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.
leading down? Turkey were way down that road long before this was announced.
Said Turkish teens in 2012, probably earlier. This is not new.
Ataturk would be spinning in his grave if he knew of the things Erdogan has done to the country.
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.
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)
What a farce
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.