Dropbox, Google Drive, GitHub and Microsoft OneDrive Cloud Services Blocked In Turkey (turkeyblocks.org)

An anonymous reader quotes the censorship-monitoring site Turkey Blocks: Turkey has blocked access to Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive and partially restricted Google Drive cloud file sharing services following the leak of a set of private emails allegedly belonging to Minister Albayrak by hacktivist group RedHack. Both Google Drive and Dropbox services were issuing SSL errors, indicating intercepted traffic at the national or ISP level. Microsoft OneDrive was also subsequently blocked off throughout Turkey.
The emails reportedly document Turkey's use of pro-government trolls on Twitter -- though ironically, it's Twitter that's now being used to document the censorship. (GitHub was also blocked last night, according to a status update from the group.) Google Drive was even displaying an official notice from the Turkish government's Information and Communication Technologies Authority describing their block as an "administration measure" -- although another Twitter update this morning says Google Drive is now back online after Google complied with the government's takedown order.

Comments

Anyone surprised?

[Opportunist]

Seriously, this regime is worse than a lot of the shit that's going down in the middle east.

Anyone still wants that country and its tinpot dictator in the EU?

Re:Anyone surprised?

[93 Escort Wagon]

I was going to make a comment about how the EU is actually the GU (Deutsch Union), but Europeans often don't have a sense of humor so I've reconsidered.

Re:Anyone surprised?

[Zocalo]

You think it's bad now? Having been to Turkey in September, the situation on the ground is a definitely lot more divided than people in the West might grasp from the media reports; there's clearly a huge amount of resentment and suspicion bubbling away beneath the surface, and many Turks are clearly not happy about the supression of the media and widescale arrests if you get them to talk candidly. Likewise, the effect of every arrest, sacking or suspension ripples out across family, friends and acquaintances who have no idea why that person should have been singled out by the government (or, as is now starting to become the case, denounced). To take that analogy further there's also a huge propaganda drive in progress with Turkish flags and nationalist slogans on just about every place you could put some one - hanging from windows of home and offices, bridges, on taxis and buses... any of this starting to sound scarily familiar yet?

Meanwhile, the economy is on the verge of imploding because the big cash cow of tourism has all but collapsed. The area around the Blue Mosque and Haghia Sophia and the Topkapi in Istanbul were all but deserted in comparison with the norm and traders are getting truly desperate and are selling things at a fraction of what they normally go for just to pay the rent and put food on the table - or at least they are trying to, given that there are so few tourists to actually buy them. Wrecked lives, many social hubs like mosques, schools, media, and stores shutdown, an abundance of resentment, widespread distrust and fear, an oppresive government... Pretty much a perfect environment for any of the several militant Islamic and Kurdish groups present that might be looking to snag some new recruits. Yeah, this is going to end really well.

As for the EU though; forget it. Turkey's progress towards EU membership requirements before the coup attempt was glacial at best - plate tectonics might actually be a better analogy - and since then it's all but stopped; Ergodan is even toying with things like bringing back the death penalty which would kill and remaining chance of membership dead in its tracks. With everything else that's going on in the EU, especially the growing pushback against globalism and immigration (both internal to the EU and from outside), it would be insane for them to even consider Turkey's membership at this point, although the flipside of that course is that's more likely to result in much tighter links between Ankara and Moscow.

whew

[GrahamJ]

Lucky for the Turkish government there are no other ways to send documents over the internet. If only there was a way anyone could publish a document and have it visible by anyone with some sort of a document browser. If they could be linked together it would form sort of a web. That'd be awesome!

Twitter is Enforcing Additional Censorship

[Kunedog]

The emails reportedly document Turkey's use of pro-government trolls on Twitter -- though ironically, it's Twitter that's now being used to document the censorship.

According to a Turkish journalist, Twitter is also helping out with the censorship:
https://twitter.com/MahirZeyna...

At the request of Turkey, Twitter decided to block my Turkish account within Turkey.

I'm not the only journalist whose Twitter feed is restricted in Turkey. The process is simple: Turkey asks, Twitter shuts down.

And lists a few more who have been banned.

What if.

[Gravis Zero]

What if we had a network of LEO satellites that replaced the internet backbone, providing high speed internet access to all people and only a handful of governments were even capable of disrupting this network? Would it be worth pissing off every nation state that censored the internet and possibly causing a war?

Turkey is also jailing many for downloading app

[schwit1]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Teachers, judges, journalists, businesspeople, bankers, shoemakers, chefs, police officers, florists... All of these people are in Turkish prisons for simply downloading ByLock. Thousands of children were left orphans in a country where child social services are broke. There are dozens of cases where entire families were jailed because of this app.