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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."
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."
Ain't dead yet!
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?
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.
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.
NO SIG
They are also arresting "civilian" programmers for mirroring the banned pages in other domains and charging them with disobedience, malfaesence and other charges.
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.
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.
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!
...and no, there is no censorship involved.
Catalonia is not a colony.
Catalonia has been always part of Spain, and a very important part. This was already so when the province of Hispania was created under the Roman Empire, imposing a layer of latin culture and roman institutions on top of the existing Iberian tribes. After the downfall of Empire, the visigoths ruled all of the Peninsula as a single kingdom for more than two centuries. The small christian kingdoms and principalities that from 711 to 1492 fighted the muslims were at times also fighting each other, but the general trend was that of strengthening alliances and uniting forces under the same religion, not unlike other places in Medieval Europe.
Catalan counties were already integrated in a larger unit (the Kingdom of Aragon) in which different languages (such as castilian and catalan) already coexisted for two centuries before the marriage of the Catholic Monarchs. They no doubt kept their identity, but the same could be said of every other region. Asserting that those small medieval kingdoms survived into today's regions with zero intermingling, thus conforming clearly separate and distinct societies, is simply untenable.
In the heyday of the Spanish Empire and till the 19th century, catalans (and basques, BTW) were not just part of the thing, but a *leading* part of it. You can find lots of catalan surnames in Hispanic American countries, many of them in well-to-do families (check out the names of some well known distilleries such as Bacardi, Brugal, Barceló, if you don't mind my alcoholic references).
With the historical digression, I just wanted to point to the fact that there have been no borders inside Spain for many centuries. This is not some country with huge differences in racial/ethnic aspects, or torn out by religious strife. The interrelationships are deep and extended in time. At this point it's difficult to define exactly who is catalan or not. Is it just being born in today's arbitrarily defined administrative region what makes you catalan? Are you catalan if your parents were not? Are you catalan if you don't speak catalan? Are you catalan if you do speak catalan but don't live in Catalonia? The top 10 most frequent family names are the same in Cat and in the rest of Sp. Catalan is the first language of 36% of people living in Cat while Spanish is the first language for 46%. Catalan exports to Germany, to put an example, are less than half of those to its neighboring autonomous region of Aragon. Who gets to vote in a referendum?
The fact is that since 1978 Sp has been a highly decentralized country, much more similar to federal Germany than to centralist France. Cat, being one of 17 autonomous regions, has had for almost 40 years plenty of effective "independence": both an autonomous government and parliament, capable of passing their own laws within a large margin, as long as they don't undermine the general interests of Sp as a whole, which doesn't seem so unreasonable to me.
If you ask me, this autonomy has been used to put the emphasis on the difference. Autonomous administration has reached all aspects of civil life, to a point that the presence of national institutions are scarcely felt, and the words "país", "nació" are used all the time to refer to Cat and not to Sp. There's a huge part of the population whose first language is Spanish, yet it is not possible to study primary nor secondary school in Spanish (due to the official policy of "linguistic immersion"). Regional governments have spent a lot of money and effort in building their image, uniformizing and boosting the usage of catalan language, confering dignity to their institutions, projecting an international image, etc. etc. The regional PM is paid almost twice as much as Rajoy - not bad for an "oppressed nation"!
At the same time, complaints about things that don't go well are targeted to a ghostly oppresive presence, the "State", the "Central Government". The idea of Spain is ass
Since the last referendum, the federal government has passed the clarity act. Has to be a clear super majority rather then 50%+1. Quebec leaving also means amending the Constitution, with an amendment that requires 100% of the Provinces agreeing. There also will need to be a discussion of how much territory Quebec can keep. What they entered Confederation with? Or what the Feds bought from the Hudson's Bay Company. Of course the natives won't want to go either and they're a Federal responsibility.
Quebec leaving is not as simple as the separatists have preached.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism