribute and only with more evidence and a more careful analysis of timeline, the malware, and the communications will things come into focus.

One thing I have not yet been able to find are numbers for the ransom. I've seen the emails demanding ransom and the defacings demanding the same, but nowhere have I seen a number of dollars being demanded. Have you seen that anywhere?

Plus, would terrorists offer an opt out(for personal information) for rank and file Sony personnel?

Whoa. Terrorists? Which terrorists? What terrorism are you talking about?

Any action that results in rich assholes losing a bit of money or potentially losing a bit of money falls under the umbrella of terrorism now, or 'economic terrorism' if you will. So copyright infringement and of course any form of organized protest fit the bill, along with hacking a Japanese company with offices in the US.

You can try to fight the total annihilation of meaning in our language, but as you see here it is a losing battle.

Oh my. This is a derailment of the thread but here are some (political) words off the top of my head having been annihilated recently:

terrorism

socialism

marxism

hero

capitalism

free market

invisible hand

imminent

torture

collect

to brief

espionage

surveillance

privacy

freedom

search

Thanks to our favorite president GW Bush, any computer hacking is considered "terrorism" and has similar consequences just like real terrorism such as ISIL or Al Qaida:

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/257

I would suggest that even ISIL isn't a terrorist group, at least in the same sense that the word terrorism has been used throughout the past 100 years. ISIL represents 30k mobilized personel, are made up of a huge number of disparate factions (some fighting for a three state solution - which would actually be a great improvement in the organization of the middle east, whose lines right now were drawn by the British and have nothing to do with historical or cultural boundaries), are fighting with traditional armies with traditional warfare weaponry and because they are fighting for political change in a state where authoritarian governments with financial and political ties to outside nations has limited how much they can represent their people. ISIL to me, if I use textbook comparisons, looks more like an grassroots insurgent army fighting for political representation.

Re: computer hacking considered "terrorism" - this represents yet another way "terrorism" no longer means the despicable act it was originally associated with. And doesn't that make the "War on Terror" also a "War on Hacking"? How the hell are we going to win a war on hacking?

I do hope that the OP was not using the GW Bush administration definition of terrorism...