A Basque Web site that posts information on a terrorist group was taken down by the hosting Internet service provider Friday after a deluge of spam and mailbombs.
"We've gotten some legitimate protest mail - quite a bit that we feel we can handle - but at this point we are so swamped by illegitimate protest of spamming and mailbombs that it's putting us in crisis," said Maureen Mason of the San Francisco-based Institute for Global Communications, which hosts Web sites of nonprofit organizations.
At issue is the Euskal Herria Journal, a site that documents the history of the mountainous Basque provinces of northern Spain and southwestern France. The site contains information on Fatherland and Liberty, or ETA, a guerrilla group responsible for decades of terrorist bombings and assassinations in its campaign to establish an independent Basque nation.
ETA assassinated a town councilor in northern Spain last weekend, triggering a series of protests throughout the country, including one that drew an estimated 1 million marchers in Madrid.
Mason said the attack on IGC began after the Spanish national newspaper El Pais published the service's general email addresses. Since then, she said, IGC servers have been "slowed to a crawl" and tech support has been completely overwhelmed with thousands of email threats over the past 10 days.
"This is really an attack on our server," Mason said, adding that in the interest of the ISP's 12,000 users, the Basque site had to come down - at least temporarily. "We will always review a site if people don't think it is meeting our humanitarian mission."
