Anonymous to attack Internal Affairs website at 11am

UPDATED 12.45pm:  Internal Affairs website has remained up - and a curious excuse has emerged for Anonymous' inaction.

An open source developer known to NBR, who hunted IRC (internet relay chat) channel used by members of Anonymous, reports that an attack has not yet started.

She was trying to get the group to "see sense", but some members - including one who is apparently a Kiwi - did not seem to care that the Civil Defence website would be collatoral damage in any attack on Internal Affairs (which the group has targetted because of its child porn internet filter, which they see as the thin end of the wedge).

As of 12.45pm, the DIA seemed safe for the immediate future, if only for the banal reason that Anonymous members had become "too busy talking about Warner Bros" (the US studio that this morning expanded a movie download trial through Facebook ... and owns a music studio; see link immediately below this story).

UPDATED:  It's 11.10am and the Department of Internal Affairs site is still up and running.  Perhaps suggestions as voiced by Colin Jackson on Radio NZ this morning that the department had moved the site to a place with more resources to handle more traffic, effectively disabling DoS attacks, were correct. 

The Department was not able to be contacted for comment.

Start your engines at 11am, folks. 

The collective Anonymous threatened in February to launch a series of attacks on the Department of Internal Affairs' website at about 11am today, or March 28 at 5pm (EST) - 11am March 29 NZ time. 

The group posted a video on YouTube that said "a series of coordinated denial-of-service attacks" (DoS), where a computer resource is made unavailable to a user, such as preventing an Internet site from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or otherwise, would be carried out against the department's website. The group objects to the department  offering a filter to ISPs that the department says aims to prevents the trade in child sexual abuse and block access to sites containing child pornographic material. The Anonymous group says the department has refused to say which ISPs had implemented the filter. 

"Internet censorship as seen in China, India, Australia, The US as well as the UK has become one of the greatest atrocities to free speech and government transparency since the cold war."

However the department now has a link (with tagline New!) to ISPs using the filter and these include Telecom, TelstraClear, Watchdog and Xtreme Networks.  The department also has a link to the Code of Practice which states it will only block access to website that contain or promote the sexual explotation of children or young persons.  The document also states that the list of blocked websites (filtering list) will be reviewed monthly.  The department says on its website that the filter is a living document and it welcomes comments at any stage.

The department has been plagued with site troubles for several weeks now. It also hosts the the Civil Defence website, which has been temporarily offline several times. These outages may have been early Anonymous attacks, it is claimed. However, in  The Next Web (technology news site) report, messages in the group's chat services between Anonymous members showed members' confusion about the attacks and the suggestions they were pre-emptive strikes.

Clouding the issue, one outage that took down Internal Affairs and Civil Defence was blamed on web servers running out of memory as the Japan tsunami approached, and people crowded online in search of NZ arrival times.