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Friday, May 18, 2012

Anonymous Launches #OpIndia Against India's Internet Censorship : Disables Number Of Sites



Since a few months, internet censorship is a hot topic in India. A few months back, Mr. Kapil Sibal provoked controversy when he spoke about proposed censorship against social networking sites such as facebook, Twitter, Google along with other sites. India is also thinking of bringing the Internet Censorship bill. A few months back, a number of file sharing websites were blocked in India following a John Doe order. Upon visiting the blocked website, users were shown a message that the site they are trying to access is blocked as per instructions from Department of Telecom (DoT). No private ISP ever accepted that they have started blocking any website. Later all blocked websites were accessible.

Now this censorship saga has continued. A few websites were blocked again this week. These sites include torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, BitSnoop along with some other sites such as PasteBin and Vimeo. This time also the reason is same - John Doe Order from a court. Many users were unable to visit these sites and they were shown the same message as last time - This site is blocked as per instructions from Department of Telecom (DoT)

Now this time, this censorship move has caught attention of famous Hactivist group Anonymous. It seems the Anonymous boats are sailing towards India. Twitter account associated with Anonymous - @Anon_Central tweeted a hint of #OpIndia few hours ago.

Namaste #India, your time has come to trash the current government and install a new one. Good luck. | #SaveTPB #Anonymous #Censorship

Another Twitter account associated with Anonymous - @YourAnonNews also suggested the launch of #OpIndia.

Namaste India - We see you've met some of the #Anonymous battle fleet's infamous cannon fire. Tsk tsk for censoring #TPB & others. #OpIndia

After the launch of #OpIndia, Anonymous temporarily brought down a number of Indian Government websites. The attacked websites included the Department of Telecom site - www.dot.gov.in, Supreme Court of India's website - www.supremecourtofindia.nic.in, and All India Congress Committee's website - www.aicc.org.in. Anonymous also brought down www.copyrightlabs.in, a Chennai based firm fighting to curb piracy.



All the above mentioned sites were down at the time of writing this. Any site which recovered was attacked back and taken down again. A Twitter account associated with Anonymous @opindia_revenge posted constant updates on attacked websites.

http://mit.gov.in & http://dot.gov.in both down!

Anonymous #India- Tango down: http://www.copyrightlabs.in | Reason: for promoting #Censorship & lobbying / bribing the politicians to pass the bill



At the time of writing this, these websites are under constant attacks. It can not be said how large the attack will be and how far Anonymous will go with #OpIndia. While Anonymous may think attacking Government websites will be a good idea to force the Government to unblock the sites, it is still unclear if Government actually knows about what is going on. When asked by a News Channel, Chairman of AICC'c computer cepartment Vishwajeet Singh denied any attacks on AICC website.

The site is not hacked at all. It was not opening for sometime because the load on the particular server was too heavy due to huge number of hits after the news of website hacking spread. It went slow at that time due to over- traffic

it would be interesting to see how the Indian Government reacts on this issue (if it reacts at all) and if it will unblock the websites. It can not be said for how long these sites will be blocked.

Keep in touch fore more info regarding this topic.

Related Post - Anonymous Continues #OpIndia - Disables More Indian Websites

Related Post - India, Piracy, Censorship, Government and Media : Where India Is Going?


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