Good grief! The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) is currently down! Hackers took down the site in protest of the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, which was signed into law by Philippine President Benigno Aquino on September 12.

Here is the screenshot I took:

Here is the message posted on the BSP website:

Anonymous Philippines hacke BSP website. The group cites The Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 as ‘the most notorious act ever witnessed in the cyber-history of the Philippines’.

The Philippine Government has just passed a bill that effectively ends the Freedom of Expression in the Philippines.

The Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 is the most notorious act ever witnessed in the cyber-history of the Philippines, and the language of the bill is cunningly designed to make you think it only applies to individuals who are deep in cyber-technology and doesn’t apply to everyone, but some part of the bill basically says it can imprison anyone who commits libel either by written messages, comments, blogs, or posts in sites such as Facebook, Twitter, or any other comment-spaces of other social media in the Internet.

New technologies give us new opportunities to connect with a lot of people not only in this country but all over the world. They can also provide us with a medium through which our political, public and even private views can have an immediate and direct impact on individuals, communities and even countries. It is just so disappointing that our government, in adopting our 80-year-old antiquated libel laws to the Cybercrime Law, again seems to have retarded our march with the rest of the world with respect to giving full force to the people’s freedom of expression.

We ask for a revision of the said bill for the betterment of the Filipino denizens.

Protect our Right to Freedom of Expression!

There is a ongoing petition asking the Supreme Court to stop the government from implementing several provisions of the law for “violating the fundamental rights”. Part of the petition reads: “These provisions are constitutionally infirm. Taken together, they restrict the fundamental rights to free speech and the freedom of the press with respect to online content in the same way a totalitarian state would do so — through unrestricted and unregulated censorship.”

You can read the full petition here: Petition for Certiorari and Prohibition on Republic Act 10175 – Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012