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OK, the next talk is
by Matthias over there, and he'll be
talking about Internet, Internet
censorship, censorship
in the Katrina referendum and what
welcome to what, Matthias?
OK, thank you very much.
Welcome to my talk.
First of all, I want to give a short
disclaimer so I'm not a security
specialist.
And so most of the information you
can find here or nearly all the
information is from
is publicly available.
And I wasn't involved in any illegal
activity. So only secondhand information.
Sorry.
OK, what I will talk about
I will talk about I will give you a short
background of a political background.
Then I will talk a lot about
how the filtering of the ISPs did
work.
Then there was a homepage that's called
Where to Vote homepage, which had a
different
a different way to store data.
And they would talk about the day of the
referendum. And hopefully we will have
some time for Q&A.
OK, so here on the right hand side, you
can see the Spanish state
and the red part is Catalonia,
which is well known
city Barcelona.
So Catalonia has its own language and
culture.
It's one of the richest regions
in the in Spain with
20 percent of the GDP.
And it has a long history of
struggling to get more autonomy.
This is especially in 2010,
the autonomy
got cut down by the Spanish government.
And so the voices
came up that asked for independence,
so the Catalan government
decided to have a referendum and first
asked 16 times the Spanish
government to agree on a referendum
and the Spanish government
did not want to. And so the
Catalan parliament
in June decided in
majority to hold a referendum on 1st
of October, which later was
called unconstitutional by the
Spanish Supreme Court.
OK, so obviously in
this talk, we will talk I will talk
about the Internet censorship and
the focus will be on this.
But there has been also other things
happening the weeks before the referendum
that I want to talk about what the weeks
before and even in the weeks after.
So, for example, there was a referendum,
material was confiscated by the police.
We had over 800 injured
people by the police.
And on the day of the referendum, when
the police tried to shut down
polling stations, one man lost
his eye by a police rubber bullet.
Uh, interesting here is that
Catalan police forces are not allowed
to use rubber bullets against the
protesters, but Spanish police
officers are allowed to do so in
Catalonia.
So right now, they are four persons
imprisoned without bail, including the
the legitimate vice president
and two leaders of
political organizations and
the president or the legitimate president
of Catalonia and four ministers in Brazil
in exile.
So if you want
to see more about the
repressive police repression, you can
have a look on this link, whereas a lot
of videos about the day of the
referendum.
So there's a famous
phrase in Spain that says Spain is
different. And
in Catalonia, 70 percent of the
population
wanted to have a referendum on 1st
of October and the end of the
of the Spanish state Worthy's.
So you can see peacefully
protest sitting on the street trying to
block the police from shutting down a
polling station and police beating them
up. In comparison, for example,
you have the Scottish referendum
in 2014, which
was agreed between the Catalan
sorry, between the UK government and the
Scottish government.
And well, it
seems that in Spain, political problems
are treated differently.
OK, so that's enough about politics.
And let's get more technical.
And I took
this picture from TFF,
so it shows you how
Internet censorship works.
So the idea is that you post
your speech here, which is normally
via the post and your audience
has to pass all these change to
actually see your speech and in
each part, like I the incident
and so on, and it can break the
chain.
On the other hand, we have the platforms
like Twitter, Facebook, you name
it, or payment systems, which can also
be censored.
So small spoiler
and I marked all the places where
censorship did happen in the Catalan
referendums on the Web host
or we start we start down here, ISP,
DNS, upstream, upstream means
in this case that a smaller ISP
providers which use
infrastructure of bigger ones
can also be affected of
censorship if the bigger ones start to
censor on the web
and on the platform.
So we will see now how this
was done. So on the right hand side,
you see the homepage of the
referendum which informed about the
referendum on 1st of October,
and it was hosted in a small post
provider outside Barcelona in
a small town in a small town called
Kliman. And on the 13th of September,
police entered with a court
order, the Web post provider,
and and shut down
the Web page.
