The offices of the .cat registry were raided by Spanish police this morning.

The Guardia Civil officers entered the .cat registry’s offices around 9am local time this morning and have seized all computers in the domain registry’s offices in downtown .

The move comes a couple of days after a Spanish court ordered the domain registry to take down all .cat domain names being used by the upcoming Catalan referendum.

The .cat domain registry currently has over 100 thousand active domain names and in light of the actions taken by the Spanish government it’s unclear how the registry will continue to operate if their offices are effectively shutdown by the Spanish authorities. The seizure won’t impact live domain names or general day to day operations by registrars, as the registry backend is run by CORE and leverages global DNS infrastructure. However it is deeply worrying that the Spanish government’s actions would spill over onto an entire namespace.

The registry wrote to ICANN about the situation earlier this week:

We have denounced to @ICANN the disproportionate action of the courts. Committed to freedom on the Internet. pic.twitter.com/NkvTMYJ79d — Fundació puntCAT (@puntcat) September 17, 2017

The Catalan referendum is scheduled to take place on October 1st. Over the last few days, however, the Spanish government has been taking very aggressive action to block the vote from taking place. News outlets are reporting this morning that Guardia Civil have been involved in raids across Catalonia targeting local government offices and officials.

The .cat registry, which is based in Barcelona, was setup to provide an online space for Catalan language and culture and if you want to register a .cat domain name you need to use it for sharing Catalan language or culture.

UPDATE: Staff at the .cat registry in Barcelona are being questioned by Spanish police. Their CTO was arrested at his home early this morning about 50km north of Barcelona.

Some of the photos being shared on Twitter by .cat registry staff are quite chilling:

Des del departament de comunicació de @puntcat us mantindrem informats de la situació. Agraïm molt totes les vostres mostres de suport. pic.twitter.com/Ntw6PGeQHI — Fundació puntCAT (@puntcat) September 20, 2017

Right now spanish police @guardiacivil is doing an intervention in our office @ICANN pic.twitter.com/nh0b1lnrv7 — Fundació puntCAT (@puntcat) September 20, 2017

Apparently the police started the raids prior to having court orders so while they entered the .cat registry offices they were unable to proceed with seizing computers and other equipment until the court orders arrived.

UPDATE Thursday 21st September

The .cat registry’s IT manager who was arrested yesterday is being detained and charged with “sedition”, as reported by Kevin.

The .cat registry has issued a statement on the raid of their offices and the detention of their staff member (English version below):

The Fundació puntCAT wants to express its utmost condemnation, indignation and reprobation for the actions that it has been suffering lately with successive judicial mandates, searches and finally the arrest of our Director of Innovation and Information Systems, Pep Masoliver. We are a private and non for profit foundation devoted to ensuring that Catalan – a persecuted and maltreated language – has its space in the digital world. We assist all our users with the greatest professionalism and we are a reference entity in Catalonia and in the world. The show that we have experienced in our offices this morning has been shameful and degrading, unworthy of a civilized country. We feel helpless in the face of these immensely disproportionate facts. We demand the immediate release of our colleague and friend. We will continue to work for our foundational objectives as well as for the defense of freedom of expression on the Internet.

The Spanish authorities are denying Masoliver his rights:

We strongly protest about the denial of the habeas corpus to our colleague detained. Pep, you are not alone! #totsambtupep — Fundació puntCAT (@puntcat) September 21, 2017

The Twitter hashtag #totsambtupep “we’re with you Pep” has been getting quite a bit of attention over the last few hours.: