A group of hackers known as Anonymous has taken responsibility for disabling a Turkish government website in a protest against recently introduced Internet filters that many consider to be censorship.
The online anarchist group has threatened to attack Turkish agencies that impose censorship, siding with Turkish Internet users against a new filtering system that the government plans to roll out this summer.
“Turkish government, expect us,” the group said in a video posted on YouTube Monday.
Anonymous swamps its targets with so-called denial-of-service attacks that disrupt and disable websites. Most recently, the group claimed responsibility for disrupting the sites of MasterCard, Visa and PayPal, after they stopped servicing WikiLeaks under pressure from the U.S. government.
Turkey’s Internet regulator, the Information and Communication Technologies Authority, or BTK, issued a directive earlier this year in which it said that as of Aug. 22, Turkish Internet users would need to sign up for one of four filters it would create: children, family, domestic and standard.
Turkey has a long history of Internet censorship, with the country’s ISPs having blocked YouTube and numerous other sites in the the past couple of years.
In a similar move in February 2011, Anonymous took down the sites of the Ministry of Information and President Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party to protest against Internet censorship in Egypt.