Social media shutdown in Turkey

https://turkeyblocks.org/2016/11/04/social-media-shutdown-turkey/

by doener • 10 years ago

123 73 10 years ago

triplesec4• 10 years ago

Here's the reason: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-37868441 More political prisoners: The Pro-Kurdish HDP opposition party's leaders and several MPs have been arrested by the Government.

draw_down• 10 years ago

Indeed. So this shouldn't be perceived as just a matter of internet censorship, there is more going on than just that.

gesman2• 10 years ago

Need peer-to-peer IoT mesh networks with spillover across the borders.

viraptor• 10 years ago

In case the government wants to shut down communication that's a very bad idea. In a global network, it's relatively easy to hide traffic in other traffic. Encapsulation and encryption work just fine.

In a physical world, if you want a mesh (RF I'm guessing) network, it's trivial to figure out who's forwarding. You can do that with a cheap scanner and go straight to the doors of people running nodes. If you're trying to stay stealthy and secure from gov/mil, radio mesh is a terrible idea.

kovrik• 10 years ago

Is there a secure solution for that problem in a physical world then?

enraged_camel3• 10 years ago

I just got back from visiting family in Turkey.

Turkey is in a really weird place. On the one hand, Erdogan is a corrupt tyrant who has done some inexcusably horrible things. On the other hand, he has thoroughly cleaned the cemaat infestation. For the record, cemaat refers to people loyal to a man named Fethullah Gulen, who is a radical Islamist and a very controversial figure in Turkey. You can read more about him here:

http://www.city-journal.org/html/who-fethullah-g%C3%BClen-13...

Anyway, Internet blockages like this usually precede widespread police operations. Based on what I can gather from Turkish newspapers right now, it looks like HDP headquarters is being raided by the police as part of a terror investigation (which is kind of a big deal). HDP is a pro-Kurdish, pro-minority party that got a lot of votes in the last election and prevented Erdogan's AKP from reaching parliamentary majority.

turkeyintrouble4• 10 years ago

It's strange that Gulen is considered a radical islamist by some and a super pacifists, modern muslim by others. How is this possible?

For some background, he's well supported in international muslims with seemingly more forward-thinking views.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BClen_movement

enraged_camel3• 10 years ago

I personally would not trust anything I read about him on Wikipedia, since it can be edited by just about anyone, and he is estimated to have about 5 million followers. Read the link I provided - it's a lot more objective and provides a lot of historical perspective as well.

dogma11384• 10 years ago

Hitler got rid of the brown coats when he didn't need them anymore also.

Fethullah Gulen and Erdogan were besties until about 3 years ago.

It's also a bit funny that you call this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fethullah_G%C3%BClen a Terrorist, if he is he has the best poker face of all of them so far.

While he probably has more than one agenda, neither the US, Israel nor any EU nation has never put him or his followers on any watch list, and at least publicly he strongly condemned any act of terrorism and incitement. He is such and "islamist" that he was probably the only major religious leader that didn't put the blame on Israel for the Flotilla incident and rather said that the organizers should have cooperated with them and put more effort into ensuring that radicals would not join the flotilla, this doesn't exactly seem like something a Terrorist would say publicly on several occasions and probably didn't made him any friends on either side of the political spectrum.

If you want here is a decent paper on him and his movement by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs https://www.swp-berlin.org/fileadmin/contents/products/resea...

enraged_camel3• 10 years ago

I never called him a terrorist. Please read more carefully.

