Birdo

Hacktivists with the collective Anonymous are waging an attack on the website for the White House after successfully breaking the sites for the Department of Justice, Universal Music Group, RIAA and Motion Picture Association of America.

In response to today’s federal raid on the file sharing service Megaupload, hackers with the online collective Anonymous have broken the websites for the Department of Justice, Universal Music Group, RIAA and Motion Picture Association of America.

“It was in retaliation for Megaupload, as was the concurrent attack on Justice.org,” Anonymous operative Barrett Brown tells RT on Thursday afternoon.

Only hours before the DoJ and Universal sites went down, news broke that Megaupload, a massive file sharing site with a reported 50 million daily users, was taken down by federal agents. Four people linked to Megaupload were arrested in New Zealand and an international crackdown led agents to serving at least 20 search warrants across the globe.

Less than an hour after the DoJ and Universal sites came down, the website for the RIAA, or Recording Industry Association of America, went offline as well. Shortly before 6 p.m EST, the government's Copyright.gov site went down as well.

Minutes later, MPAA.org also returned an error as Anonymous hacktivists managed to bring the website for the Motion Picture Association of America. The group, headed by former senator Chris Dodd, is an adamant supporter of both PIPA and SOPA legislation.

Universal Music Group, or UMG, is the largest record company in the United States and under its umbrella are the labels Interscope-Geffen-A&M, the Island Def Jam Motown Music Group and Mercury Records.

Brown adds that “more is coming” and Anonymous-aligned hacktivists are pursuing a joint effort with others to “damage campaign raising abilities of remaining Democrats who support SOPA.”

Although many members of Congress have just this week changed their stance on the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, the raid on Megaupload Thursday proved that the feds don’t need SOPA or its sister legislation, PIPA, in order to pose a blow to the Web.

Brown adds that operatives involved in the project will use an “experimental campaign” and search engine optimization techniques “whereby to forever saddle some of these congressmen with their record on this issue.”

story via RT: http://rt.com/usa/ne...ersal-sopa-235/

Copy-pasted from my blog...

In a quick turn of events, right after the US-wide Internet protest "blackout" in response to SOPA and PIPA, the governments of the world have exercised (too much of) their power and have shut down larga-scale file-sharing super-website Megaupload.

via FBI.gov

:

Seven individuals and two corporations have been charged in the United States with running an international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy of numerous types of copyrighted works through Megaupload.com and other related sites, generating more than $175 million in criminal proceeds and causing more than half a billion dollars in harm to copyright owners...


The individuals and two corporations—Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited—were indicted by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia on Jan. 5, 2012, and charged with engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering, and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement.

The indictment alleges that the criminal enterprise is led by Kim Dotcom, aka Kim Schmitz, and Kim Tim Jim Vestor, 37, a resident of both Hong Kong and New Zealand. Dotcom founded Megaupload Limited and is the director and sole shareholder of Vestor Limited, which has been used to hold his ownership interests in the Mega-affiliated sites.

Others arrested are as follows:

• Finn Batato, 38, a citizen and resident of Germany, who is the chief marketing officer;
  
• Julius Bencko, 35, a citizen and resident of Slovakia, who is the graphic designer;
  
• Sven Echternach, 39, a citizen and resident of Germany, who is the head of business development;
  
• Mathias Ortmann, 40, a citizen of Germany and resident of both Germany and Hong Kong, who is the chief technical officer, co-founder and director;
  
• Andrus Nomm, 32, a citizen of Estonia and resident of both Turkey and Estonia, who is a software programmer and head of the development software division;
  
• Bram van der Kolk, aka Bramos, 29, a Dutch citizen and resident of both the Netherlands and New Zealand, who oversees programming and the underlying network structure for the Mega conspiracy websites.

As alleged in the indictment, the conspirators failed to terminate accounts of users with known copyright infringement, selectively complied with their obligations to remove copyrighted materials from their servers and deliberately misrepresented to copyright holders that they had removed infringing content.Dotcom, Batato, Ortmann, and van der Kolk were arrested today in Auckland, New Zealand, by New Zealand authorities, who executed provisional arrest warrants requested by the United States. Bencko, Echternach, and Nomm remain at large. Today, law enforcement also executed more than 20 search warrants in the United States and eight countries, seized approximately $50 million in assets, and targeted sites where Megaupload has servers in Ashburn, Va., Washington, D.C., the Netherlands, and Canada. In addition, the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., ordered the seizure of 18 domain names associated with the alleged Mega conspiracy.


According to the indictment, for more than five years the conspiracy has operated websites that unlawfully reproduce and distribute infringing copies of copyrighted works, including movies—often before their theatrical release—music, television programs, electronic books, and business and entertainment software on a massive scale.

The indictment states that the conspirators conducted their illegal operation using a business model expressly designed to promote uploading of the most popular copyrighted works for many millions of users to download. The indictment states that the conspirators conducted their illegal operation using a business model expressly designed to promote uploading of the most popular copyrighted works for many millions of users to download.

