Slashdot Mirror
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.
... but even IS confiscating all phones and computers has failed to cut the population completely from the outside world. The actions of the Turkish authorities are leading them down a slippery slope to a total, hated police-state.
Isn't it great that we live in the US, where we have freedom of the press.
The press is free to report on any story without worrying about how the government will react. They are free to cover both sides of a story, to give a different perspective, and not have to worry about what the people in charge will do.
The press is also free to leak information which would paint the government in a bad light, and which might uncover corruption, collusion, or crime. Additionally, the press isn't liable for publishing this information, as the pentagon papers have clearly shown. (Here I'm making a distinction between "publishing" and "getting". Just publishing, without addressing how the information was obtained, is allowed.)
There's also a strong sense of "protect your sources" in the mainstream media, so that anyone can feel safe identifying themselves to members of the press as they pass information.
Living in the US is great, because we have freedom of the press.
Yay.
Just shows what NATO has been allowed to become with Turkey as a member. Basically an empty arms and munitions sales club with total disregard for how those arms and munitions are used. Supply them to terrorists, not a problem, let sex slavers use them to take over towns and cities leading to a million rapes (let them kill themselves till they tire of it - Hillary Clinton, I guess that's what those under age sex slaves do, tire of it and them kill themselves, no excuse the corporate whore knew exactly what was going on and still allowed arms and munitions to be sold for exactly that purpose), not a problem. Basically just war is good for business, sell, sell, sell.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
leading down? Turkey were way down that road long before this was announced.
Said Turkish teens in 2012, probably earlier. This is not new.
We're going ahead with Thanksgiving.
Have gnu, will travel.
Ataturk would be spinning in his grave if he knew of the things Erdogan has done to the country.
Are they really, seriously, going to stop their people from doing ssh'ing to cloud servers? Because if they are, they won't have a high tech industry at all. I might have been in the market for freelance django developers, but not from Turkey apparently.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
Because internet is easy to block. SMS is far more difficult to block because it is used by all kinds of industrial hardware so blocking it can cause serious issues for thre regime as well. Encrypted SMS is required as a backup service.
Fortunately the Turks can use the Signal fork Silence: https://silence.im/
This is what happens when a government attempts to censor the internet. First, they start with a few "objectionable" sites. Then they expand the list. Then they clamp down on the workarounds that people use to accessed banned content. At some point, they'll have to either relent or go Full DPRK and cut off the external internet entirely.
Never go Full DPRK.
(Score: -1, Stupid)
And this is the government that kept up a pretense of wanting to join the EU.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
What a farce
Blocking encrypted speech over the Internet is a human rights violation. Those implementing the censorship are playing with the very rope that will hang themselves.
Given a choice between Erdogan's neo-Ottomanism and the Kurds' moderate progressivism, it's a slam dunk.
And it's about time the Kurds had their own country in any event. Maybe when Turkey considers an alternative to making everyone within their current borders "Turkish" whether they like it or not, we can talk about that EU thing again.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Yeah, they should do it like we do in America. Require all the big companies to scan and funnel data to the government or provide you with important pieces of information whenever you ask. Then pass some laws so they're not allowed to tell you they're providing all this information to them. Then invite all the CEOs over to the Big House for lavish parties or recruit them to be your next big political appointee. Then watch the online dissenters drop like flies.
No, this was the government that really wanted to join the eu but gave up.
They already did it in the past, they removed greeks and armenians. They didn't do it to kurds only because they were fellow muslims and they needed their support for greek/armenian massacre. All people who are called turks in Turkey are of armenian/greek ancestry, and the only reason they didn't change state culture to greek or armenian and went with genocide instead is to allow old ottoman elites to remain in power.
Turkey want to do with the Kurds the same way they did with the Armenians over a century ago.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
They can still limit it to certain sites - or put a proxy in between that fakes the original certificate.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Turkey is going int full-blown religious fascism at this time. Next step introduction of a death-penalty, and you can bet it will be applied for anybody accuses of "anti-government activity", "insulting the president", and the like. With the current state of the prisons and the number of people in there, that the government does not like, they already effectively have concentration-camps.
The only good thing is that this way, they will not get to be part of the EU anytime soon. They will have to come back out of the darkness first, and that takes a long, long time, and currently they are very intent on going much deeper into evil.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Probably. It is also the government that never understood what joining the EU means and that it is not only about economics.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
We're in an era where moderate politics is a vacuum waiting to be filled. Probably not a good time to do anything in haste. Besides, the U.S. has adversaries who would just love to partner up with Turkey if it means an opportunity to destabilize relations in the west. So humiliating Turkey by kicking them out of NATO would absolutely backfire. Not to mention Turkey is a supplier of the F-35 center fuselage and committed to buying 116 of the aircraft... An arrangement that would get awkward pretty quick.
The only thing Washington and Brussels can do is sit on their hands and maybe raise concern every now and then. The rest is up to the Turkish people.
I think if Europe had a better understanding of what kind of a cutthroat political game is going on there they would have been more patient and less biased(current bias is against AKP and Erdogan, and for Gulen , the Kurdish resistance in Iraq/Syria and all the opponents of Erdogan).
European bias is a turnoff for the Turks I think. Hard to admonish the Turks for going overboard now when you can't even acknowledge there has been a coup.
So Europe is also giving up leverage. I think that's stupid, in the sense it's not in europe's interest.
>Turkey Doubles Down On Censorship With Attempted Block
FTFY.
Turkey is going int full-blown religious fascism at this time. Next step introduction of a death-penalty, and you can bet it will be applied for anybody accuses of "anti-government activity", "insulting the president", and the like. With the current state of the prisons and the number of people in there, that the government does not like, they already effectively have concentration-camps.
The only good thing is that this way, they will not get to be part of the EU anytime soon. They will have to come back out of the darkness first, and that takes a long, long time, and currently they are very intent on going much deeper into evil.
The death penalty is in effect. Jail a dissident, and suddenly, for no reason, he dies in prison.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada