Tags:
Journalism of Courage
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (TRAI) website has been brought down by Anonymous India, according to the latter’s Twitter timeline. At the moment, the TRAI website is inaccessible and says the URL cannot be retrieved. Anonymous has carried out a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack against the TRAI website.
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Anonymous brought down the TRAI website after the regulator put out 1 million email ids of the users who had sent emails responses on the Net Neutrality debate. You can check out Anonymous’ tweets below:
https://twitter.com/opindia_revenge/status/592623340101246977
https://twitter.com/opindia_revenge/status/592635479700414464
https://twitter.com/opindia_revenge/status/592636535352238080
https://twitter.com/opindia_revenge/status/592645452631252992
TRAI has reportedly received over 10 lakh responses to its paper and then in a rather silly move put out all the responses, including email ids on its website.
The comments were divided into three sections- Comments from the Service Providers; Comments from the Service Providers’ Association, and Comments from other Stakeholders (which includes the regular folks, tech start-ups, etc.)
Also read: TRAI makes all Net Neutrality responses public, including your email ID
Of course, TRAI’s brilliant move has put India’s netizens at the risk of spam. As we noted, transparency is fine, but ignoring user privacy is simply not acceptable as it has happened in this case, especially as email nowadays is linked to many social media accounts liked Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and even banks.
While TRAI’s move was no doubt damaging, Anonymous has also defended its move to bring down the site saying that this was done to deny spammers access to the 1 million email ids.
