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Anonymous has gone after and taken down Indian government websites over the country's Internet censorship plan, which has resulted in the blocking of websites like The Pirate Bay and Vimeo.

"Namaste #India, your time has come to trash the current government and install a new one. Good luck," the @Anon_Central Twitter feed tweeted earlier today.

Hackers have since targeted the websites of the Indian Supreme Court, the All India Congress Committee, Copyrightlabs.in, the country's Department of Telecommunications, the Ministry of Information Technology, and the Jammu & Kashmir Police, according to @Anon_Central.

Anonymous is tagging its Twitter posts with calls to end censorship and save The Pirate Bay.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted in February, "India has been known to censor online content, typically under the guise of national security or obscenity." That same month, Google and Facebook were required to remove from their websites content the Indian government had deemed offensive. They were among 21 companies forced to take down photographs, videos, text, and other items officials consider anti-religious or anti-social.

The Anonymous attacks started amidst reports that Internet crackdowns were blocking sites like The Pirate Bay, Vimeo, Daily Motion, and Pastebin in India.

Leading the charge is @opindia_revenge, under the #OpIndia tag on Twitter. The feed encouraged Web users to "use tor or VPNs to access torrent sites. #DEFY #government. Tell them they cannot stop you."

The @opindia_revenge feed promised continued attacks. "#India its a DDOS attack. We do not assure for how long we can keep down sites. But we are firing at them. They will face lags," it said earlier in the day.

The move comes after The Pirate Bay was hit with a DDoS. It has not been revealed who carried out the attack, but The Pirate Bay said it was not Anonymous.

Wikileaks.org has also been under attack for several days.

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Anonymous Targets Indian Govt Websites Over Censorship

The Dirty Cowboy by Amy Timberlake.

The National Coalition Against Censorship has entered the fray surrounding the Annville-Cleona School Board's banning of the award-winning children's book "The Dirty Cowboy."

The NCAC on Tuesday sent a letter to the members of the board, expressing the coalition's concern over the decision to remove the book and urging the board to return the book to the district's libraries.

View the letter here.

The school board will meet at 7:30 p.m. Thursday.

The letter was signed by NCAC executive director Joan Bertin and Chris Finan, president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression.

The letter notes that the objection upon which the ban was based was to "nudity" in the book, although sensitive areas of the body are not depicted. Regardless, the letter points out, simple nudity is fully protected by the First Amendment.

"There is no salacious or sexually suggestive content in the book - it is merely an amusing story of a cowboy taking his annual bath, getting even dirtier in the process," the letter states. "As the Supreme Court has observed on numerous occasions, " 'nudity alone' does not place otherwise protected material outside the mantle of the First Amendment."

The letter also states that school officials are bound by constitutional considerations, including a duty not to give in to pressure to suppress language or images deemed controversial or offensive by some.

According to the letter, the Supreme Court has cautioned that school officials "may not remove books from library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to 'prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.'"

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Anti-censorship group weighs in on 'The Dirty Cowboy' ban

Two anti-censorship groups want Sumner County schools to lift a ban on the teen novel Looking for Alaska.

The National Coalition against Censorship and American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression sent Sumner Director of Schools Del Phillips a letter Monday.

It urges the district to honor its constitutional obligation and allow the White House High School English class to finish reading the student-selected novel.

It is particularly disturbing that the complaint of one parent triggered a county-wide ban within the span of a single week, without following established procedure and without so much as a review of the literary and educational merits of the book, the letter states. The district has imposed one viewpoint on the entire student body, without regard to the educational consequences for students.

The groups claim Sumner County violated its own district policy, which says if a parent complains, that student can be given an alternative book to read.

Sumner County school officials said last week a parent complained to the district, which led officials to review a two-page oral sex scene in the book and pull the book from assigned reading districtwide.

The book is still available in school libraries for individual students to check out, said district spokesman Jeremy Johnson.

Our policy was broken to start with. The teacher didnt run it through that process, he said. We do not see a reason to revisit the issue and think its been properly addressed.

Under the districts controversial materials policy, he said, teachers are required to submit all titles of required reading for parents to review, but the White House teacher didnt.

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Anti-censorship groups want Sumner schools to lift book ban

15 May 2012 Last updated at 14:45

Pornography filters on mobile phones are "censoring" normal web content, according to the Open Rights Group.

Its report found that 60 websites were incorrectly blocked by mobile filters designed to prevent children viewing adult content.

The affected sites included political commentaries, personal blogs and community websites.

The government is considering whether to apply similar blocks to fixed-line broadband services.

Peter Bradwell of the Open Rights Group, author of the report, said the study proved such tools were ineffective.

"Child protection filters can actually affect many more users than intended and block many more sites than they should. These blunt blocks effectively add up to a system of censorship across UK networks," he said.

In a response published on the ORG website, Hamish MacLeod, chairman of the Mobile Broadband Group, denied this.

"Even allowing for the ORG missing a few, 60 misclassified websites does not amount to anything that could reasonably be described as 'censorship', particularly when mobile operators are happy to remove the filters when customers show they are over 18 and will re-classify websites when misclassifications are pointed out to them," he said.

"This is how the small handful of websites that get referred to mobile operators each year are already dealt with," he added.

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Mobile porn filters 'censorship'

A three-decades-old partnership between the city's black ministers and the Houston Police Department has ended after pastors refused to agree to new guidelines issued by Chief Charles McClelland that prohibits them from criticizing the police or city administration.

The ACLU and longtime civil rights activists blasted the prohibition against criticism by clergy who volunteer with the department.

McClelland changed the organization of HPD's religious volunteers by forming a group called the Police and Clergy Alliance (PACA). He issued guidelines governing the new alliance that took effect April 26.

Last week, an estimated 100 to 150 black ministers who are members of the Houston Ministers Against Crime turned in their HPD-issued credentials, saying they would no longer work with police, the pastor's group director confirmed.

The ministers against crime organization was founded in 1976, and Houston leaders have since heralded the group's accomplishments at improving relations between police and minorities at national mayor's conferences and other forums.

"It's hurting that in 2012 preachers cannot say in the United States what they want to say about what's going on that's not righteous," said the Rev. Robert Jefferson. "If anybody stands for righteousness, it ought to be a preacher. But if you got to obey a piece of paper saying you can't associate with people who are against the police department, you can't say nothing against the mayor or say nothing against the police chief, I quit because I'm going to be free to say what God tells me to do."

No individual limits

In a statement, McClelland said the prohibition against criticizing HPD is in force only while the clergy members are wearing an HPD-issued badge. The badge is essentially a photo identification card with the city's seal and motto and under the words "Houston Police Department."

McClelland said the police department has had multiple ministerial groups with various missions and whose activities were difficult to coordinate.

"With the formation of PACA this is a good way that we refocus, make sure we're all on the same page and committed to the same goals," McClelland said. "It is unfortunate some ministers feel they are being silenced by myself or HPD. As I have stated from the outset, they are free to do or say whatever they want as individuals. Any guidelines apply only when they are speaking in their official capacity as representatives of the alliance with an HPD badge."

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Pastors end partnership with HPD, accusing chief of censorship