Anonymous take down Department of Justice, RIAA, MPAA, Universal Music

Earlier today the sites Megaupload and Megavideo were shut down by ICE, a federal group responsible for working with and shutting down groups that pirate media illegally – in retaliation the hacker collective known as Anonymous have shut down the RIAA, the MPAA, Universal Music, and the United States Government site Justice.org, belonging to the Department of Justice. These hits have been confirmed by several anonymously run “official” Anonymous sources such as twitter accounts @Anonops, @AnonymousIRC, and @YourAnonNews, and were likely planned in advance. As a bit of an extra jab after the biggest sites in this situation were downed, Anonymous noted that they should simply say, “for #SOPA supporters their#SOPAblackout is today.”

You can check for yourself with several sites that check the network status of sites, RIAA.ORG is down for the count, Justice.org is no longer, http://universalmusic.com is nowhere to be seen, and the Motion Picture Association of America will be showing no films at the moment. Each of these groups had a part in knocking out Megaupload and certainly had a say in not only SOPA but PIPA as well. For those of you that don’t know, both bills are being heavily reconsidered now due to the massive dissent seen yesterday during the blackouts.

What this appears very much to be is the solidification of the internetization of justice on a grand scale. As AnonDaily reports, Anonymous has taken down 10 sites in 20 minutes and this is therefor the “Largest On Scale Attack Ever” by the group. We’ll see where this leads us in regards to fair sharing and trading of ideas on the internet from here on out, a place where hackers take command of the internet with their ability to knock out any website, no matter who runs it, in no time flat.