In December, as part of “an anti-terrorist initiative” Operation Pandora, over 400 cops raided 14 houses and social centres in Spain. They seized computers, books, and leaflets and arrested 11 people.

Four were released under surveillance, but seven were “accused of undefined terrorism” and held in a Madrid prison.

It turns out that the reasons given by the Judge Javier Gómez Bermúdez to hold seven people in jail “include the possession of certain books, ‘the production of publications and forms of communication’, and the fact that the defendants ‘used emails with extreme security measures, such as the RISE UP server’. 

Riseup provides secure email services and online communication tools popular among activists and people opposed to "full pipe monitoring" in the US.

Needless to say Riseup is furious calling the move a Kafkaesque criminalization of social movements, and the “ludicrous and extremely alarming implication that protecting one’s internet privacy is tantamount to terrorism.”

Many of the “extreme security measures” used by Riseup are common best practices for online security and are also used by providers such as hotmail, GMail or Facebook.

The only difference is that Riseup is not willing to allow illegal backdoors or sell our users’ data to third parties.

Apparently the other reason the Judge kept the seven locked up is because one of them had a pdf of the Anarchist Cookbook or had read Against Democracy .

What is interesting about the raids was that the Spanish press rushed to call those arrested “criminal groups”, “terrorists” and “violent ones” and yet there was no indication that that this was the case. The police raids happened a day after the enactment of the the introduction of a restrictive law to criminalise disobedience and protest.

What is also strange is that the Bermúdez could have held the seven on charges connected to actual evidence. There was some indication that the seven were involved with destroying ATMs with homemade bombs during 2012 and 2013, but Judge Bermúdez cited the book and the use of secure email as “evidence” to apply the anti-terrorism law.

In fact, Bermúdez said he was not interested in investigating those attacks, but is more interested in the organization based on possible danger it might pose in the future.