Then afterwards, there appeared
to Miro's first one Mirro
one October cut and afterwards
one of the EU dockett
is stands for Catalonia and not for
the right.
So
well, the next day, tomorrow official
home page got SIST and on 16 16th in
September and a judge ordered the ISP
start to click to block home pictures.
Right.
And the next big event
was the 20th of September, which
was like the big attack from the Spanish
state against the referendum.
So they took over the control
of the Catalan territories of the
autonomous region of Catalonia, was not
able to spend any money.
They
announced that they will bring 10000
police officers to Catalonia to
stop the referendum and that if they
don't have facilities for all of.
Some will sleep in in
ships, in Catalan ports.
And there were a total of
14 people arrested by federal police
and several high ranking officials
of the Catalan government and civil
servants, and especially
some members of the center of
telecommunication, telecommunication and
technology, which is the
technology center of the Catalan
government.
So with this, it seems that
most of the technology infrastructure
for the referendum got dismantled.
And if you read this
weblink down here, which is unfortunately
only in Catalan, you can see
that hacktivist group took over
the task of
setting up the infrastructure and
they did it directly from the
underground. So they used Tor Signal
Anonymise, SIM cards, Bitcoins
and Becher.
And later on it was it got clear
that actually the police was
intervening the telephones of the
politicians, of the Catalan politicians
to find out where which
people to arrest and which facilities
to to search on the 20th of September.
OK, apart from that, there was also the
technical director of Fundación that cut
arrested.
So what is Fundus?
You got cut from that cut as a private
foundation and is the top level
domain operator of the dot com domain.
So they got a court
order on the 15th of September to shut
down one October cut.
And in total they got and they
got three court orders, which every
time a larger list of domains.
And the court order also included that
they should resolve the
mentioned dot com domains to a police
server.
And if you know how DNS works
and you know that the top
level domain name server only
only pinpoints you to an authoritative
domain server.
So it seems like the police didn't really
understand how the universe works.
And but what is a more
severe part on this?
On on this is the fact
that the court order also included that
top level domain operator and
has to block all domains that may contain
any kind of information about the
referendum and that they should actually
actively monitor
all the domains so that places
the burden of blocking the means to the
registry operator.
And the question is if this
is legal at all because there's no
court order, it's just blocking
them all.
OK, so on the 17th
of September, they inform
you that cutting from I can about the
Berendt and under the 20s, the technical
director get arrested.
So he was retained under custody for two
and a half days with the accusation
right now, up and up to date is
misappropriation of public funds,
perversion of justice and disobedience,
which is a bit strange because
it's a private foundation.
So I don't know how to apply
misappropriation of public funds or
public funds, but I'm not a lawyer
neither.
So they said
the reasons are.
That's the interesting part is one of the
reasons are quite unclear.
So there is no no proof that proves
proofs or evidences were provided
up to now.
And the director actually is awaiting the
trial to see what the
prosecutor actually
puts on the table, to see what they
actually were on, what these
accusations are based.
OK,
as an answer to this
massive amount of Miro's appear in the
next days, the exact number
is difficult to say, but
it's over 100 for sure.
So some one mirro was also done in the
Tor network.
And you had some funny names like, see,
not sexy worker. Yes, he will is one
of the it's a civil guard, which is a
federal police corpse that was and
intervening in the in
the Catalan referendum and purely
undercut people in this
Catalan instance for Tweetie, you know,
these small chicken cartoon
and the yellow one.
So why is this why would you name
a domain name like this?
Well, because one of the boats was a
police officer slept with this one.
So it was really a token in social media.
And 22nd of September, the police
raided a house near Valencia, accuse
this man, Daniel Maurella Morales,
and that he is head of a group
that organizes murals of the referendum
websites and just mentioned
that Valencia is outside of Catalonia
and that he did this with his GitHub
repository.
And the very same thing here is that the
search warrant included literately
to change password and security
questions for GitHub, Facebook, Twitter,
mail, etc., and of him.
