[Zoraida Sambolin]... 6:23 in the East, and new this morning
The US government's websites are now back online
after facing a major attack from online activist group Anonymous,
Anonymous lashed out after the Department of Justice busted the downloading site Megaupload.
Authorities arrested four people, including the site's founder.
Anonymous retaliated by shutting down the DoJ and FBI websites,
as well as sites for several major entertainment companies.
And here with the latest is Amber Lyon, she spoke exclusively
with members of Anonymous. What did they tell you?
[Amber Lyon]: Well, they said that yesterday the shut down of MegaUpload.com
was really the straw that broke the camel's back
we've seen Anonymous protesting anti-piracy legislation all week
legislation such as SOPA, they say after this website was shut down,
almost immediately Anons started gathering in online chatrooms
discussing what they were going to do, and they began
what is known as Distributed Denial of Service attack against these US government websites
that's a type of attack where so many computers flood a website with so much traffic
that it causes it to shut down. I spoke exclusively with some of these Anons who were watching
this operation they called it, it was called...Op Megaupload.
They were watching it very closely, and here's what they had to say.
So Anonymous sees the shut down of MegaUpload as a type of internet censorship?
Exactly, it's a violation of freedom of speech, and it's... Anonymous and a lot of other movements
regard the internet as sort of independent from any governments
and they regard a government interfering in the free flow of the internet
as stepping outside of the jurisdiction.
How long did it take for the Department of Justice's website to go down?
I would give it seven to eight minutes, not even -
Seven or eight minutes?
I say seven minutes.
Is - What was the thoughts within Anonymous that it was that easy
to take down the Department of Justice's website?
With enough power, and with enough manpower you can take down really much anything
It's basically the power of an absolutely massive group of people coming together
they're not happy, and this wouldn't be possible with one or two people
You know, it's one of those things which is very genuinely an expression of how many people are angry.
Those Anons were covering up their faces because they wanted to conceal their identities, obviously.
On the other side of things the Department of Justice says that this site was
Allowing the illegal upload of copyrighted material
Costing the industry somewhere near half a billion dollars a year
But you talk to Anons, the other side they believe this was some type
of internet censorship, Zoraida.
[Zoraida Sambolin]: Well they have that kind of collective effort that they can do this
A twitter account that is affiliated with the group said
that FBI.gov is next to go down. Did they talk about that, what was next?
[Amber Lyon]: Well, they were able to take down FBI.gov for a brief period of time
yesterday, and there's still traffic going online saying that Anons
are targeting more websites today. We'll be monitoring that all day on CNN.
[Zoraida Sambolin]: Alright, Amber Lyon, thank you so much.