The United States should retaliate against North Korea for the cyber-attack and threats it made against Sony Pictures over the movie "The Interview," says former House Intelligence Chairman Pete Hoekstra.
I hope "that there's retaliation against North Korea, but I hope it's in such a way that maybe we'd never know about it," Hoekstra told John Bachman on "America's Forum" on
Newsmax TV on Friday.
However, he says it's important "that the North Koreans or others who are identified as being responsible for this attack really feel the pain."
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"There's no reason for the U.S. public to actually know what the retaliation may be from the United States government," he said. "It'd probably be better if we didn't know."
Hoekstra says it's very unlikely that North Korea was acting alone.
"The North Koreans had assistance in this," he said.
"As we know, North Korea has a very limited Internet capability and capacity. Just from a capacity standpoint, what happened with Sony probably had to have some assistance — whether it was the Iranians, whether it was the Chinese, whether it was the Russians," he said.
"It's hard to determine at this point, but I'm pretty confident that the North Koreans had help in this attack," Hoekstra said.
Sony decided to release "The Interview," which includes a satirical depiction of a plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, online and in some theaters. The decision was made after announcing that it would not release the film on Christmas Day, as it had originally planned.
Hoekstra said Sony's final decision to release the film "is about free speech, but Sony has a lot of other obligations as well."
"They must have made the internal determination that over the last week or so that they have beefed up their cyber-security that they felt more comfortable releasing the film in that they would be able to withstand any other cyber-attacks," he said.
"Obviously, they've got responsibilities to shareholders, to their theaters, their affiliated theater chains and those types of things," he said.
"The bottom line is this shows what happens when companies don't have in place the type of cyber-security that businesses, small and large, need today," he added.