So when the police actually entered
his house into the computer,
turned on so they were able to
take over sessions in the browser, in
concreter Google
account, and they could account.
And
happily, he later asked
was talking to lawyers and say they
said that it was totally illegal.
So he was able to recover them
after a few days by notifying Google
and GetUp that his identity
got dropped.
He's accused of disobedience, which is
six months to four years of prison
and is awaiting trial as well.
And there are more than 15 people
and there are more than 15 people were
cited to declare. But I have no
information about
how this if they are what
they are accused of, etc..
OK, let's have a look on the sensor
methods.
So overall, the number is circulating
between 25 websites, which says the open
observatory network of interference,
interference from
the Torah and project
to up to 140 blocked websites,
most of the sites.
Blocked or censors were mirrors of
the official website, but also
political organizations which are
appropriate for pro independence
or the yes campaign websites from the
political parties that run a campaign
for the referendum to vote yes and
some other.
And like
in paper, I want to explain, but there
were some smaller websites which
are which was created
from the social movement of Catalonia
to support the referendum.
So what we've seen up to now from the
since the methods we've seen postcard
sized, we have seen the redirection
of the documents to a police
landing page by the
name server APOSTILLE, the registrar
registry operator, and
apart from the ISPs as well,
and did censor.
So they used DNS tampering and HTP
blocking. And the interesting thing is
that different ISPs use different
methods.
So in in concrete DNS
tampering was used by France, Telecom,
Spain, Vodafone and Scotland.
And the more sophisticated the package
inspection was used by Telefonica.
Telefonica is one of the biggest
ISPs in Spain, all the biggest.
And as I already said, smaller
ISPs which connected and which were
connected or which are connected to the
larger were also affected.
And they are the interesting part here is
that some small independent ISPs were
not affected.
So it's not clear if
the police forget to
send them a court warrant or
the police said with 90 percent of the
Internet users not being able
to see all these Miro's, we are fine.
This is the home page, the police
landing page.
I already talked about when
you when you enter your world of a
censored website, it shows a
symbol of the civil guard.
And while some information.
OK, let's talk about the tampering
in the case of DNS tampering, what
the ISPs did, they just
resolved the them
and they resolved the hostname in
their in their dinner service to the
police landing page.
So it was really easy or quite easy
to circumvent this.
You just change the DNS resolve address
in your local machine.
And this works in case of
Vodafone. If you had original Vodafone
router, you also had to call them
on their helpdesk and ask
them to disable the DNS proxy,
which actually they did.
Or alternatively, you use VPN.
And the typical inspection
was done on the HTP layer.
So what they did say and
matched the hostname
of HTP get a request
on on some specific IP addresses.
And there was a regular expression used
to do this.
I'm really bad in regular expressions.
Used the example for everyone of you.
So if you put anything in front
of W-W, if one of you
when you do get request,
then then the filter hit.
But if you put like in photograph
one of you, then you actually
have the filter, didn't it.
And this website used
to for CloudFlare
see the end. And there were two, two
IP addresses which
were resolved by seediness system.
And so the
IP is used
for this blocking where these two CEP's
and if you use the different IP from
Clouthier, then you could actually see
the on page.
In the case of https,
the HTP traffic is encrypted,
so you can't use it to duplicate
and hostname
to filter.
So what you do,
what they did here is and the tearless
and protocol
and the host in the tail protocol
has to know which
which domain you actually want to
start the encryption
to provide user specific.
So the correct certificate.
So therefore the
a hello message.
And there's a feel that the server
name indication, which is transmitted
in clear text which
passes through this, which gives a hint
on the host you want
the third certificate for, and
that is used by all state of the art
browsers.
So you can see this year when the client
sent a fearless Hillo message,
you have the
entire domain name here.
And then there is the package inspection
here with checks.
And if it's allowed, then it will forward
and you have the connection and if not,
it will reset the connection.
