Anonymous

In its latest hacktivist campaign, the Anonymous group has targeted a government site in Turkey over a proposed new Internet censorship plan.

The site for Turkey's Telecommunications Communication Presidency (TIB) was inaccessible late today.

"Over the last few years, we have seen how the Turkish government has tightened its grip on the internet. It has blocked thousands of websites and blogs while abusive legal proceedings against online journalists persist," Anonymous said in a statement on its Web site. "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."

The loose-knit Anonymous group had planned to launch a distributed denial-of-service (DoS) attack on the Turkish telecoms site beginning at 6 p.m. (1500 GMT) on Thursday as part of "Operation Turkey."

"We will not stand back in the face of an attack on our country by this group," Yavuz Kocoglu, head of an association set up to tackle IT crimes, said in a statement to Reuters. "We call on the state bodies responsible for fighting such crimes to act."

There have been protests in Turkey ahead of national elections scheduled to take place in three days.

Other Anonymous targets have been Iran, Egypt , Sony and companies like PayPal, Visa and MasterCard after they stopped allowing Wikileaks to receive contributions through their sites.