Spain's Crackdown on Catalonia Includes Internet Censorship (internetsociety.org)

Spain's autonomous Catalonia region wants to hold a referendum on independence next weekend. Spain's Constitutional Court insists that that vote is illegal, and has taken control of Catalonia's police force to try to stop the vote. They're deploying thousands of additional police officers and have seized nearly 10 million ballots. And now the Internet Society has gotten involved, according to an announcement shared by Slashdot reader valinor89: Measures restricting free and open access to the Internet related to the independence referendum have been reported in Catalonia. There have been reports that major telecom operators have been asked to monitor and block traffic to political websites, and following a court order, law enforcement has raided the offices of the .cat registry in Barcelona, examining a computer and arresting staff.

We are concerned by reports that this court order would require a top-level domain (TLD) operator such as .cat to begin to block "all domains that may contain any kind of information about the referendum."

Comments

Well that is one way of ensuring a loss

[Carewolf]

Trying to suppress people's freedom is the surest way of pissing them off. How many went from pro-union to pro-independence due to this nonsense?

Re:Well that is one way of ensuring a loss

[valinor89]

Quite a lot of people are very enraged by the actions of the government that were not thinking of voting.

Re:Well that is one way of ensuring a loss

[elrous0]

Nah, just call them Nazis. Then censoring them or even physically assaulting them is okay.

This is the slippery slope

[Anonymous Coward]

If you start condoning Internet censorship for political reasons (for example, what has been going on with the Daily Stormer), it will never stop where you think.

Re:This is the slippery slope

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't play word games and call yourself anything other than an oppressor.

It is political speech, suppressed on the basis of politics. It used to be that any company who deigned to offer communication services to the public understood itself to do so on a non-discriminatory basis as to the ideological content of that communication.

Any business that thinks it has the right NOT to take that business should not be in the communication business. It makes no difference whether censorship is carried out by government, or corporations. The people are neither.

Re:This is the slippery slope

[Anonymous Coward]

If you start condoning Internet censorship for political reasons (for example, what has been going on with the Daily Stormer), it will never stop where you think.

The "Daily Stormer" was not censored, they just weren't supported by businesses. If they were censored, they wouldn't be back online and being hosted by some company in Iceland.

Is it too much to ask of mods to grasp the truth of content before modding it? (mod me down, "-1 oww, my feels!")

The "Daily Stormer" was censored. Businesses do the censoring at the direction of the government. In some ways this is worse than direct censorship. These decisions can be arbitrary and wrong and they can not be challenged. Most of the ideas expressed by the Daily Stormer are things that I find to very wrong but many other organizations and ideas that I support could be removed. The truth is that there was an attempt to censor the Daily Stormer. Last I heard they had reopened on the dark web. Most people that are critical of your comment and post a comment will mod you up. Irony is a b...h.

Re:This is the slippery slope

[Gravis Zero]

Don't play word games and call yourself anything other than an oppressor.

Way to play the victim!

It makes no difference whether censorship is carried out by government, or corporations.

So, you are upset that a intrinsically oppressive ideology is being oppressed? Doesn't is seem like they are getting exactly what they want? Oh, they want to be the oppressors, right.

That's some serious mental gymnastics you got going on there, buddy.

Kinda wish you had

[Anonymous Coward]

A 2nd amendment right about now don't yah? But yeah no one would ever want to protect themselves from their own government.

Re:Kinda wish you had

[MightyYar]

The concept behind the Second Amendment was discredited and abandoned a long time ago. The founding fathers had a deep distrust of a standing army, and so the theory went that a well-regulated militia could instead serve to defend the nation. After a series of failures of militias to various crises, within a couple of decades there was a large standing army. Now the US military is so large and so heavily armed and trained that the sole remaining provision (the right to bear arms) is superficial at best. The Second Amendment isn't going anywhere, but as a bulwark against government it is a complete failure.

Re:Not smart, but it is right

[johanw]

Repressive governments don't like that. Look at the US and see how it reacted when some parts didn't want to belong to the US any more.

The US had no reason to secede from the Empire

[ffkom]

Driven by local nationlists, the north American territories of the British Empire did absolutely illegal things when they seceded. How could those people dare to question the legal rule of their central government?

And by the way, lot's of European countries would still be under the despotic rule of some emporer far away in Rome, had they not been "disobedient" to Roman law.

Re:Not smart, but it is right

[elrous0]

It plays into the hands of the fucking cataluña nazis

Witness the new political norm in action, people. Just label your opponents Nazis or fascists and then anything you do to them--be it censorship, assault, or even murder--then becomes justified. Such is modern political discourse.

Not smart and not right

[Roger W Moore]

Cataluña has no reason to secede. Nationalists, who are basically localist fascists are the ones pushing for an impossible exit of cataluña from the Spain, when by the way, they werent anexed.

You can say exactly the same things about Scotland in the UK and Quebec in Canada. In both cases the regions were given a free vote (two in fact for Quebec) about whether they wanted to secede and in both cases the majority voted against it and the independence movements in both locations are now effectively muted for decades. So while Spain has been saying that "no country would tolerate this" they are utterly wrong: two countries have and it worked out well both times.

If what you say is true then the Spanish government is being idiotic in its response. It should not only have allowed the vote but organized it too to ensure it is performed fairly. If you are right then such a vote would have been against independence and the problem goes away for several decades. Actively suppressing it is likely to greatly increase support for independence and the result will be some sort of election probably in favour of independence and then you'll have a resurgent independence movement which will cause you problems for decades and way well eventually result in independence!

Re:Not smart, but it is right

[CustomSolvers2]

the Partido Popular, is an indirect decendant of the Franco regime.

This is an extremely inaccurate statement. Partido Popular is a typical European centre-right party, on the lines of Conservative Party in the UK or CDU in Germany.

CLARIFICATION: I am a leftist who will never vote or support Partido Popular, much less after their numerous corruption problems.