Hello Oonitarians,

Today, in collaboration with our friends at Virtual Road, OONI published a post on the blocking of Catalan referendum sites.

You can read our post here: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/internet-censorship-catalonia-independence-referendum/

This report links to network measurements collected from three local networks over the last week, examining the blocking of domains associated to Catalonia's independence referendum.

Our findings confirm the blocking of 25 Catalan referendum sites between 25th September 2017 (when OONI Probe testing started) to 1st October 2017 (referendum day).

France Telecom Espanya (AS12479) and Euskaltel (AS12338) blocked these sites by means of DNS tampering, while Telefonica/Movistar (AS3352) served block pages through the use of HTTP transparent proxies.

While Telecom Espanya and Euskaltel were not found to be blocking seized .cat domains, we found Telefonica to be serving block pages even for .cat domains already seized.

This case highlights the need to measure internet censorship everywhere, even in countries that we consider to be less likely to censor information.

We can't go back in time and run measurements, but we can always be prepared. ;)

You can consider running OONI Probe in your country through our installation information here: https://ooni.torproject.org/install/

You can also explore OONI data further here: https://explorer.ooni.torproject.org/world/

All the best,

Maria.

-- 
Maria Xynou
Research and Partnerships Coordinator
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.torproject.org/
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