A group of hackers known as Anonymous has taken down a Turkish government website in a protest against recently introduced Internet filters that many consider to be censorship.

"(The Turkish government) has blocked thousands of websites and blogs while abusive legal proceedings against online journalists persist. The government now wants to impose a new filtering system on the 22nd of August that will make it possible to keep records of all the people's internet activity. Though it remains opaque why and how the system will be put in place, it is clear that the government is taking censorship to the next level," said Anonymous in a message on its website (currently offline).

Anonymous took down the site for Turkey's Telecommunications Communication Presidency (TIB), which is still inaccessible at the time of this writing.

Turkey has a long history of Internet censorship, with the country's ISPs having blocked YouTube and numerous other sites in the the past couple of years.

In a similar move in February 2011, Anonymous took down the sites of the Ministry of Information and President Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party to protest against Internet censorship in Egypt.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ssuni

[via Reuters]