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Internet Censorship In Spain
An anonymous reader writes "I thought it only happened in China or Arabia Saudi... but it also happens in Spain: spanish government has ordered all the ISP in the country to block the web of Batasuna which is hosted outside Spain. Batasuna is a political party from the Basque Country (similar to Sinn Feinn in Ireland) and has been recently illegalized in a very controversial decision. I can't access their web right now. Luckily, proxies come to rescue me (for instance http://anon.free.anonymizer.com/http://www.batasun a.org/g_index.htm. There are also some mirrors which are being opened in other countries and haven't been blocked yet."
I work for a Spanish ISP and have read the various articles about this on web sites in Spain.
As far as I'm aware the only company to block access to Batasuna is Telefónica, plus companies of the same group like Terra and Telefónica-Data. We get our upstream bandwidth from Telefónica Data so we've been affected: access to the IP of the Batasuna site is blocked on all their routes out of Spain.
Given that Telefónica is the ex-public telco in Spain, only privatised fairly recently, this does smell a bit like the government still has rather a lot of influence there.
Connections through other companies all seem to work as normal. Try doing a traceroute to www.batasuna.org from An Spanish ISP that uses UUNet (in the Tools section)
The judge Baltasar Garzón who's effecting the illegalization of the Batasuna party seems to be getting nowhere over their web site and is trying all sorts of things. He's written to ICANN asking them to block the domain name batasuna.org - they said it's nothing to do with them.
Although I to think that ETA are a despicable terrorist organisation and action should be taken against Batasuna for supporting them, censorship is never the answer.
I thought it only happened in China or Arabia Saudi or the US...
WorldCom Forced To Block Questionable Sites
Trying to knock them off the internet is just dumb.
It will make the Spaniards look dumb. Instead, they should get the group onto the US' terrorost
organization list, so that they can no longer do
business in any western country. A little hint about the
proper use of US bases in Spain should do the trick.
I speak a bit of Spanish, let's see what the hubbub is about...
Ok, website in a foreign language that looks nothing like Spanish. Luckily there is a link for Castellano in the corner. Ah, much better.
First headline is "I know what you did last summer." Seriously. Anyway, talks about some political machinations, in somewhat inflammatory tone (The robber thinks he can...) and in not-too-great Spanish (very hard for me to read, lots of grammatical mistakes). Not recognizing the names of the players involved, I wouldn't be able to translate well. But the basic idea is that they are going to tell everyone about what is going on behind the closed doors of a government that claims to be good. (So far nothing worth censoring, IMHO.) Lets see, calling the Spanish government fascist and nazis... Propaganda in favor of "Euskal Herriarentzat" whatever/whoever that is.
I don't know. Supposedly the site has ties to a terrorist organization, but I don't see anything like that on the front page. Other than your normal Rush Limbaugh (ok, probably a bit more severe than Rush) style political mud-slinging and name-calling taken to the extreme, I would never have called it illegal.
But on the other hand, I haven't lived in Spain, so I can't talk about the political tensions. And maybe somebody else who does live there has looked at more than just the front page and could tell me whether or not the site does have terrorist links.
In my opinion, this is a pretty lame site to be censoring. Maybe I'm missing something.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
There never have been any real firm links between ETA and Bastasuna. Batasuna doesnt condem their terrorist attacks, or does it praise them. Both ETA and Batasuna are radical sepratists, but that is about it. ETA is already outlawed and on US terrorist lists. It is strange for us americans to see that in Europe they dont have nearly unlimited free speach, the government can outlaw a political party here in Spain and they cant post signs with the name Batasuna, protesters cant have anything that identifies them with Batasuna, and the batasuna politicians cant associate under the name batasuna anymore. In Germany, IIRC, you cant buy/sell anything that is Nazi related.