The social-justice hacker group Anonymous Argentina has taken down the website of the National Statistics and Census Institute (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos, or INDEC by its Spanish acronym).
INDEC is the government agency responsible for publishing the official inflation rates for the country. This week they announced that Argentina’s official inflation rate for 2012 was 10.8%. Congressional economists from the opposition estimate that the real inflation rate is at a soaring 25.6%.
In August 2012, INDEC inflamed the nation when they published numbers for the ‘canasta básica,’ or base daily alimentation that stated that a person could eat in Argentina for AR$6 per day, about the cost of a liter of milk. Nutrition experts from the University of Buenos Aires said the real number should be AR$23 per day per person to eat a balanced diet.
The creative mathematics of INDEC have raised eyebrows since 2007 when then-president Néstor Kirchner replaced professional statisticians in the agency with several of his appointees. In 2008, after Cristina Kirchner took office, the agency published an inflation rate of 7.2%, while non-official estimates hovered around 24%.
On February 1, 2013, the International Monetary Fund is meeting in New York to evaluate sanctioning Argentina for cooking the books.
Anonymous Argentina published on their twitter account, “For three hours we’ve had indec.gov.ar under control. We will return it when they understand. Enough lies. Fire fire’
Other targets of Anonymous Argentina are Catholic pedophiles, sex traffickers, resellers of free computer software, Scientology and ‘English pirates’ in relation to the Malvinas/Falklands conflict.
In 2012 Anonymous Argentina also took down the websites of the Argentine Central Bank, The Economic Minister, sites related to the leftist militant group, La Cámpora and the websites of many of the major mining corporations in the country. They also published information that showed that the company running the new Sube Smart card is keeping data on users.
