Disgraced Colombian corrupt intelligence slut Maria del Pilar Hurtado yesterday joined the first international cyberwar against internet censorship from her Panamanian hideout - siding with the censors, of course.
As you may have noticed, dear reader, Bananama Republic participated in the internet blackout on the 18th, in protest against a gringo law proposal called the "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA) and a similar one called the "Protect Intellectual Property Act" (PIPA). Both laws facilitate internet censorship, without any due process or burden of proof, by authorities on behalf of Hollywood moguls and the music industry. We don't like censorship and we think "big content" needs to find new business models that reward creation (the artists) instead of reproduction (the business suits and bean counters). This is an important issue in Panama as well, because under the Free Trade Agreement with the US whatever ridiculous copyright laws they pass we have to comply with here as well.
The protest was a big success, with both bills losing majorities within a day because mainly Republican senators and representatives dropped their support, while corrupt Democrats addicted to Hollywood donations continued to defend the censorship initiatives.
In some countries, such censorship is already in place, and one important characteristic of these measures is that they are technically impossible to enforce. Your own Bananama Republic, dear reader, is offering proxy access to banned websites like the Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks, through our new anti-censorship page which can be found here.
We had hardly installed that proxy thing when news came in that the FBI had shut down megaupload.com, a popular filesharing site, and arrested its principals. The DOJ claims that Megaupload cost the content industry $500 million in lost revenues - only a fraction of what tax payers worldwide lost in Wall Street bankers scams and shenanigans for which nobody has ever been arrested of course.
Within minutes, Anonymous sprang into action. Just another half hour later, they had brought down websites of the FBI, the Department of Justice, several websites of the music and movie industry and many others. The largest and most furious Anonymous attack ever kept these sites down for hours, and saw the arrival of new tools and tricks to get people to participate in the onslaught - which still continues.
The affair is quickly turning in the digital equivalent of a territorial war about who controls the internet.
Within hours, the FBI had no website any more and Megaupload was back online.
Proudly participating in the global mayhem was our own Anon_PTY, the Panamanian offshoot - we have no idea really how big they are and they haven't been terribly active against our own domestic threats to freedom.
Much more prominent is Anonymous Colombia, which set up its own hives for global cyber dissidents to join what was now a full scale war on censorship.
And that is what provoked Mrs. Maria del Pilar Hurtado's pro-censorship comments on Twitter. Typically, if you enjoy political asylum - even if it has been granted by a mafia boss like Martinelli - you are not supposed to be meddling in politics, but the former head of Colombia's sleaziest illegal surveillance and harassment program sees that differently and tweeted:
@Anonymous_co es la guerrilla de la internet, dicen tener ideologías pero solo se lucran haciéndole favores a medios y políticos corruptos.
And then she addressed the FBI:
Yo confío que el FBI desmantele todos los anonymous del mundo para que internet nunca vuelva a ser vulnerado por estos grupos saboteadores.
We hope that this Colombian state-sponsored terrorist gets extradited sooner rather than later.