Dead Drop: February 22-28

WHAT WOULD PETRAEUS SAY? — More than 195K people (and counting) have now watched The Cipher Brief’s YouTube interview with former CIA Director General David Petraeus (Ret.). We caught up with the general in Munich earlier this month at the Munich Security Conference, just after he stepped off the train from Ukraine, (where he’s traveled some nine times since Russia’s full-scale invasion). In our very popular conversation, Gen. Petraeus offered new insights into Ukraine’s drone program, with an eye toward both the innovation that continues to happen in the battlespace (particularly in the no man’s land along the border) as well as where the industry is headed now that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has okayed the export of drones. It was fascinating to hear him explain how that one decision is expected to impact future wars and the impact it will also have on Ukraine's post-war security - assuming we ever get to a deal. Watch Petraeus' interview here.

THE HIGH COST OF BEING COOL - Michael Lynton, former CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, is looking back on the 2014 film The Interview (the 2014 Seth Rogen–James Franco comedy about killing Kim Jong Un) with deep regret. In an excerpt from his memoir published in the Wall Street Journal, Lynton sais greenlighting the movie was the “biggest mistake of my career.” The fallout roughly 70 percent of Sony’s servers were hacked. Embarrassing and person emails, scripts, and other personal data was then dumped. The believed culprit: North Korea. Lynton says his real failure was greenlighting the project “on the fly,” driven less by strategy and more by a “desire to belong.” He admits in his memoir that he wanted to run with the ‘cool kids’, the ones making “subversive” movies at the time. Lynton says he, along with his colleagues and his family, paid a very high price for his mistake. The cyberattack was deemed one of the worst in corporate history.