![Censorship Censorship](http://a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/censorship_64.png)
![Your Rights Online Your Rights Online](http://a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/yro_64.png)
Internet Censorship In Spain 32
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."
Off topic, but I have to say this: (Score:2)
Back on topic, this kind of reminds me of China vs Falun Gong - can anybody fill us in on the details? Specifically, what they believe in (not just what the web site says ; there's sometimes a big difference, see KKK) and why they have been illegalized?
Re:Off topic, but I have to say this: (Score:3, Informative)
It's odd to me that you american fellows are not well informed about what goes on here in Europe, but Spain has an awful terrorist problem.
First you have to understand that there is no "spain" country per se. Spain is merely a collection of kingdoms that have been subdued by the kingdom of Castilla. The only ones who have managed to fend off their attacks throughout 1000 years of history have been us, the Portuguese, the only remaining independent country in the Iberian Penninsula, and even so, they are occupying a portion of our land called Olivença which they have colonized so no one there is truly portuguese anymore.
There isn't a spanish language or a spanish people either. There are 3 or 4 different languages for the different kingdoms.
This means that the peoples of the Iberian Penninsula have managed to maintain a certain cultural identity throughout this long history of Castillian domination. In Galicia, the spanish kingdom to the north of our country, there have been protests claiming that they want to integrate with us, since their language and culture is more similar to ours, and they are a natural extension of our territory, since they occupy the strip of land between our northern border and the northern sea.
In Pais Vasco, however, the Basque protests are all but peaceful. They have a very different language and culture from all of us. It does not even derive from Latin. They are a separate people, which they have been throughout history, their territory is split between France and Spain, and no one cares about them. I think it is obvious that they more than deserve their freedom, although I cannot support their actions.
You see, some of the Basques have formed a terrorist organization called ETA which has commited numerous atrocities throughout the past few decades. Many important people have been assassinated, numerous bombs have been planted, injuring innocent bystanders.
Batasuna is an independentist left-wing party aiming to promote the freeing of the Basque people and territory from their Castillian opressors.
A link between the party and the terrorist organization has never been established, their site does not promote or even mention ETA or any form of violence, so it is terribly anti-constitutional to illegalize the party and block their website.
I am amazed that I cannot reach the website without the anonymizer link, since I don't live in Spain. Would this mean that our government secretly agreed to block it as well? I find it highly unlikely.
If you want more information about spanish events there is an excellent newspaper at http://www.elpais.es [elpais.es] (use the fish).
Re:Off topic, but I have to say this: (Score:1)
-God
Well I've had it! I'm not taking them! They can fucking go to heaven for all I care.
-Satan
-
You're not the only one in Portugal... (Score:1)
Great. And here I was thinking we were only being invaded phisically...
About Spain's territory arrangement (Score:2, Interesting)
The Communities have wide rights of self-goverment, including:
Re:Off topic, but I have to say this: (Score:1)
Hey! There's not such thing as "important" and "unimportant" people (unless like ETA, you're interested in "eliminating" "important" people).
By the way, ETA has actually KILLED a whole lot of innocent bystanders with their bombs and shit for years (I lived in Spain for 27 years and they're always in the news, which is anyway what they want).
I liked very much your post, anyway.
Cheers,
Alex
EU membership makes independence irrelevant? (Score:2)
That being said, I think it is cowardice of the EU not to interfere in some manner in the Batasuna case.
User Training (Score:2)
They are listed through all pages on the left, and on the right there is a bar that shows a semi random section and the top stories.
I think that is good enough, people who don't bother to learn more about slashdot don't get the full benefit. Those who do learn, get more.
Also there is a lot less noise on the less obvious articles.
Not all Spanish ISPs and not required by law (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [batasuna.org] 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 [web.ocea.es] (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.
ETA are just stubborn fanatics. (Score:3, Informative)
The ETA is still planting bombs all over Spain, in spite of the massive public demonstrations all over the country, and especially inside the Basque region itself which have said "Stop Bombing!" See CBS News [cbsnews.com], and The Guardian [guardian.co.uk]
They are still bombing in spite of being a party which is close to single digits in most polls, and in spite of the fact that the regional government is (peacefully) nationalist.
The ETA has more in common with Al Qaida than the IRA, where anyone who is not as violently radical is branded a traitor to the cause.
on the other hand. (Score:2, Insightful)
Trying to knock them off the internet is just dumb.
It will make the Spaniards look dumb. Instead, they should get the group onto the US' terrorost
organization list, so that they can no longer do
business in any western country. A little hint about the
proper use of US bases in Spain should do the trick.
Re:on the other hand. (Score:1)
People should be able to read what they want, and they ought to have the right to present their views on a website.
Regardless of the fact that they and the ETA may have vaguely the same ultimate goal, Batasuna appears to be a party that believes in Basque independence, and not a terrorist organization itself. There is no reason to extend any issues with the ETA to them. At risk of making a controversial analogy, it's like lumping together people who are against abortion and people who kill abortion doctors.
I don't know what the Spanish government should do about the ETA, but I'm pretty sure that what they do shouldn't have anything to do with the legitimate desires of others in the Basque province to get their message out.
Re:on the other hand. (Score:1)
There are other parties which are nationalist. They are far more popular than Batasuna. While these results may be out of date, look at the '94 election Here [sispain.org] The winner is the "Basque Nationalist Party", with 30% of the vote. The second, the "Basque Socialist party" with 20%. It is hard to figure out which of the remaining ones is left, but you're in the 10% and lower region... The Basques do have a voice and they do use it to disavow the ETA.
