It really was only a matter of time until the collective hive mind of Anonymous got whipped up into a fury over the latest censorship news in Australia. What with our strange stance on certain female bodily functions and minimum restrictions on their bust sizes to even being so bold as to ask the almighty Google themselves to censor Youtube (and comparing us to China in the process, seriously Conroy are you that bonkers?). The media is already in a tizzy over all these issues but of course the stand alone complex that is Anonymous will take any opportunity to strike at the heart of the beast and they did so with Operation Titstorm yesterday morning:
Several Australian government websites were slowly recovering Wednesday hours after the online prankster group Anonymous unleashed a massive distributed denial-of-service attack to protest the country’s evolution toward internet censorship.
The group, which previously brought down Scientology’s websites has also undertaken a host of other online pranks. It dubbed the new attack “Operation Titstorm” to protest the government’s move to require the filtering of pornography that uses adult actors if they appear underage. Violent material targeting children is also to be censored.
…
“No government should have the right to refuse its citizens access to information solely because they perceive it to be unwanted,” the e-mail said. “The Australian government will learn that one does not mess with our porn. No one messes with our access to perfectly legal (or illegal) content for any reason.”
It was just over 5 months ago that Anonymous launched their first attack against the government and to be honest my opinions on the attacks haven’t changed. Whilst this certaintly has accomplished the goal of getting more attention on the issue using such nefarious means is both childish and damaging to people who are fighting the course through legitimate channels. Luckily many of the media outlets only go so far as to say the attackers called themselves Anonymous and list their various pranks. Heaven help us if a real journalist did some investigation and made the connection back to 4chan and all the inaccurate connections that implies.
What did suprise me though was the reaction at my workplace, which spurred a quite intelligent discussion about the matter. Don’t get me wrong we’re all quite tech savvy but my reaction amongs the general populace when it comes to talking about the Internet filter in Australia is usually one of either misinformation or complete disdain. When the proposal was first introduced I spent a good hour explaining to the in-laws how damaging it would be. With 2 of them being members of the Australia Federal Police force it was even harder as they have had to deal with real world implications of what the filter would attempt to stop. To their credit though once the facts were laid out to them (I think the tipping point was how easy it was to circumvent) they did come around and are now at least questioning what benefit the filter will provide.
The sad thing is that an attack like this generated more press in a day than most of the No Clean Feed campaigns have done in their entire lifetime. I still believe that the grass roots approach is the best legal method of garnering attention but when a collective hive mind can flood a couple servers and in doing so the newspapers as well it makes you look at all the effort put into these legitimate campaigns with a twinge of frustration. Sure our initial volleys certaintly did damage to the proposal (by all means it was meant to be implemented now) but few of us made waves comparable to that of Operation Titstorm.
I can’t condone these attacks yet I feel that I also can’t condem them either. The more publicity the Internet Filter gets the more likely it is to go down in flames however every one of these attacks is yet another rhetorical weapon to use in the fight to get it implemented. Only time will tell whether the end justified the means in this case and I hope our fight won’t suffer because of it.
That won’t stop me from giggling at the name though 🙂
