'Anonymous' hackers allegedly leak internal U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics data

Hackers operating under the title of "Anonymous" claim to have leaked internal emails and other electronic documents from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics website.

The files were uploaded onto the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay on Monday. The authenticity of the documents has not been confirmed.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics, a branch of the Department of Justice, publishes data relating to crime in the United States.

"We do not stand for any government or parties, we stand for freedom of people, freedom of speech and freedom of information," the hacker wrote on AnonNews.org. "We are releasing data to spread information, to allow the people to be heard and to know the corruption in their government. We are releasing it to end the corruption that exists, and truly make those who are being oppressed free."

Using a recently created a Twitter account, the alleged hacker announced he or she would be leaking data on May 21.

"We successfully hacked into the Bureau of Justice, 1.7GB of data was obtained," the alleged hacker wrote.

It is unclear why the Bureau of Justice Statistics was targeted. In the past, those associated with "Anonymous" crashed the website of the U.S. Department of Justice after the FBI shut down one of the most popular file-sharing websites, MegaUpload.com, in January. The following month, "Anonymous" hackers leaked audio of an international coordination conference call between the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the British Scotland Yard.

The hacker collective also crashed the CIA website multiple times in February. The websites were apparently subjected to a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS), where the bandwidth or resources of a web server are overloaded with Internet traffic in hopes of knocking it offline.