Let’s do this Hollywood’s way. Freeze frame, then roll back a few days – to the hours before Sony, be-hacked, bothered and bewildered, decided to give the “Guardians of Peace” their victory and put its Pyongyang assassination “comedy” back in the can. We know what happened after The Interview was whisked away. Sonorous warnings from the White House, with guarded confirmation from the FBI that this was a digital plot hatched beyond the 38th parallel. Sonorous editorials round the world (‘North Korea 1, Freedom 0” in the Times). Much Tinseltown heaving about corporate cowardice and letting the bad guys win. But before?

Hey! Do you like the one about Angelina Jolie being a “minimally talented spoiled brat”? Or those sniggery jokes at Obama’s expense? Or comparisons of who got paid what making American Hustle? Or the news that George Clooney got sad when his last movie bombed? And what about that new Bond script, details revealed? Not to mention a (largely unmentioned) mountain of personal tax details and sundry private info. The cyber-mob with a Korean terror twist who raided Sony, spirited away enough juicy emails to set hundreds of press pages turning (and broadcasters burbling). The moguls’ emails and rows make compulsive reading. But where, pray, was our old chum “public interest” in all of this?

Aaron Sorkin, world champion liberal moralist and writer of The Newsroom as well as The West Wing, told the New York Times: “I understand that news outlets routinely use stolen information. That’s how we got the Pentagon Papers … [But] do the emails contain any information about Sony breaking the law? No. Misleading the public? No. Acting in direct harm to customers? No. Is there even one sentence in one private email that was stolen that even hints at wrongdoing of any kind? Anything that can help, inform or protect anyone?” The cyber-raiders might have been threatening violence in a blowhard way, but first they were feeding stolen titbits of celebrity trivia to the lions. Banquet hour at the zoo – in London and LA. The spoiled bratfulness of Angelina, and George Clooney’s “agony” duly featured in the Times and the Guardian, as well as every tabloid in sight.

There was nothing in Britain to justify publication under the existing press standards code and plenty of restrictions already on the statute book that would theoretically make it impossible anyway. But American law is far more permissive (and the US manages without a national press standards code anyway). So Angelina and related humiliations garnered exactly the kind of publicity the hacking gang intended.

Now, of course, GB is not an island, just one more fish in a digital sea. Of course headlines cross the Atlantic in a trice. Of course the whole edifice of regulation, bombed by broadband again, has little sensible to contribute. We’re in celebrity hock to the US; to American custom and legal practice; to American definitions of privacy.

But the modern moral maze touches every shore. Fleet Street has spent four years apologising for hacking celebrities’ phones and gathering celebrity gossip along the way. Journalists have gone to prison for trafficking in stolen information goods without any standard public interest defence – while American editorialists have sniffed at such debased British practice. But watch what happens when a shadowy gang of hackers runs a giant corporation ragged. Suddenly, everything’s different. Suddenly not just the deed but the details make a big, big story – and the fact that it is a story underpins the rationale of the crime.

Answers? You can see security agencies everywhere licking lips at the thought that hacking of any sort can one day be declared off-limits. (Dump future Snowdens in the Sony basket). You can see news organisations trying, and failing, to reach some cross-border accord on what can be published. But you can also see nothing good emerging. Only the saintliness of Sorkin’s Newsroom could find high global ground here. Only the isolation of a North Korean-style news regime, frankly, would allow us to go our own way. And that doesn’t sound like much of an answer either.