Re:on the other hand. (Score:1)
Freedom of expression. (Score:1)
Spain suffered 40 years of dictatorship, with all the censorship attached, it is sad to see that there are people in Spain that did not learn anything form this experience and are far too willing to commit the same mistakes.
ETA and its supporters should be fought with the arms of reason and eventual negotiation. When a group of people feel agravated (and many people in the Basque country obviosuly do, otherwise they would not be voting for Batasuna) suppression of ideas an elemental freedoms will not silence them and in the contrary, will give them more ammunition to condemn a goverment for repressive measures.
Re:ETA are just stubborn fanatics. (Score:1)
The situation is far more complex. I've been living in Spain for 27 years and, although in Madrid you're not so much involved with the political issues, you get lots of information on this daily.
Alex
Re:ETA are just stubborn fanatics. (Score:1)
I did say, the ETA, not the basques. While the Basque problem is complicated and difficult, the ETA planting bombs everywhere is the most simplistic "solution" imaginable.
AND (Score:2, Insightful)
WorldCom Forced To Block Questionable Sites [slashdot.org]
Re:AND (Score:2)
Trying to make a comparison between blocking child porn and blocking controversial political info is absurd.
What's on the website... (Score:2, Insightful)
Ok, website in a foreign language that looks nothing like Spanish. Luckily there is a link for Castellano in the corner. Ah, much better.
First headline is "I know what you did last summer." Seriously. Anyway, talks about some political machinations, in somewhat inflammatory tone (The robber thinks he can...) and in not-too-great Spanish (very hard for me to read, lots of grammatical mistakes). Not recognizing the names of the players involved, I wouldn't be able to translate well. But the basic idea is that they are going to tell everyone about what is going on behind the closed doors of a government that claims to be good. (So far nothing worth censoring, IMHO.) Lets see, calling the Spanish government fascist and nazis... Propaganda in favor of "Euskal Herriarentzat" whatever/whoever that is.
I don't know. Supposedly the site has ties to a terrorist organization, but I don't see anything like that on the front page. Other than your normal Rush Limbaugh (ok, probably a bit more severe than Rush) style political mud-slinging and name-calling taken to the extreme, I would never have called it illegal.
But on the other hand, I haven't lived in Spain, so I can't talk about the political tensions. And maybe somebody else who does live there has looked at more than just the front page and could tell me whether or not the site does have terrorist links.
In my opinion, this is a pretty lame site to be censoring. Maybe I'm missing something.
"Euskal Herria" means "basque people" (Score:1)
BTW, the name of the terrorist organization ETA is from "Euskadi ta Askatasuna" and means "Euskadi and freedom".
From an American in the Basque Country (Score:1, Insightful)
From a Catalan (Catalonia another Nation in Spain) (Score:2, Interesting)
Today Spanish Goverment is pressing the hardest in 25 years of democracy, against terrorism. This goverment is legitimate (has a broad majority in parliament) but has a strong centralist (Madrid) point of view of things. Anyway it has adopted the path of ilegalization and prosecution that has arised controversy here. Some think it's time that somebody kick hard ETA and others think they are blocking this way the political arm of ETA closing all doors to negotiation.
On the other hand ETA was borned during dictatorship and has no sense now. I think ETA followers maintain outdated ways to get what they want, but they aren't able to see the problem from outside its own logic.
The relation of batasuna, eta, jarrai it's obvious to me. Jarrai perform kale borroka (street war = burning cars & busses, breaking restaurant glasses, burning cashtellers & that bad kid stuff) while ETA performs terrorism (shoot at head & bombing). Batasuna its just the political army.
But what is also obvious its that the Basque nationalism (peacefull) its broadly supported (in fact they rule Basque Goverment), and even Batasuna (and what represents...) has some hundred thousand votes on each elections.
I think banning that is closing the door to the voice of all that people, whatever they have to say.
Re:From a Catalan (Catalonia another Nation in Spa (Score:1)
First of all, I don't hate any other region people. Have work and friends all over Spain.
Second, microlanguage. The number of people who speaks it its similiar to danish, finnish, dutch and many others.
Third, very few people speak English because most people don't care about English at all. Almost all schools teach english or french (badly done I think), but most forget it because it's mainly useless here (appart from being a CV skill, travelling or reading slashdot).
Fourth, I've spoken Catalan when I went to school, and there (many years ago) we had to spoke only spanish. Has changed completely now.
I don't feel being a extreme nacionalist or so and I don't complain all day about our situation (it's not that bad), but as can be seen from your mail, some people just don't understand. Nearer to you, you've got Quebec, Puerto Rico, or native american minorities, but you don't want nor have the need to understand.
the Spanish government's plan! (Score:1)
2. Watch it get added to Slashdot
3. Watch it become the website most viewed by Spaniards
4. ???
5. Re-election!
Yup. Blocked. (Score:2, Informative)
vadim@alice:~$ traceroute batasuna.org
traceroute to batasuna.org (161.58.228.92), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 router (192.168.0.1) 1.010 ms 0.816 ms 0.744 ms
2 10.3.50.1 (10.3.50.1) 66.757 ms 63.716 ms 63.745 ms
3 83.Red-80-58-11.pooles.rima-tde.net (80.58.11.83) 63.761 ms 60.499 ms 61.945 ms
4 37.Red-80-58-76.pooles.rima-tde.net (80.58.76.37) 66.936 ms 71.502 ms 63.596 ms
5 17.Red-80-58-72.pooles.rima-tde.net (80.58.72.17) 65.170 ms 70.477 ms 71.765 ms
6 242.Red-80-58-73.pooles.rima-tde.net (80.58.73.242) 68.336 ms !H * 68.530 ms !H
vadim@alice:~$
For those who don't know, "!H" means "Host Unreachable"