The Jester claims responsibility for taking down Westboro Baptist Church website, as Anonymous refuses to back down

The pro-American hacker ‘The Jester' has claimed responsibility for taking the controversial Westboro Baptist Church offline earlier this week.

As revealed by SC Magazine earlier this week, the website of the Topeka, Kansas church was taken offline, with an apparent claim by Anonymous that it could not abide this behaviour any longer ‘and the time for it to be idle spectators in its inhumane treatment of fellow man has reached its apex', and it was moved to action.

However a Twitter update from the Jester, who tweets at ‘th3j35t3r', said that it had taken Westboro's godhatesfags.com domain down ‘temporarily for celebrating the death of US troops'. It also said that there was a ‘honeypot fail', assumingly by Westboro's hosters.

Writing on its Twitter feed, Anonymous later said that it and the Jester are ‘still like Sun and Moon, following our own agendas' and the cooperation ‘was an eclipse'.

In an online debate on the David Pakman show, an Anonymous spokesperson denied that it was directly responsible. A spokesperson for Westboro Baptist Church taunted the Anonymous spokesperson to the point that the Anonymous group posted a message during the interview.

There was some uncertainty as to whether the statement by Anonymous was genuine or not, as some suggested that it was a hoax. However in this message, Anonymous claimed that Westboro's response was ‘rather poorly-written' and Anonymous said that its press release explained ‘clearly the hoax behind the initial declaration of war against your church'.

It said: “We had thought this latest release would be enough to make you realise that we have no interest in going to war with you. Your continued biting of the Anonymous hand, however, has earned you a swift and emotionless bitchslap, in the form of this very message. Despite having had the capability to hack your sites previously, we chose not to and instead responded maturely to your threats, but you have not respected this.

“For this unremitting display of overzealousness, we award you no points. Take this defacement as a simple warning: go away. The world (including Anonymous) disagrees with your hateful messages, but you have the right to voice them. This does not mean you can jump onto Anonymous for attention. God hates fags: assumption. Anonymous hates leeches: fact.”

The Jester previously hit the headlines after it hit the WikiLeaks website in late November with a ‘mass distributed denial-of-service attack'. This occurred before WikiLeaks began releasing the cache of confidential cables that led to it redirecting DNS configurations from its Swedish hosting provider to sites hosted around the world.

The Jester said at the time that it took down WikiLeaks ‘for attempting to endanger the lives of our troops and other assets'.