Hackers group Anonymous has taken down the Turkish telecom agency official website on Friday in a protest against Internet censorship imposed in the country.

After hacking the website of Turkey’s Telecommunications Communication Presidency (TIB), the group left a message saying: “The government has blocked thousands of websites and blogs while abusive legal proceedings against online journalists persist. The government now wants to impose a new filtering system on the 22nd of August that will make it possible to keep records of all the people’s internet activity. Though it remains opaque why and how the system will be put in place, it is clear that the government is taking censorship to the next level.”

Anonymous announced its move on Thursday before carrying out the attack. We will bring our support to circumvent censorship and retaliate against organizations imposing censorship, said the group in a posting on the anonnews.org website, under the title Operation Turkey pledging to fight Internet censorship in Turkey.

The attack followed protests in Istanbul in May against Internet censorship and plans for a new filtering system, to be introduced from August 22, under which users must sign up to filter for domestic, family, children and standard usage.

In December, the group launched attacks that temporarily shut down the sites of MasterCard Inc and Visa Inc for blocking payments to WikiLeaks.

In February, it took down two major government websites in Egypt following the unrest and Hosni Mubarak government's crack down on pro-democracy protesters.

Turkey said it is taking measures to limit the impact. We will not stand back in the face of an attack on our country by this group. We call on the state bodies responsible for fighting such crimes to act, Yavuz Kocoglu, head of the body to tackle IT crimes, said in a statement.

Turkey has earlier banned YouTube for two years, under court orders, for infringing decency laws. Reporters Without Borders, an international censorship watchdog organization, included Turkey on its 2011 list of 16 countries under surveillance.

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