And when the connection gets reset
in which to https
TTP, you got the
SIS homepage,
so you can see here the female body.
There are some JavaScript
snippet and you can see here
a switch. And and
here the homepage will actually
be replaced by the police landing
page, the one we saw beforehand.
And you can also see that there are also
cases in the switch.
And this, for example, is for illegal
gambling, which is
which below the different,
a page from a different IP.
And it looked like that this
infrastructure was not built up for
the referendum, but it was already there,
used by Telefonica for illegal gambling
homepages.
And if you look on so
if you look on this, which is actually
the case that hit on the referendum
on and you can see
that it's most probably they did
see domains and
domain names to the fishing, to the list
of fishing pages and
blocked in this way.
OK, and with some
tests, you could see that the
typical inspection holds the states for
10 seconds because it can't hold the
state forever and
and because it has only
a, uh,
infinite amount of memory.
So what you could do, you could, for
example, here was not could you connect
the two and HTP connection to four
eighty. So your friend HTP connection
built up and then you wait 11
seconds before you sensi
htp get
request with a hostname and
then the filter does not apply.
So.
So conclusion's if the
homepage uses Klopfer, you can just use
a different for to resolve the domain
and then you should be fine, or you could
delay the HTP get for 11 seconds
or use a.
So the conclusions are all
about censorship in this case,
technically, it was easy to circumvent.
And as long as you don't have
to educate five point three million
voters. Right. I mean, if you're
if you want to take, you maybe can change
your your your denisova.
If you ask maybe your parents, maybe
they're not they don't know how to do
this. And here you can see on the right
hand side a Twitter from the
president of Catalonia, which
explains how to use online
proxies to actually
circumvent and
circumvent censorship.
And as far as I know,
and no ISP communicated to
the users that they will start to block
content.
And I think the most
interesting conclusion is choose your
ISP wisely.
You might get around censorship
that you see some are more motivated
to censor than others.
OK, now we will talk about
the way to vote website.
So normally, if you go
if you are called to an election, you get
a letter which tells you which polling
station and polling place you have to go
on the day of the election.
This was not possible because Spanish
Postal Service denied using this
information.
So the Catalan
government decided to build a homepage
and where where you
could query this information.
So it has already said census of five
point three million voters and
over 1000 polling stations, which you can
see here on this map.
And it was foreseen that the official
homepage will be blocked.
And so
the website must be easily Klown able.
And normally you build a
website like this with a
database and where you query,
query and then send information
to the client. So this was not possible.
Here and I will explain in a minute
how they did it,
so this homepage was published
on the 21st of September and got blocked
the next day. So the assumption was
correct and until
agreement with the Twitter
boards were also published.
But you could just send your info, send
your information. And then they told you
which polling station you had to go and
also on and read up in the Google Play
store. And this app
was pulled out on the 29th of September.
So it at least was up for
some Mortez.
OK, many clones of this home page
appeared and the Web
also published in the interplanetary file
system for everybody who does not
know what's in the planetary system is
it is a really cool project,
a project. I think it's a
peer to peer network.
And you can imagine
that this is like
BitTorrent magonet link
where you can find the home page and
any client in the network
who has a home page and you can
access it and you have your gateway,
which actually allows you to see the data
in your browser.
So what did Telefonica?
They wanted to block this home page, so
they just blocked the whole gateway.
That means it does not
only block the home page
of the referendum, but any other data
that anybody wanted to see
through this gateway, unfortunately.
And there were different
gateways and there access
different gateways for IP IPv6.
And it was so it was still possible
to see the content.
And if you use the command line
tool, you could easily copy
the content to your go to your computer.
OK, so
they were picked
up about where to vote, looked like
this, saw you had to put in some
personal I.D., which is called DNA,
then the date of birth and your postcode,
and then you send the information in
there, as I already said there.
