You'd think this was expected.

Large protests against austerity measures have roiled Spain as demonstrators rallied across Madrid on Tuesday. The protests were spawned by economic woes and have targeted politicians and government facilities.

They climaxed Tuesday night with protesters surrounding the Spanish congress building in action dubbed "Occupy Congress." Clashes with police ensued, resulting in multiple arrests and fueling the wrath of Anonymous.

The hacktivists issued a press release expressing their solidarity with the Spanish occupiers and announcing a "Operation Spain" in support of their efforts.

Anonymous said the livestreams of "the horrendous brutality on the part of the Spanish National Police" against the protesters prompted the hackers to remove "from the Internet the web site of the Spanish National Police located at www.policia.es." They say the site will be kept offline as "long as we continue to watch scenes of brutality."

Anonymous won't stop there, though:

Beginning tomorrow, Anonymous will also begin an attack on the primary website of the Parliament of Spain. This attack will include not only DdoS and hacking, but also Black Fax & E-Mail bombs - effectively removing the Parliament of Spain from the Internet entirely.

The announcement closes with the usual Anon valedictory about not forgiving and not forgetting before telling the Spanish government that it is "to (sic) late to Expect Us."

No, seriously, you should expect this.

Anonymous has pretty much had all it can take of The New York Times’s bullshit and it's not going to take it anymore. That's the upshot of this "Anonymous Declaration of #OpNYT” posted on Pastebin sometime late yesterday. #OpNYT certainly sounds ominous, but as Gawker's Adrian Chen noted in a tweet, "Anonymous' press releases get somehow get longer-winded every time."

This long-windedness makes it tough to parse what the eternally seething hacktivist collective is trying to say. In this instance Wikileaks, Stratfor and HBGary are all name-checked before the declaration segues into, inevitably, the Orwellian global surveillance system currently loathed by privacy activists everywhere, TrapWire. The Times’s minimal coverage of TrapWire (a system apparently controlled by the Cubic Corporation, which is referenced below) appears to have pushed Anonymous's "epic invective" button:

The facts on Trapwire have since been confirmed by a series of other outlets ranging from The Daily Caller to Pravda to The New American to NBC.com to Cryptome, and by six Australian outlets that were promptly forced to delete the assertion via Cubic's powerful lawyers - but these facts have yet to be acknowledged by the NYT nor by those other outlets that still think highly of the Grey Lady despite her being a filthy, poorly-composed whore - Thomas Friedman's syphilitic dominatrix.

Anonymous also cries "Death to this horrid paper" before essentially saying we shouldn't get out the popcorn in preparation for an epic hack.  Anons are asked to spread "these and other failures of the New York Times by attaching the info to those deeds to come, and by encouraging all Anons to assist in this brief engagement" in conjunction with other ops, including #OpTrapWire.

After this call to arms, Anonymous mentions an interesting nugget of information--someone may have recently changed The New York Times’s website administrator's password. Anonymous, however, does not approve, writing that such a prank is "amusing" but not part of the "generally-accepted Anonymous tradition of non-aggression via hacking or DOS towards publications not run (officially) by the state. Gawker has been only exception, lol Kayla."

The #OpNYT announcement closes with, "Don't wait. Retaliate. We do not forget."

We did not expect that.

Hackers were targeting pedophile and pedophile-interest websites in Usenet forums as far back as the 1990s but that was well before Anonymous had such a powerful name brand to put behind the effort.

Anonymous explained some of its motivation in a Pastebin document published July 7:

WE Anonymous aim to diminish if not eradicate this plague from the Internet. For the good of our followers, for the good of mankind, and for our own enjoyment we shall expel from the Internet and systematically destroy any such boards that continue to operate.

The message charged readers to spread the word to other Anons and the press. The statement also took a classic Anonymous shot at its target: "These pedos are very butthurt about being hit too, so there is some LULZ factor in it."

According to their reporting, Anonymous has already taken down a laundry list of sites with stomach-turning names like boychat.org, boylovenews.com and pedofilie.nl.