ISOC Against its Own Principles: Acting as a Censor

ISOC Against its Own Principles:

Acting as a Censor

In my recent article at CircleID, I didn't want to put my finger into anyone, because I was hoping, after having asked ISOC by email and phone conversations, that they will provide a correction to their “Internet Society statement on Internet blocking measures in Catalonia, Spain”, they will realize about how wrong and incautious it was, specially after ISOC has confirmed that they didn’t talked to other Spanish ISOC chapters, but only to the Catalonian one, which of course, is basing his judgment in a single view of the situation, which is not the real one.

The correction didn’t come, which is very sad. I’ve even asked for opening the blog or alternative ways, so as they don’t want to correct, others could do, but nothing happened. So, when ISOC is pre-judging how governments apply freedom of speech, is that no applying to themselves?

Looking further into ISOC documents, I found that the creation of ISOC chapters is governed by rules, including “Multiple Chapters serving overlapping communities are not permitted”. So how come, we have several chapters in a single country, as recognized by international laws, and instead of consulting the “master-national-one” (to call it someway), or even all them, just ISOC-CAT has been consulted for making such statement? Probably they can find an explanation, but not nice.

Let’s take a look to what is incorrect in that article:

1)    “There have been reports that major telecom operators have been asked to monitor and block traffic to political websites”. This text point to a link to a local Catalonian newspaper site, that clearly talks about “10 websites from the referendum” (which has been declared against our Constitution).

2)    “has raided the offices of the .CAT registry in Barcelona, examining a computer and arresting staff”. It may be because I’m not an English native speaker, but also when you read the Spanish version, it seems clear that they arrested “the staff” not just a single person, which again is not true, as only the Director of Innovation and Information Systems was detained for interrogation, as the court police investigation seems to have found indications of being involved in “embezzlement, prevarication and disobedience”, as indicated in the .CAT website.

3)    “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”. I’ve a copy of the court order, and it only mentions 14 web sites (all them from .cat), not a generic control. It may be there have been additional court orders, no doubt on that, but I suspect, this may have been a consequence of further copies of the illegal web sites, were continuously created under .cat, and we can guess this is related to the precedent point.

4)    “we believe actions that impede the ability of any local community to use the Internet freely are unacceptable … an unjust impact on the ability of Catalan-speaking persons to create, share, and access content on the Internet. We are concerned that network blocking practices are multiplying as a way for countries to police online content  around the globe”. This is a gross generalization or even an exaggeration. There is nothing against Catalonian-speaking persons, or the language itself. We are a democratic country that fully respect all the regional languages up to the point that they are also official in their own autonomies, according to our Constitution, which also mandates special respect and protection to them.

5)    “We hope to see a return to free and unfiltered Internet in Catalonia in the near future and call on all parties to commit to upholding freedom of expression and dialogue in this challenging time.” Again, a clearly malicious comment as in the context of the complete document, is assuring that there is a generalized filtered Internet in Catalonia and no freedom of speech.

By the way the funny thing, they should find better translators, as for example, apart from other nits, the last paragraph is calling for a “free Internet” (for “freedom”), but the Spanish translation talks about “gratuitous” (for “at no cost”) … Such kind of statements must never be published without the proper review, for both accuracy of contents and wording, even for the translated versions.

In summary, ISOC somehow suggest in this blog that everybody should ignore national laws, because freedom of expression is always over the rest of the citizens that follow the law and the law itself.

By saying all that, ISOC is fostering hate for those that want to follow the law and disagree with those than decide to not follow it, and this is the reason, for example, in very few hours after my first article was published, I got about a dozen of threats of death if I continue speaking freely. This is the same is happening in Catalonia, with people being coerced to don’t complain about the “process”, or forced to speak in “favour” of it, or to go to “vote” or provide the keys of the school for that voting, destroying public properties, or kidnapping policeman that just do their job, or even worst, asking fathers to “make sure” their kids go to the protests. Is all that right? Is that democratic?

Going away from any specific political issue, thru this statement, ISOC is acting as a censor, against its own principles and discourse of freedom of expression, because not rectifying wrong and misinformed words is a way of subtle censorship.

ISOC attitude looks like in the vey limit of doing apology of the subversion, which is an unlawful act, according to a lawyer that has read the document.

We can’t trust ISOC anymore unless their principles are revised and behave in an open, constructive, informed way, and offering the people the freedom of speech on their own blogs, or at least, if they make mistakes, amend them immediately.

Not publishing all the information, from all the parties, is nothing else than exercising censorship.

ISOC is not just an organization, is “The Organization” of Internet, is all of us, is nothing without us and will not be useful if there is no trust in their words.


Tweet


Follow @jordipalet