It's not possible to have
as an as a
database because
and because if you clone
it, this is confidential
information. You would have to dump the
database and you would have to provide an
IP address, for example, the database to
everybody. And you don't want that
because you don't want everybody to know
and the I.D.
and whether people have to go to vote.
So what they did, what did they do?
They took this is the
idea of the
idea of the person, which is eight
numbers and a character.
The character is a checksum,
the date of birth and the postcode.
And you can concatenate
the living alone,
the first three numbers.
So you take all these what is underlined
this as a string and then you hash
it 1714
times and you put it in a
variable, let's call it key here.
And then you should once more and you put
it in search and then
the hash from search you take the first
four will use.
And this will give you the
file of the database, which is encrypted
on the Web server itself, which you
download. This is all done.
This all this procedure is done in
Java script, in your client, in your
browser.
Right.
So you download this file.
The file is a
key. Well, you store it has around 70
lines and then you take the
remaining 60 will
use of the hash and
go line by line to find, to find,
to find the values of the key value
store. And this is actually
not random data, but encrypted data.
And this data you can encrypt with
the key here
using a yes, 256
CBC and then you get a polling
station. This is more or less clear how
this works.
So the question is here, OK, you have all
these all these data
encrypted on the Web server,
it's a secure.
Well, first of all, you can do brute
force because it's just the hash.
Yeah. You can just start trying
to find it out and you
have postcodes and the birth date.
You can group this in divide
and conquer.
And the SC letter here is
a checksum.
You can you can't recalculate
the correct I.D., but you can recalculate
45 ities.
So maybe you can then say some
these look really strange.
I've never seen anything like this.
I can ignore them.
And then you have a reduced
number of ideas that you can, by brute
force, get for one postcode
and one state said,
you know, one of these I don't know,
maybe 15 is correct.
So the question is, how will it is this
data? There was a big discussion
in the media about this and especially
the media against the referendum said
that all the all
of the census of five point three million
people were leaked.
So, first of all, you don't get
the correct idea.
You just get a
reduced number of I.D.
and the NCAA, this public data
in this in the sense that if you
want to open a bank account, you have to
tell your idea.
If you want to get a library card, you
will have to tell
your I.D. or if you, uh,
I don't know if you want to
sign up in not because you think you are
not fit enough, then you have also to
tell your I.D. So say the
person through a lot of friends.
And it's not a top secret data
like for for example, to secure a Social
Security number.
So I think this is an interesting
way of storing data
and massive data in an easy to clone able
website in, I'm not
sure about if it's not, if
it could have been done better.
So if you have any ideas about
this, then just write a blog
post or Twitter about it or whatever
and spread the word.
OK, so 30th of
September, one day before the referendum
actually happened, the federal
police took over the city to a
center of telecommunications and
technology.
And this was because
nearly all the polling stations of
these offices, they
were were
entities of the Catalan government,
especially schools and medical stations.
And the Internet Internet
connection is all through CTT
so they all have a connection to the
city. And from there they go to the
Internet. And so probably they
did this to start to monitor the IPS
to see what traffic actually will be
and will happen on this
on the polling stations.
OK, the
day of the referendum.
I just want to give you a small
impression about how the
how the
situation was on the day of the
referendum, so it was clear
that the federal police will come and
will close down and will try to close
down polling stations by force.
So there were people that were already
sleeping from the day before occupying
the polling stations to hinder
the police to to stop
the police from closing them down.
And in the early in the morning, around
five o'clock, hundreds and thousands of
people gathered in front of polling
stations and stayed there the whole day
trying to block, like
with their bodies, the police from
entering and, for example,
the ballots and the ballot boxes in which
the police, which was searching for
months and metrically,
arrived in the earlier in the early hours
of this day on the polling stations.
So at eight o'clock this morning, there
was a global census
announced by the Catalan government, that
means that you don't need
to go to a specific polling station to
vote, but you could go to any polling
station. And this was done because it was
foreseen that the police will close down
polling stations by force.
