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Turkey Doubles Down On Censorship With Block On VPNs, Tor (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: In what's a significant escalation in its censorship efforts, the Turkish government now wants to block the very same tools that tech-savvy citizens use to get around the government-imposed social media blocks. On Friday, the Turkish information technologies and communications authority, or BTK, ordered internet providers in the country to block Tor and several other censorship-circumvention Virtual Private Networks or VPNs, such as VPN Master, Hotspot Shield, Psiphon, Zenmate, TunnelBear, Zero, Vypr, Express, according to multiple local reports. Earlier in the day, the government had already blocked Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, and restrictions on messaging apps like WhatsApp and Skype were also reported. The independent monitoring organization TurkeyBlocks also reported throttling and other forms of censorship on Friday, linking the disruptions and blocks to the arrests of pro-Kurdish party leaders.
If someone told me that NATO could dump Turkey and support a Kurdish state instead, I'd probably be for it. Right now they're one of the more moderate Muslim groups in the Middle East and they have been crapped on by every country in which their ethnic group resides to some degree. There's little doubt that Erdogan is a dictator now and his actions will seriously set Turkey back to the point where it's not worth keeping them around. Russia probably wouldn't object to the plan since it would let the push Turkey around a lot more due to a lack of NATO backing and having Kurdistan would still allow for a NATO presence in the region.
It seems like this is a plan that everyone could get on board with. Syria and Iraq have some serious territorial integrity problems right now with ISIS, so they can hardly complain. Iran probably wouldn't go for it without some concessions, but they might do it just to spite some of their neighbors or if embargoes were lifted. Turkey obviously wouldn't like it, but since they're well on the way to becoming a complete despotic shithole, I don't think we should care at this point.