I lived in Turkey (Istanbul) for one year, made some good friends and was active in the Gezi Park protests. While the country is now highly polarized, all sides have some things in common which help explain these measures.<p>Turks typically have a feeling that everybody conspires against them. Not only against the country, but also against them personally. Americans and Jews are always among the prime suspects of any conspiracy.<p>The kemalists have nurtured a strong national identity with flag, anthem, the infallibility of leaders, language and territory. Criticism is simply not welcome, but the internet is full of it.<p>Istanbul, and let alone the rest of Turkey, despite the rich cultural past is not international or multi-cultural. It is a given that most people are inclined to distrust cultures they are not familiar with.<p>None of these factors are exclusive to Erdogan. That helps explain why internet censorship is prevalent in Turkey and does not cause much uproar at all.<p>Now the AKP movement is extra zealous in 'protecting' the people from sex and gambling. That does not help either.<p>* disclaimer: I tired giving a generalizing brief on Turks, plz don't take it personally.
Many people here in Hacker News, Turkish and non Turkish tried to exploit this news as an oppurtunity to attack Turkish people by making some generalizations and talking about massacres, which are totally unrelated to the problem at hand.<p>They fail to realize that the Internet restriction practices are not specific to any one particular country. Similar practices are emerging in Britain, Ukrain and even in the USA.<p>If I was to talk about Internet restriction in the USA would I start talking about individuals in the USA or what kind of massacres took place in the past in America? How big a non-sense would that be!<p>We are faced with serious problems here in Turkey and most of those problems are artifically created and one-sided. The Internet Restriction law was proposed by only 27 parliament members and law's passed wo asking others. It's sure to die soon because it's created in a one-sided manner by a small group of blind people.
Countries like China, Iran and now Turkey are just slightly ahead of the curve of what will come toward us.<p>While the progressive part of the Turkish population looks for help and support from the "Western civilization", the "Western civilization" struggles with internet censorship and privacy themselves.<p>The sense of superiority of this western society is really strange: when disapproving and rejecting this kind of developments in the Middle East, they pretend that is intolerable and they cite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But in the meantime, they themselves trivialize their own actions and policies regarding censorship and privacy breach that is getting worse.<p>Public opinion is just as schizophrenic. Such news is read with pity and denigration, without any realization that their own future is maybe not much better.<p>But hey, we are just much better and things like this will never happen here!
Wasn't this the country that wanted to be part of the European Union? When they said that, I thought they were going to take steps in the right direction. But years have passed and that's obviously not the case.
This seems to be a calculated move by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in response to two things:<p>- Widespread dissent that was not publicly expressed suddenly became public in the gezi park events, and the internet was a huge catalyst in expressing dissent and disseminating information, as well as organizing protests (Long topic, more here: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_protests_in_Turkey" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_protests_in_Turkey</a>)<p>- There has recently been a fallout between AKP and their longtime allies, the Gulen Movement (weird religious cult-cum-political-power <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BClen_movement" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BClen_movement</a>). This has resulted in the Gulen people uncovering a ton of dirt on AKP members, including mind-blowing corruption scandals that include millions in cash being kept in shoeboxes in the personal residence of the owner of a national bank and important people being complicit, including the PM Erdogan's sons. AKP's response was to shuffle around 350 police officers to replace them with their own men, and unsurprisingly the police refused to carry out the prosecutor's orders for arrest. The prosecutor was also fired. The cabinet was reshuffled. A "judiciary coup" took place where they tried to change the laws to have the head of the judiciary elect the prosecutors, so they could elect their own prosecutors, so they could find prosecutors which would not indict AKP (<a href="http://www.todayszaman.com/news-336883-erdogan-govt-rolls-back-judicial-reforms-in-violation-of-eu-coe-rules.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.todayszaman.com/news-336883-erdogan-govt-rolls-ba...</a>)<p>Throughout this internal fallout, documentary evidence was often released anonymously on the internet (records of phone conversations, photos of documents, etc). AKP suddenly realized that it's not to their benefit to allow this.<p>(Long topic, more here: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_corruption_scandal_in_Turkey" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_corruption_scandal_in_Turk...</a> and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/28/opinion/the-filth-in-erdogans-closet.html?pagewanted=all" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/28/opinion/the-filth-in-erdog...</a> and yet even more here: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/magazine/whose-turkey-is-it.html?hpw&rref=magazine&_r=0" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/magazine/whose-turkey-is-i...</a>)<p>The new legislation was suggested by 27 members of AKP, and no other members from other parties. Surprise, surprise! (Source: <a href="http://www.tbmm.gov.tr/develop/owa/tasari_teklif_sd.onerge_bilgileri?kanunlar_sira_no=145376" rel="nofollow">http://www.tbmm.gov.tr/develop/owa/tasari_teklif_sd.onerge_b...</a>)<p>edit:<p>More info on the new laws:<p>- The Telecommunications Communications Directorate (yes, redundant name, TIB for short) head can immediately order content to be removed.<p>- TIB can ask for any information they want and the hosting providers have to supply it, no due process needed (no DMCA safe harbour-ish clause)<p>- You need permission from the TIB head to begin a questioning process about any TIB employee (i.e. abuse abounds)<p>- Hosting providers must keep IP addresses for 1 year instead of 6 months<p>- IP, DNS and URL blocking will be implemented (previously it was DNS only), but of course no one knows how they're going to acquire the hardware for deep packet inspection.<p>- No hearing required for complaints about websites that allegedly involve a violation of personal rights. A decision is immediately made.<p>- Hosting / Service providers must respond to requests in 24 hours.<p>- The directorate has permission to "fight cyber war", which seems to be a patriot act-ish catchall phrase to do whatever they want.<p>Ridiculous!
That's nothing new in that country, before free-internet was a hot-trend, Turkey used to genocide and massacre thousands of Kurdish people just because they wanted to speak in their mother tongue, and west was OK with it, because we needed Turkeys support during the cold war, the same situation continued after the cold war in other forms, Turkey and Iran use these kind of acts as an old and continuing process mostly for racial purposes.
We can't compare this to the paradigm that exists in the US or EU.
<a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1fwj66/u161719_tells_us_all_why_surveillance_is_not_ok/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1fwj66/u161719_t...</a><p>This link has been just recently discussed here on HN and it seems like this will be the future of Turkey.<p>Turkey never was a hotbed of freedom and justice - but when injustice is made legal by law, then the shit is about to hit the fan soon.<p>Option if you have friends in Turkey like me - set up a VPN?
The best analogy I can come up with is proverbial ostrich hiding his head when threatened. Long story short, the ostrich doesn't survive then again this is a myth purported by Pliny. But this does not hide the fact that this act is parallel to that.