Also, since you obviously haven't read the link I provided, here's an excerpt from a speech he gave in 1999 in which he talks about... well, I'll let you be the judge:

"You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers. . . . Until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria, . . . like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. . . . The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it. . . . You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey . . . . Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all—in confidence . . . trusting your loyalty and secrecy. I know that when you leave here, [just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and the feelings that I expressed here."

denfromufa3• 10 years ago

There were many lawsuits against Gulen and his sympathizers (Hizmet movement) even in US - but he was acquitted many times. Erdogan put all the blame on him and his followers to suppress corruption investigation into his circle of politicians and even family members. Read about Reza Zarrab prosecuted in US right now.

https://www.google.com/amp/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/iran-san...

hackuser6• 10 years ago

It's hard to see Gulen as worse than Erdogan, who has invaded Iraq, oppressing his population, reignited war with and is killing Kurdish people, and building relations with Russia. He's outlawed criticism of himself and arrested people for it, shut down newspapers ...

he has thoroughly cleaned ...

The upside to every dictator, with just different endings to the sentence. Too bad for the innocent people imprisoned, whose lives have been ruined. No problem for you and me, so it's a good thing.

Freedom and rights mean for everyone else; everyone believes in freedom for themselves.

reimertz• 10 years ago

It's breaking my heart watching a democracy slowly being suppressed and manipulated into a dictatorship.

I wish the people will find ways to stand up for their rights and initiate a peaceful revolution.

brassic• 10 years ago

They don't need a revolution. They need to stop voting for Erdogan.

forgotpwtomain• 10 years ago

It's quite a bit late for that.

myf01d6• 10 years ago

Still believes that voting changes the result in Turkey

turkeyintrouble4• 10 years ago

It's hard to have a peaceful revolution when the people are mostly in favor of him.

234dd57d2c8db3• 10 years ago

So democracy is working as intended, the people decided. Just because you don't agree with the results of democracy doesn't invalidate it.

cup• 10 years ago

Are we talking about Turkey or the US?

preexo• 10 years ago

Good that people are working on those kind of projects like https://freedomboxfoundation.org/doc/flyer.pdf

dogma11384• 10 years ago

You still need internet for this to work ;) these boxes only work in places where the internet isn't going to be shut down on a whim.

Countries that are willing to blanket the internet and do mass arrests aren't exactly the place where you want to be caught with those things.

This is the problem with all the so called "freedom" tools (tails, tor, various vpns etc.) and it is that they essentially only provide safe "freedom" to people who are already generally free.

jospoortvliet5• 10 years ago

well you can run something like the nextcloud box on a local network, no problem, and it's super cheap, too. If government blocks the pipes to services like Twitter etc, that sucks but doesn't block local, self-hosted services. They are hard to block unless you take down the entire internet - and THAT is an economic issue.

LMGTFY - https://nextcloud.com/box

myf01d6• 10 years ago

Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia -> Friends

Syria, Iran and Russia -> Enemies

That's how pay for play works, everybody. If you don't pay, your government is labeled as a dictatorship. Simply fallen from the US grace. The UN is just a diplomatic tool to discredit you and NATO is another tool to kill you.

ztratar• 10 years ago

What do you mean pay for play, here? Please tell me how Turkey, Quatar and Saudi Arabia are "paying" for anything in terms of meaningful value for the US.

This is simple geopolitics, not some corruption scandal.

myf01d6• 10 years ago

1. These governments are for example "donating" hundreds of millions every year to many politicians in the US. One of them is may be going to be the next president.

2. Look at the ads and sponsors in the big news channels like CNN, mostly institutions and companies owned by these countries (Qatar airways, Turkish airlines, Dubai, Abu Dhabi...), no wonder on the day of the "coup" against Erdogan, These media outlets labeled his "supporters" as pro-democracy. That never happened for Hosni Mubarak who was labeled as an evil dictator for example, he just didn't pay simply.

3. The west is trying to push the story that the conflict in Syria is just between white "the rebels" (FYI they are actually Sunni islamists) vs black "Assad" (he is a dictator yeah, but not worse then Erdogan), it is the same opninion of these governments.

4. No one is condemning or even talking about the horrific crimes like Turkey against the kurds, Saudi Arabia killing thousands of Shia in Yemen, Qatar funding militant islamists all over the world.

Fluid_Mechanics• 10 years ago

Well, you seem to be making a plethora of paranoid generalizations, care to back up any of that with evidence?

