At the beginning of 2012, Anonymous staged its widest attack ever, by coordinating a series of website shutdowns in response to the US Department of Justice shutting down the popular file uploading site, Megaupload. Following the SOPA and PIPA acts, officials claimed that sites like Megaupload - with over 50 million daily users - were responsible for taking away over half a billion dollars from copyright holders and breaking numerous copyright laws. Administers and affiliated personnel of several file sharing sites were arrested and laws were drawn up. Anonymous fought back, claiming that the laws were designed to censor content and information on the free Internet. Their attack was massive, not to mention scrupulously well organized. For various periods of time, the collective was able to shut down the US Department of Justice website as well as those belonging to Universal Music, The Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry of America and the FBI. Further, Anonymous shut down the US Copyright Office and the site for BMI, the company responsible for collecting and distributing artist royalties. This was an epic attack in both purpose and scale. Over 5,000 participants wittingly (and unwittingly) sent out a series of Low Orbit Ion Canon attacks, each one flooding the target sites with an overwhelming amount of information designed to break their servers. According to reports, the DOJ website was taken offline in less than ten minutes.
David Wagner is an author/musician who splits his time between Oakland, CA and Istanbul, Turkey.
David has published two novels, both available on his website, and as a fan of movies, comics, and genre television, he is happy to be working with WhatCulture as a regular contributor.
