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(RT)
The website for the United States
National Security Agency suddenly went offline Friday.
NSA.gov
has been unavailable globally as of late Friday afternoon, and
Twitter accounts belonging to people loosely affiliated with the
Anonymous hacktivism movement have suggested they are responsible.
Twitter
users @AnonymousOwn3r and @TruthIzSexy both were quick to comment
on the matter, and implied that a distributed denial-of-service
attack, or DDoS, may have been waged as an act of protest against
the NSA
Allegations
that those users participated in the DDoS — a method of
over-loading a website with too much traffic — are currently
unverified, and @AnonymousOwn3r has previously taken credit for
downing websites in a similar fashion, although those claims have
been largely contested.
The
crippling of NSA.gov comes amid a series of damning national
security documents that have been disclosed without authorization
by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
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The
revelations in the leaked documents have impassioned people around
the globe outraged by evidence of widespread surveillance operated
by the NSA, and a massive “Stop Watching Us” rally is
scheduled for Saturday in Washington, DC.
DDoS
attacks are illegal in the United States under the Computer Fraud
and Abuse Act, or CFAA, and two cases are currently underway in
California and Virginia in which federal judges are weighing in on
instances in which members of Anonymous allegedly used the
technique to take down an array of sites during anti-copyright
campaigns waged by the group in 2010 and 2011. In those cases,
so-called hacktivsits are reported to have conspired together to
send immense loads of traffic to targeted websites, rendering them
inaccessible due to the overload.
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