What Spain used to censor Catalonia's 2017 independence referendum
The website exposes Spanish government's censorship tactics during the Catalonia referendum in 2017. It details blocked information, circumvention methods, and aims to prevent future censorship. Key ISPs were targeted.
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The website aims to document the methods used by the Spanish government to censor official information related to the Catalonia referendum scheduled for October 1, 2017. Despite attempts to block access to this information, it has been replicated in various locations and can even be downloaded. By documenting these censorship methods, the website hopes to thwart future censorship efforts. The censorship targeted key internet service providers like Movistar, Vodafone, Orange, and others. The site provides insights into how online censorship works and offers guidance on navigating such restrictions.
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3 commentsThere were a number of techniques used to block access to information:
For websites under the .cat top-level domain, the .cat registrar got takedown notices. The only workaround for this was to publish elsewhere.
For other websites, blocking access required ISP intervention:
• Two ISPs (Euskaltel and Vodafone) pushed changes to their DNS servers—the ones that subscribers use—modifying entries for web sites that were being blocked. This would be detectable by clients doing DNSSEC verification (assuming the domains used DNSSEC, which hopefully they did!). It could be worked around by using a different DNS service (like Google's), or by running your own recursive resolver, or by using a VPN.
• Movistar was doing Layer-7 traffic inspection: For HTTP access, the IP address and HTTP Host: headers were examined. For HTTPS access, the TLS SNI (Server Name Indication) message was examined. The workaround was to use a hostname that the server would respond to, but which wasn't filtered: For example, web.ref1oct.eu instead of www.ref1oct.eu. The other workaround would be to use a VPN.
The lack mode of blocking was the most interesting. I've heard of the risks of SNI-based filtering, but hadn't seen it in the wild yet!
But yes, there was also some internet censoring.
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