The attacks, dubbed ‘Operation Titstorm’, began this morning, targeting the websites of Senator Stephen Conroy and the Australian Parliament House, taking them both down with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) for a period of time.
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| Anonymous’ ‘Operation Titstorm’ flyer |
The group is protesting Australia’s upcoming Internet censorship legislation, in particular the proposed banning of images of small-breasted females and female ejaculation, and also claims it will follow up with pornographic emails, spam faxes and prank calls to government offices.
“Australia’s laws on internet censorship are already among the most restrictive in the western world. Their government filters more internet content than any other Parliamentary Democracy. For some elements within the Government, including Telecommunications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy, this still is not enough. Late in January of 2009 he proposed legislature that would lead to mandatory ISP filtering for all of Australia. The stated goal is to prevent Australia from viewing ‘illegal and unwanted content’ on the Internet,” Anonymous said in an email release to Australian media.
“The ambiguity of the term ‘unwanted content’ is completely unacceptable. No government should have the right to refuse its citizens access to information solely because they perceive it to be ‘unwanted’.”
It is the second such attack from Anonymous; the first, in September last year, brought down the websites of the Prime Minister and the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
The System Administrators Guild of Australia, SAGE AU, has condemned the attacks, saying that while it believes the Internet filtering legislation will fail to work, the DDoS attacks are the wrong way to express disagreement with the proposed law.
As one member commented after the previous DDoS attack on Australian government servers, the result was to “waste the time of long-suffering System Administrators who had to stay back at work after hours to clean up the mess.”
SAGE AU is not the only critic of the legislation to condemn the attacks. Stop Internet Censorship co-founder Nicholas Perkins said, “By attempting to bring down or deface government websites, a minority of Internet users have brought negative attention to what is a very important issue for Australians.
“It would be much more helpful for these people to put their efforts behind legitimate action to stop this ineffective and inefficient attempt at censorship by the Australian government.”
