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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.