Early Friday morning, Anonymous struck a several U.S. government websites to protest the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), an extremely controversial trade agreement between multiple nations that has been dubbed the next version of SOPA and PIPA (recently defeated copyright legislation in the U.S.) In their attack, the hactivist collective claims to have taken an entire set of government websites offline including parts of the Federal Trade Commission website (business.ftc.gov and consumer.ftc.gov), consumer.gov—a website for information on the  National Consumer Protection Week 2012—ncpw.gov, and others.

Hackers defaced the websites, left behind a manifesto (quoted below) and even uploaded a hilariously uproarious, although gruesome, cinematic involving heavily armed, masked gunmen portraying ACTA killing anyone who uploads, copies, or otherwise purveys in copyrighted material. The video will be embedded at the end of this article.

As a trade agreement, ACTA reflects a similar set of values to the defeated bills but doesn’t change legislation outright; however, the secrecy under which it was forged and a lack of elements that directly address piracy or include frameworks for actually engaging it have brought it under dark scrutiny. Although the worst version of ACTA (the secret version) has been leaked and many of the provisions that made it bad have been removed, it’s argued that it still suffers from the same philosophical illness that riddled SOPA and PIPA.

Several of the possible signatory nations of ACTA have since refused to ratify the treaty based on the concerns of their populations (and often government officials representing the concerned.)

Upon defacing U.S. government websites involved with departments related to ACTA, Anonymous left a manifesto speaking out against the treaty and were kind enough to add a TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) at the bottom, which reads, “ACTA is a downright shitty act. We must kill it. With fire.”

For those willing to read further, here’s the salient portion of the manifesto:

Even more bothersome than your complete lack of competence in maintaining your own fucking websites and serving the citizens you are supposed to be protecting, is the US federal government’s support of ACTA. You really want to empower copyright holders to demand that users who violate IP rights (with no legal process) have their Internet connections terminated? You really want to allow a country with an oppressive Internet censorship regime to demand under the treaty that an ISP in another country remove site content? Well, we have a critical warning for you, and we suggest you read the next few paragraphs very, very closely.

If ACTA is signed by all participating negotiating countries, you can rest assured that Antisec will bring a fucking mega-uber-awesome war that rain torrential hellfire down on all enemies of free speech, privacy and internet freedom. We will systematically knock all evil corporations and governments off of our internet.

As a group, Anonymous has been very big in the democratization of protest against SOPA and PIPA and have been slowly raising awareness of ACTA.