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

Generalismo Fransico Franco

[Anonymous Coward]

Ain't dead yet!

Not smart, but it is right

[alexborges]

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. Cataluña entered Spain voluntarily, more than 500 years ago. Now the spanish government though is anything but smart. Prime Minister Rajoy could almost qualify as a sea sponge if we are talking about intelligence. This is why this move on the Spanish part is sad, stupid, but not unforseen. It plays into the hands of the fucking cataluña nazis, which is what nationalists are.

There is more

[valinor89]

They are also arresting "civilian" programmers for mirroring the banned pages in other domains and charging them with disobedience, malfaesence and other charges.

Re:There is more

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Isn't Spain in the EU? How the hell is this allowed to happen?

I mean, Brussels has so little to do they can micromanage the length of carrots and the yellowness of bananas. Clearly they must have the big stuff like free speech guaranteed everywhere.

And this after 2006 an auonomy treaty was signed

[ffkom]

Not too long ago, in 2006, a majority in the Spanish parliament voted in favor of a treaty that intended to give Catalonia some more autonomy - only to be subsequently stopped by jurisdiction - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for more on this.

And now Spain has a government that seems inclined to follow in the foot steps of Erdogan and alike, who think that violence and oppression is the way to go if you don't like what some regional government has decided upon.

It's really a shame how this conflict is being escalated for no good reason.

Re: Well that is one way of ensuring a loss

[Faluzeer]

Who is able to vote? All of Spain is affected by this, should they not all have a chance to vote?

Hmmm

That is the same argument that so many little Englanders expressed over here in blighty when Scotland wanted an independence referendum, of course those same people would have been outraged if it was suggested that the UK leaving the EU required a majority vote from all the EU countries. It should be the vote of the majority of people in the region/state/country that decides on independence.

Re:Well that is one way of ensuring a loss

[Anonymous Coward]

So how do you propose to ever have change through a referendum when the status quo can just choose not to participate and thus make it "invalid", winning by default?

Assume for a moment that there is a majority in favour of independence - how could they ever legally achieve their goal without the cooperation of national government?

I'm actually asking, because I can't think of any way.