Residents of Barangay San Rafael, Rodriguez, Rizal expressed alarm after the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) installed a “free wifi service” in their barangay last May. Kalatas, a mass newspaper of the revolutionary movement in Southern Tagalog, reported that the “solar-powered free wifi” facility was installed to monitor residents, at the instigation of the National Task Force-Elcac.

The report said the NCIP itself revealed the purpose of the free service. In a meeting on May 24, its staff instructed residents to use the free wifi to “contact NTF-Elcac and report ongoings to maintain peace in the barangay.”

Accessing the service requires users to log-in to a page and provide their name, age and gender, which the the NCIP and NTF-Elcac will collate. This “free service” was built by the Department of Information and Communications Technology in partnership with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and Broadband ng Masa.

The Protect Sierra Madre Network said “The perpetuation of the notorious EO 70’s whole-of-nation approach where any [government] branch and program is a cog in the wheel of the NTF-Elcac’s bloody counter-‘insurgency’ war [against the people] is worrying.”

In the whole of Montalban, only Barangay San Rafael was granted the free service by the national government. This is part of the militarization by AFP units that serve as guards for the destructive Wawa Violago Dam of Prime Metro Power Holdings Corporation and San Lorenzo Ruiz Builders & Developers Group, Inc. The two companies are owned by crown princes Enrique Razon and Oscar Violago.

The presence of the NTF-Elcac and the military in interior communities such as Barangay San Rafael has led to numerous cases of illegal arrests, abductions and extrajudicial killings.