"Anonymous hacks govt sites for blocking Vimeo"

Hacker group Anonymous, has struck again and this time its much closer home. The group reportedly brought down the Congress website, the Supreme Court website and some other

government websites in retaliation for India’s new Internet laws and the blocking of websites like The Pirate Bay and Vimeo.

According to PCWorld , the group posted about the attack on their Twitter feed saying,“Namaste #India, your time has come to trash the current government and install a new one. Good luck.”

According to their Twitter feed, the group targeted websites of the Indian Supreme Court, the All India Congress Committee, Copyrightlabs.in, Department of Telecommunications, the Ministry of Information Technology, and the Jammu & Kashmir Police.

The Congress denied that its website had been hacked. “The site is not hacked at all. It was not opening for sometime because the load on the particular server was too heavy due to huge number of hits after the news of website hacking spread. It went slow at that time due to over-traffic,” Chairman of AICC’c Computer Department Vishwajeet Singh, a former Rajya Sabha MP told PTI.

Yesterday the Rajya Sabha had also debated the issue of Internet censorship with regard to the new IT rules. A number of members opposed the proposed law, which forced Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal to say the government would strive to build a consensus on the subject.

According toMedianama, Vimeo, The Pirate Bay, have been blocked because of a John Doe order taken by Copyright Labs, Chennai, from the Madras High Court, for preventing piracy of Tamil Films Dammu and 3.

Some people can still access Vimeo and The Pirate Bay. It seems that the sites were initially blocked by Reliance, followed by Airtel. The users who faced the blocking got a message saying that this was due to a DOT regulation, but later the message said that it was because of a court order.

This is not the first time that the India has faced Internet censorship. Previously whenSingham was released, Reliance Communications had also used a John Doe order to block all video-streaming sites to curb piracy.

The government has expressed an unhealthy enthusiasm to curb social media and video websites, which they claim are being used to defame members of the government. Advocates of Internet freedom, however say that the defamatory content ruse is a mere excuse to curb any criticism of the government.