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.

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: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.