And actually, for example, in Barcelona,
one of the first polling stations they
closed down by force was the biggest one
of Barcelona.
So if you want if
you don't have a global census, then
everybody that had
that need to go to this polling station
won't be able to vote in this way.
It was possible.
So the homepage of the
global census, which was a centralized
database where you and
where you registered the I.D.
of the person that had already voted.
So to assure that nobody votes
twice or more than once,
it was really simple.
So this is I have not found a better
picture because it's not online anymore,
obviously.
And it looked like this.
So you had a polling
station and a polling station
idea, which is this one, and then you had
a polling station
password and
those responsible of the polling station
had to enter these to actually register
on the central system, the polling
station, and then you could enter it
here to
and to to
mark people that they have voted.
And then if you if you put the button,
then when they were screened and the
people the person was allowed to put
the ballot in the ballot box.
And if it was red, then you said you
already voted. You are not allowed to
vote again.
And
so it's it seems that
this passport here was
also used for authentication
and encryption of the data because
the whole system had no
tearless certificate.
We will see why.
And and there was, of course,
a timeframe of up time for this
solution, because the
referendum was from 9:00 to 8:00 p.m.
and you can just say, well, we need four
hours to fix this and then we are up
again.
So an Internet connection
in the polling stations, which runs
through CTT, I what I said before, and
it's not totally clear what happened
because there are so many
different information from different
people in different polling stations.
So some got cut off from the net
totally.
Some got cut off.
Only part of the net, for example, either
from Wi-Fi didn't work, but
cable network did work in
some you weren't you could not access
and using the Tor client
and some reporter that also
a block IP addresses got directly
blocked and
some people at some polling station had
alternative access to the net, but that
was a minority.
And so what?
In many polling stations, people did use
their cell phones or they'd
and used 4G access
points or the neighbors opened the
Wi-Fi so that people could access and
so registered voters.
And it was seen that
different apps were blocked by different
ISPs.
And OK, so
the page that was announced by
in the morning was the Domain
Registered Nurses, which used
CloudFlare, they like the other pages
and it was blocked within minutes.
And so so
it wasn't even possible to open the
polling stations in time at nine o'clock,
because when they wanted to
add to connect the two,
register all the polling places,
it didn't work.
So and from this point on and
there were only only IP
addresses were used directly, which were
reverse proxies
for a central server that were somewhere
on the Internet.
And in the in the first hours,
these proxies were attacked through
those attacks all the time and there were
severe connection problems because
they got down quickly.
And so if you
if you're a reverse proxy
didn't work and you had to call a hotline
and say, hey, I'm using this IP address
and it doesn't work, and then it says,
OK, you have to use another one,
you one.
And you can imagine that this is a total
chaos because the responsible of the
polling station can be an
old man which has never used a computer.
And you have to tell him what
is an IP address and where to put this.
So there was a
total chaos and
well, not not chaos, but it was
complicated. Right.
And there was also instant messaging
between people in different polling
stations, which in that changed
information like I'm using this IP or
I tried this when I changed it
in a server, then I could get access.
So there was a lot of communication.
And it was seen that
every time a new IP address
was announced through the hotline and the
polling stations started to use them,
dittos attack was in place right
away. So this is why this
is possible that
the police and
check the content checked the
network connection of the polling
stations or the network of the polling
stations to find out which piece to
block.
OK, so whenever you needed
a new a new reverse proxy
and you needed to reregister
the and your
polling place, so you had to call the
hotline and say, hey, I'm I'm
I'm polling place with Lady
X X, I
want to I need a new I need
I need a new passport.
And they provided you a new passport and
then you could reregister.
So what happened?
Someone was really emotional about the
referendum and historical day
and posted a photo of the
letter there.
The responsible, a responsible
of the polling place got
on Twitter where there was the
the idea of his polling place and the
number of the hotline.
