Anonymous forces DOJ and several others to protest SOPA / PIPA

by Steve Ragan - Jan 19 2012, 23:34

Anonymous, in response to the indictment of Megaupload and its removal from the Internet, has forced the U.S. Department of Justice, the MPAA, the RIAA, Universal Music, the U.S. Copyright office, and BMI to protest SOPA and PIPA. How? By launching a massive DDoS strike, which at the time this story was posted, had been active for nearly an hour.

Within minutes, less than an hour after Megaupload fell from the Internet, and the DOJ released a press statement on the Megaupload indictment, Anonymous reacted. With a statement warning the government that they should’ve “expected” them, OpMegaupload was launched.

On a massive scale, including a reported 5,635 people (or more than 20,000 depending on the source) who armed themselves with LOIC in order to participate in the DDoS, Anonymous went on a rampage.

(Note: Sources close to the operation have said that there are about 1,200 people on IRC, and that the reported numbers for LOIC are suspect. In any case, lower numbers have not seemed to have impacted the DDoS at all, as each of the domains remain off-line.)

As of 6:20 p.m. EST, Anonymous had quickly amassed a hit list that included the MPAA.org, RIAA.org, Copyright.gov, Justice.gov, universalmusic.com, bmi.com were all offline.

As we mentioned in our earlier coverage of the inducement, the government’s actions against Megaupload are exactly the actions that has major domains like Google, and content providers like Reddit, worried. Megaupload was charged with – in the DOJ’s words – “engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering, and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement.”

The case itself comes just after millions of people wrote to Congress, protesting the controversial SOPA/PIPA bills. The timing of the Megaupload’s fall, and the arrests of foreign citizens on U.S. orders cannot be ignored.

As Mike Masnick on Tech Dirt explained, the DOJ should have known such a maneuver would be ill-advised.

“For them not to think the reaction would be fast and furious shows (yet again) just how incredibly, ridiculously, out of touch with the internet the DC establishment is.”

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