Well now we know why we haven’t been able to access at the Department of Justice’s press release about its raid on Megaupload for the past few hours!
The websites for the U.S. Justice Department, the Recording Industry Association of America, Motion Picture Association of America, and Universal Music Group have all been down this afternoon. As TPMIdeaLab reports, hackers who associate themselves with Anonymous are taking credit. Twitter accounts like @YourAnonNews and @AnonOps claim the attacks are in retaliation for today’s shutdown and arrests related to the file sharing site Megaupload.
ONE HOUR! Tango down! universalmusic.com & justice.gov #Megaupload
— AnonOps (@anonops) January 19, 2012
Anonymous/Megaupload backlash update: RIAA.ORG is now Tango Down | #OpPayback #OpMegaupload #SOPA #PIPA
— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) January 19, 2012
The government takes down #Megaupload? 15 minutes later #Anonymous takes down government & record label sites. #ExpectUs
— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) January 19, 2012
Betabeat has not been able to access the DOJ’s site since at least 3.30pm EST and as of publishing, we can’t access the RIAA, or UMG websites either, although the MPAA site has started loading. Hello there, Matt Damon! You bought a zoo!
The same DOJ press release we’ve been trying to click on was posted on Pastebin, a popular hangout for Anon hackers. As IdeaLab points out, “But going after the Justice Department’s website probably isn’t the brightest idea, given that the feds believe that DDoS attacks are a crime and have charged members of the group Anonymous for such efforts in the past.”
However, between the blackouts in response to SOPA and Israeli hackers retaliating against Arab hackers, it seems digital tit for tat is the new mode of political discourse. In the case of Megaupload founder Kim Schmidt (aka Kim Dotcom), Anonymous might find itself once again in the Julian Assange spot of backing a man of questionable intentions in the name of the free flow of information. Not that they care, necessarily.