The investigation was initiated and led by the FBI at the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center), with assistance from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations. Substantial and critical assistance was provided by the New Zealand Police, the Organised and Financial Crime Agency of New Zealand (OFCANZ), the Crown Law Office of New Zealand,and the Office of the Solicitor General for New Zealand; Hong Kong Customs and the Hong Kong Department of Justice; the Netherlands Police Agency and the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Serious Fraud and Environmental Crime in Rotterdam; London’s Metropolitan Police Service; Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt and the German Public Prosecutors; and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police-Greater Toronto Area (GTA) Federal Enforcement Section and the Integrated Technological Crime Unit and the Canadian Department of Justice’s International Assistance Group. Authorities in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Philippines also provided assistance.

Criminal sentences for each of those indicted are as follows:

• Conspiracy to commit racketeering: 20 years
  
• Conspiracy to commit copyright infringement: 5 years
  
• Conspiracy to commit money laundering: 20 years
  
• Criminal copyright infringement: 5 years for each substantial charge

I'm not sure how many of you guys are aware, but US Congress is considering passing to law and enacting two bills that will effectively censor the Internet in the name of copyright law. The two bills:


STOP ONLINE PIRACY ACT (SOPA)


SOPA is an acronym for the Stop Online Piracy Act, and is a bill introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives by Represenative Lamar Smith on October 26, 2011. In similarity with PIPA, SOPA is a build on a previous legislation. This legislation being the PRO-IP Act of 2008.

SOPA, if passed, will work in conjunction with PIPA. As described by such entities as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, SOPA is nothing more so than the U.S. government and private corporations black list. Here is a breakdown of the power given to the government and private corporations.

• The U.S. Attorney General can now seek a court order that would force search engines, advertisers, DNS providers, servers, and payment processors from having any contact with allegedly infringing websites
  
• It will allow private corporations to create their own personal hit lists composed of websites they feel are breaking their copyright policies, ironically this doesn’t have any odd feelings of a legal mafia at all. These companies will be able to directly contact a website’s payment processors a notice to cut all off payment involvement with the targeted website. This payment processors and website of question will then have five days to act before it is simply taken down.
  
• Payment processors will have the power to cut off any website they work with, as long as they can provide a strong reason of why they believe this site is violating copyrights

PROTECT IP ACT (PIPA)



PIPA is an acronym for the Protect IP Act, and was first introduced to the U.S. Senate on May 12, 2011 by Senators Patrick Leahy, Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley. It is also good to take note that PIPA is a re-written legislation, the original being the failed to pass Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) of 2010.

PIPA, if passed, will give U.S. corporations and the government the right to seek affirmative legal action with any website that they see as enabling copyright infringement weather of U.S. origin or not. Here is a breakdown of all that they will have the power to do.

• Force U.S. internet providers to block access to websites deemed as enablers of copyright infringement
  
• Seek legal action by suing search engines, blog sites, directories, or any site in general to have the black listed sites removed from their website
  
• Will be able to force advertising services on infringing websites, and those supporting of them, to remove them from their advertising accounts
  
• Companies will also have the power to sue any new websites that get started after this bill is passed, if they believe that they are not doing a good job of preventing infringement on your website

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These two bills, working together will effectively give power to the government and copyright holders to shut down any site that it deems qualifying as infringing on their copyrights, If your site hosts copyrighted media/material, then your site is shut down. If your site has links to another site that has copyrighted material, your site is shut down. If there's a comment (posted by someone you don't know, and really it's out of your control) that either has copyrighted material within or links to another site with copyrighted material, you're held responsible and your site is shut down.

This completely destroys the freedom, exchange of ideas, and innovation that thrives on there being a free and protected Internet for everyone.

In protest of this legislation, major Internet companies (Google, Reddit, English Wikipedia, the Cheezburger Network, Minecraft, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, TwitPic, Greenpeace International, plus a whole other slew of others that are too many to list) are staging a day of protest in opposition to both bills in Congress by disabling their services. In place of their usual home page, you will see information concerning the two aforementioned bills.

As a form of protest, these sites in opposition will not be performing their usual services and will show everyone what life will be like to not have them on the Internet, which will be the case If these bills pass.

...and as I write this, zero hour is coming very soon. A few sites have already gone down, and some will go down soon (English Wikipedia, Google), and some will go down for a short time. Most sites will be down for exactly 24 hours, some for only 12 hours. During this time, you, as a user, will not be able to use the site as you regularly would. That means no Google searches, no signing into your mail, no way to check up on your daily news, no viral videos, no way to post pics of yourself doing whatever activity that has a company logo showing.

Some sites will go down at midnight tonight, and some will go down at 8:00 AM tomorrow morning. The goal is to get enough people angry and upset and to educate them on a bill that was a long time coming that nobody knew about (most of the companies in support of it never even covered it on the news: NBC, CBS, FOX, CNN).

I don't know about you guys, but I'm very curious to see what will happen tomorrow...what say you guys?