234dd57d2c8db3• 10 years ago

Saudi Arabia was (until massive backlash and attention) on the Human Rights board of the UN. You know, the country that stones women and sponsors terrorism. In a totally unrelated series of events, they have also donated millions upon millions of dollars to the election campaigns of US officials. Surly Saudi Arabia is just a powerhouse when it comes to Human Rights and they really deserved that spot.

Please note, this is just one obvious example. Read into this topic more. Ignorance and lack of research doesn't mean people are "paranoid". Easy to dismiss uncomfortable truths by calling people paranoid and conspiracy theorists.

denfromufa3• 10 years ago

What does this have to do with actual censorship, shutting down media, and jailing of journalists critical to Erdogan?

myf01d6• 10 years ago

I am from Egypt, I remember very well, when the revolution of June 2013 broke out against the muslim brotherhood, the US said it stands with the "legitimate" regime (back then morsi), when they were toppled, the US said it was coup (funny they said it was a revolution when it was against Mubarak). And everyone here is suffering from an unofficial economic embargo enforced by the US on us ever since.

It is simply a coup or a revolution, a democracy or a dictatorship, depending on the "relations" between the US politicians and these governments.

etrautmann• 10 years ago

sounds like a Russian troll account

hackuser6• 10 years ago

I'm pretty confident that it has nothing to do with pay, but with geopolitics. In fact, I think the U.S. generally gives them more money (and other aid) than vice versa. The former three are allies and provide essential value to the U.S. Off the top of my head:

Turkey gives NATO an very valuable geopolitical position, with leverage as the most powerful nation in the Mideast neighborhood, as well as dominating the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean, and providing a position on the southern flank of Russia, eastern flank of the Balkans (less essential post-Cold War), and a stable border with countries to the east and south. Turkey as an enemy would be a serious headache.

Qatar and especially Saudi Arabia, the wealthiest and most powerful Arab state, give the U.S. leverage and stability (at least for decades until recently) in the Mideast, which, due to the oil supply, is essential to world peace and prosperity. They also counter-balance to Iran.

Those benefits don't necessarily justify supporting oppression, but those are very serious considerations.

not_ed_snow• 10 years ago

I believe that's what parent referred to as the "pay" part.

Maybe more accurately would be "play ball with us or with nobody".

tdkl2• 10 years ago

Well, parent was trying to highlight that what you wrote should be a footnote every time there are big words of bringing "democracy" to other countries by the said actors.

jospoortvliet5• 10 years ago

With regards to Saudi Arabia and stability - that might have been a rather short term decision then...

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/saudi-connection-...

Iv• 10 years ago

The changes in Turkey have happened pretty recently and as Turkey is a NATO member (where some nukes are located) and is a crucial player in Syria, most other NATO members look away when this kind of things happen.

I expect huge diplomatic backlashes when the situation in Syria stabilizes. But I'm a bit of a dreamer.

toyg2• 10 years ago

Indeed you are. Syria will not "stabilize" for a long time, for the simple fact that Turkey went for a land grab (motivated mostly by anti-Kurdish strategies, but hey, a land grab is always a good thing in itself, right?) that will remain an issue of contention for decades, regardless of how the civil war is settled. Turkey needs a weak Syria, and everybody (US, Russia) needs Turkey. We have just created yet another Kashmir.

dibstern4• 10 years ago

ITT: Anti-west propaganda commenters, somehow relating censorship issues in Turkey to the "evil west"

oxide• 10 years ago

This is par for the course around here.

If you ever forget that Russia is persecuted by the evil western media, just come to the HN comment section to be reminded.

fusiongyro• 10 years ago

A lot of bright green account names too.

lathiat• 10 years ago

Reasons why I chose not to fly through Istanbul next week :/ Price was cheaper, but gave the 'ol cheapest flight policy a kick to the curb.

Now I get to make a stopover in Tunisia instead... mmhmm.

Social media shutdown in Turkey

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