Anonymous has attacked several British Government websites in support of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. In the attack titled #OpFreeAssange, Anonymous took down both the site of the Ministry of Justice as well as the site of the Department for Work and Pensions with the message ‘Tango Down http://www.dwp.gov.uk/  & http://www.justice.gov.uk #Assange’ posted by the #AnonymousIRC account.

Assange was granted Asylum by the Ecuadorian government earlier last week, following over two months of waiting within the Ecuadorian embassy after he broke his bail conditions and stayed there overnight. As a result, Assange has been unable to leave the embassy for fear of being arrested.

However, the British government warned that it could still enter the embassy despite the diplomatic immunity he has and arrest Assange. While the British Government have yet to follow through on this threat fully and arrest Assange, they have not seen fit to withdraw it either. The police did enter the embassy two days ago and although they did not arrest Assange, this act could have been the Government showing they will enter and arrest him should they choose to.

Addressing the public keeping watch outside the embassy Assange, said in a speech on Tuesday “Inside this embassy after dark I could hear teams of police swarming up into the building through its internal fire escape, but I knew there would be witnesses and that’s because of you.”

While it is not clear whether Anonymous’ members appear to be carrying out their attacks just for fun or as a way of causing disruption, they do have loosely agreed goals that they attempt to achieve. The main factor prompting Anonymous to launch an attack is any attempt from government’s to curtail people’s freedom of speech or rights especially concerning censorship of the internet.

This can be seen in their defence of several pirating websites, as well as their involvement in the Occupy movement. Therefore it is easy to see just why they have leapt to the defence of Assange. After all, Assange’s website is devoted to bringing news to the public, and like Anonymous, has received condemnation for its methods of obtaining data.

The attack, which also apparently targeted the Prime Ministers No 10 and home office websites, was done using Anonymous’ standard method of DDOSing. DDOSing stands for distributed denial of server, and involves a multitude of computers bombarding a website with requests for information. If successful, the server will be unable to handle the huge amount of information received by the various attackers, and as a result is forced to shut down and stop processing information for the site being attacked.

This type of attack is illegal in both the U.S. and U.K., with laws in place to prevent them from taking place. These laws seem to have done little to prevent people from taking part in the attacks, which have become vastly more popular in recent years.

They are so effective that governments may have started using them. Demonoid, one of the world’s largest torrent websites, was DDOSed and hacked three weeks ago, just days before the Ukranian government raided Demonoid’s servers. This attack was either a huge coincidence or a carefully constructed plan by the Ukranian authorities, turning the attackers’ main weapon against them.

Image Courtesy of   Uros Zunic / Shutterstock.com

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As technology advances at such a rapid pace, government regulations of censorship of the internet are cracking down just as fast. In recent weeks, an anonymous group has begun attacking the Indian government in retaliation of the government blocking citizens from using certain websites.

The websites that have been banned to the public thus far include, “YouTube, Vimeo (a video sharing website), Pastebin (a web application that allows users to write a large amount of text for public viewing), Daily Motion (another video sharing website) and The Pirate Bay (a Swedish website that allows users to download music, movies, games, software, etc), all in an effort to fight online piracy,” says Reporter DJ Pangburn.

Internet censorship has become a global issue. Is it perhaps that governments in various countries don’t want their citizens to see certain things on websites? Pangburn uses examples of the growth of censorship by mentioning that, “of course, it isn’t right to steal and distribute content, but it’s also not right to resort to draconian, Orwellian measures that empower governments to control the Internet.

Indeed, this architecture of control could be used for any variety of measures to stop what the government doesn’t want Internet users to see. This Internet censorship effort is truly global, with various treaties, executive agreements and UN proposals such as one currently being pushed by Russia, Iran and China that would have the UN implement an Internet code of conduct and create a superstructure to manage it all.”

The group ‘Anonymous’ keeps their identity concealed by wearing decorated masks or cloth to cover everything but their eyes. The group is communicating with the Indian government and the rest of the world through a program on the internet they created called ‘Anonymous Operations.’

On their website, the group recently announced they “had taken down the Indian Supreme Court and All India Congressional websites, as well as the Department of Telecommunications with the hacking collective accusing the Indian government of censorship and corruption in the form of bribery,” says Pangburn.

A member of India’s Upper House, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, wrote a letter to India’s Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, expressing his opposition over India’s recent attempt to control the Internet through a United Nations committee. He wrote that, “any attempt to expand government’s power over the Internet should be turned back,” according to his website, Death & Taxes.

‘Anonymous’ chose June 9 as the protest day for the censorship of the internet in India. Several protest sites have already been announced including Mumbai, New Delhi, Chandigarh, Indore, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Kochi, Kozhikode, Nagpur and Pune, according to the Times of India.

‘Anonymous’ has made a statement in regard to what they are hoping for as a result of the protests, but wants it to be known that they have no plans of this becoming a violent retaliation against the government. In the groups press release they stated, “this is to be a 100% Non-Violent Civil rights protest,” and encouraging “any one who feels they need this movement needs to be in their city can start a FB page for the Occupy City movement and let us know about it.”

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