You could say that Anonymous, the cyber activism group, are synonymous with cyber attacks on international sites and speaking out against abuses of human rights. For instance, in February of this year a member of Anonymous posted the email addresses and passwords of of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian President, his wife Asma al-Assad, and countless other senior figures in the regime. However this week the Japanese government, namely the Supreme Court and Finance Ministry, have reportedly come under cyber attack. According to AnonPR, a site that supposedly speaks on the group’s behalf, said that the attacks were due to the recent copyright laws passed in Japan:

Japan, home to some of the greatest technological innovations throughout history has now decided to go down the path as well and cave into the pressures of the content industry to combat piracy and copyright infringement. Earlier this week Japan approved an amendment to its copyright law, which will give authorities the right to imprison citizens for up to two years simply for downloading copyrighted material

We at Anonymous believe strongly that this will result in scores of unnecessary prison sentences to numerous innocent citizens while doing little to solve the underlying problem of legitimate copyright infringement.

The new copyright laws mean that you can be imprisoned for illegally downloading copyrighted content. However, given the anonymity of Anonymous it is impossible to tell whether this was actually a cyber attack from Anonymous or just a group of anonymous “hacktivists”. Takanari Horino of the Japanese Finance Ministry said that ”We are aware of the Anonymous statement referring to the new copyright law, but we don’t know at this point if the cyber-attacks are linked to the group,”.

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• Hacker group Anonymous attacks Japanese government website(buzzom.com)

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• Anonymous Launches OpJapan in Response to New Copyright Law(news.softpedia.com)

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