So someone
someone took the hotline
called said he
said that he is responsible of this
polling place code and you got
a new passport and was able to introduce
some some ideas from
people he found on the Internet, which
doesn't mean that he was able to actually
vote. He was just able to
and mark
people has voted that they have
voted even they haven't.
So if they would have come later to vote,
that wouldn't be possible for them.
And so the problem here was,
of course, that there was no secure
communication channel between the police,
the polling place responsible and the
hotline, so there was no way for the
hotline to actually knew if the person
that called was the responsible of a
polling place or if it was someone
who wrote the number.
OK, so as I said,
there was a distributed in
denial of service attack against
the whole system, and that was organized
through a forum that's called for
Cochise's, which is a
forum about cars where
car lovers
talk about a lot of things, and that's
not only about cars, but about
everything.
And there was one user.
You can find the info
down here, which is really interesting.
It's in English and there's one user
and he's called Alex Thiong'o.
And it seems that he's from Madrid.
And he opened the thread in this forum
and said and ask
people to help to shut down the system.
And he wrote in the thread, I want to
remind you is that it's something that is
illegal, is not illegal.
So, yeah, that's an opinion.
Right.
And in this thread,
IP addresses from the
reverse proxies got published and
also they updated IP addresses
that went down because of those attacks.
So they
were really working on this.
And there was a there's
evidence that the attacks
actually did happen.
So it was not just some
computer, a computer, some
car lovers sitting in front of
their computers, pressing F5
and to see if they can
if they can deduce the system.
But there were actually professional
techniques used and
it was seen flooding with IP spoofing.
So the question is, if this were only
users from the Rakoczy or if they were
law enforcement agencies involved,
it is, of course, unknown.
So on their reserve proxies, they
introduced Fort Knox to try to mitigate
the attack and
after some hours anonymise Barcelona,
I think it was attacked
for coaches.
It serves a forum.
And so the forum, the website had
to go it had to go down to
maintenance
for maintenance so it wasn't accessible
anymore. And some other hacker groups
attacked, attacked
and did some other attacks.
These are all described in these
really good article.
Unfortunately, it's only in Catalan,
so.
Sorry for that.
OK, so on the day of
the referendum, we had a we had a whole
bunch of attacks, so we had the attack
Internet infrastructure, obviously
we had filtering techniques used
and we had a distributed denial of
service attack and
an.
Also this all these attacks
voting was the
rotation was able to take place,
and while the central service
was the weakest point of the system, so
I was wondering if it would be
possible to put this
in a decentralized manner.
Right now, the DEA, everybody is
talking about block chain.
Maybe there's any possibility to build
this with a block chain.
I'm not an expert.
So the participation
of the referendum was 43
percent, which is extremely high,
I think, because you have to think that
you could see from the early hours
in the morning and police officers
beating up people.
So it was a real risk to go there and
vote because they could just come by
and well, the yes vote won by
90 percent or something like this.
And there was like one hundred seventy
seven thousand people that voted no
and forty five thousand nine hundred
thirteen that voted in blanko
is like
this a vote like I don't care which
and which gets actually
added to the votes of the most voted
party on this case, on the gets
added to the votes of the yes to
independence.
And
in the aftermath, it's on the 10th of
October, the website of
assembly and in North Catalana got shut
down again.
And I say again because the website
got shut down three times as
National Catalana is
is a political organization which
promotes independence.
And on the 30th
of October, several websites from the
Catalan government got shut down
and assembling a national
catalana just a few days
ago, 19th of December, they took
legal action against the blockage of
their website because they
claim that they never got any information
that the websites could get shut down
or blocked and why.
So they don't even know why.
So I come to the conclusion
I think this could be the biggest
Internet censorship in the European
Union so far, and I
think the European Union
did not condemn sufficiently
what happened these days.
And it's really it's
concerning that the government tried to
load the censorship responsibility
to the top top level domain registrar.
And there was a huge repression against
the creator of Miro's.
And these unconventional datastore
from the home page,
I think is really interesting.
