In Memory (and Vengeance) of MegaUpload

On Thursday, Internet giant MegaUpload was taken down by the U.S. Government. While the site’s headquarters are in Hong Kong, the government shut down the site (including its sister sites) on the grounds that one of the giant’s servers was in Virginia, while its founders were arrested in New Zealand. As its name suggests, MegaUpload is (or rather, was) a site where anonymous users could upload videos, movies or any other files that are too big to send through conventional means, such as email. The Motion Picture Association of America accused MegaUpload of hosting an extreme number of copyrighted data. 

            Less than thirty minutes after the site went down, the infamous hacker group Anonymous began a full-fledged attack at what they claimed was the government’s answer to the internet blackout. Calling the shut-down “the single largest Internet attack in its history”, the group retaliated with hack-attacks on the US Department of Justice’s justice.gov, FBI.gov, as well as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), both of which are staunch advocates of the SOPA and PIPA bills. Barrett Brown, a public spokesperson of Anonymous, noted “so if this is what can occur without SOPA being passed, imagine what can occur after SOPA is passed”.