And it might need a deeper look to
understand if this is really secure or
not.
And I think the most
important conclusion of all this is all
the repression on the street and
the censorship in Internet.
The Spanish state was not able to stop
the referendum.
And.
So here are some links about the
international reaction.
There are more, but I just put in these
four links.
I will upload the slides afterwards so
you can check them out.
And yes, thank you a lot and thank you to
all the people that helped me some my
name here and there are many
more that gave me.
They put me in contact with people that
gave me explain me there
and what they experienced on the day.
Thank you.
Thank you for going to the
and a brief announcement
if you leave through the door.
Mark B.W., there's a TV crew
behind that making a recording.
So if you don't want to be filmed, please
exit through the door. Might be.
And we have about 10 minutes left for
Q&A. And the first question
shall come from the Internet.
You don't have any sound.
OK, then, microphone one,
please.
I think that was very, very interesting.
It seemed like you needed a lot of
computer expertize to help run
all of the polling stations on the day
where those people, volunteers
are part of the government.
Is it normal that the government is so
technically the Catalan government
as well?
On the day of
I think what happened in the
days before the referendum, there was
like most
of the people in Catalonia were really
upset with the Spanish state and
were like, this is illegal.
I don't care. That was like what
everybody felt like about I don't care
if it's illegal or not.
So on the day of the referendum,
they were like people that
normally would have go to this polling
station or they were called because.
So someone you are you have you have some
computer expertize.
Come by, help us.
The network is not working.
So there was no official
organization of this but the Catalan
government as far as as far as I know.
But it was just the
people spontaneously helped
each other.
Hello, and I have a question,
a question about that, the
censorship was quite brutal.
So are there any legal
actions that are going on against
Spain? Because if there is
nothing going on against this country,
the next time another country will do the
same because they have nothing to lose.
Well, I don't know of any
apart from what I explained
from the ANC, from the assembly
on National Catalana, which did some
legal action, I think
I mean, for example, European Union hides
behind the fact that the
Supreme Court of Spain declared the
referendum unconstitutional
and therefore all the censorship was
legal in some way.
OK, next question goes to the Internet.
So, uh, why
did you use, uh, password
notification instead of, uh,
I keep hearing on
cert?
You mean on the day of the referendum,
right? Yeah, uh, well,
I don't know, because I didn't build the
system, so I don't know why
not, but I think it wasn't used because
it was foreseen that the rebels
proxies will be attacked.
And from what I know, you have to
you would need a certificate for each IP
address, for each domain.
And that was not possible because it
was like and we had
someone put up a new universal proxy,
it get attacked. You have to get a new
one. And it was like it was like
a cat and mouse all the day long.
So that wouldn't be feasible.
OK, microphone to
thanks for the talk.
My question is regarding Telefónica,
did they block, based on government
requests, one website at a
time or did they block based
on the whole referendum was illegal?
I see a website based for a
referendum. I block it now.
So who blocked or what
decision?
I don't know, to be honest, I don't know.
But I suppose that they blocked on this
on the warrants. On the court orders they
got. But I can't tell you for sure.
Thanks.
OK, any last question from the Internet?
Yep, um,
how many people were involved
in the war undertaking,
if you have any idea?
I have no idea.
It's totally unclear
who this was or how many people these
were, these activists.
OK, any other questions?
Oh, you know,
it's OK. It was just a precedent
to say it wasn't a technical
part and not every
management of people who you
add for the undertaking.
But I think you will say
the same answer.
I didn't understand your question.
No, the people in Internet just
wanted to precise their question
and say the number
of people they want to know is about
technical people.
But it's I think it's the same
answer. Not from you. Yeah, well, that
you mean like the people and the people
on the polling stations that help each
other? I don't know.
But I suppose thousands or
thousands at least.
But I can tell you, I have no idea.
OK, since it seems there are no further
questions, I thank you all for keeping
your questions brief and to the point
when you leave, please take your trash
with you and
wash your hands.