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Turkey Says It's Investigating 10,000 Social Network Users (engadget.com)
Turkey has been cracking down on internet activity at a frenetic pace ever since an attempted military coup in the summer, and it's now clear that there are a lot of people caught in the dragnet. From a report: The country's interior ministry has revealed that officials are investigating about 10,000 social network users suspected of backing terrorism. About 3,710 people have been questioned in the past 6 months, authorities say, and 1,656 were arrested. The rest were let go, but 1,203 of them are still under watch. There's one inescapable question, however: just how many of those internet socialites really support terrorism?
has gone insane with paranoia, maybe a coup would be best, get rid of that insane paranoid government and install a secular democratic/republic government that has a separation of islam and state, religion tends to ruin democratic processes and islam is the worst offender, (just look at the brutal states run by islam) so democracy needs republic oversight otherwise it is just tyranny of the majority
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Just how many of those internet socialites really support terrorism?
Probably close to zero. Most of them are likely supporters of Kurdish or other opposition parties, people who think the hate campaign against Fethullah Gülen is a giant smoke screen or just people who made the mistake to point out that Erdogan bears a striking resemblance to Gollum .
Yet.
That is the point. In the "Five Eyes" (US, UK, Canada, Australia, NZ), data is being collected, and it is possible that maybe someday that data could be used to roundup and arrest dissidents or people that question authority.
In Turkey, that worst case scenario is happening now. 70,000 people have been arrested. Hundreds of thousands more have lost their jobs. Erdogan's has openly expressed contempt for democracy. He once said "Democracy is like a train. You get off once you reach your destination."
For those of us who believe in open societies, with free movement of people, goods and ideas, 2016 has been a annus horribilis. I never expected to see so much regression in so many places.
Anytime someone asks questions about my concern for privacy online and why I find data collection so dangerous ("But I am doing nothing wrong and have nothing to hide, so why should I care?"), I point to McCarthyism and the anti-communism mania from the 1940's and 1950's. In the late 1940's, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (Yes, that's really the name of a U.S. House of Representatives investigative committee) began to subpoena Hollywood types (screenwriters, directors, actors, etc.) and ask them to testify about known or suspected membership in the Communist Party, association with its members, or support of its beliefs.
This committee would ask people to name names of colleagues with Communist affiliations. They saw a massive web of dissidents just based on affiliation. No bad deeds required other than showing up at a house party 20 years earlier. A paranoid black spot on our history that had serious repercussions for a lot of professionals when private companies started to blacklist people (See the Waldorf Statement) based on little to no evidence. Just being subpoenaed by the committee was enough cause to lose your job and not be able to find another job. Why would you be subpoenaed? Who know? Did you go to a coffee shop where "Communist" meetings were held? Did you best friend become a Communist? You could be roped in and tarred when you hadn't done anything wrong. It was even worse if you were actually a member of the Communist party (something that was not illegal) ten years before.
Can you imagine how horrible that era would have been if they government had just the Metadata on every single person in the country? Who you messaged, called, etc. tells a lot about your network, and you are going to be 'guilty by association' for a lot of things that you are not necessarily guilty of. It may be wrong of me, but I often draw parallels in modern times with what happened then. Are there any ideas they or their friends hold that may become more unpopular in ten or twenty years? Do they have religios beliefs that will be considered 'bad' in the future? We don't know... but if it does we have a record of every person you talked to. And that's just the Metadata. Browsing habits, actual content of communication: apparently a lot of that was collected (if not retained). Location is just as dangerous. There is a record of nearly everywhere you have been since you they started logging where your phone has been. Every day for a month, were you at Starbucks around the same time as a future terrorist? You wouldn't know, but the government does.
People are damned by what they say, even if what they say wasn't wrong when it was said. It can get taken and twisted by a motivated agent, and we are giving them the ammo future McCarthys need to do horrible damage to society. Sure, no one is actually looking at you when your data sits in a massive data warehouse, but when that data becomes relevant or certain ideas are labeled as 'dangerous', it's there for discovery. What was once 'no evidence of wrongdoing' at one time becomes the noose that is used to hang you in the future.
"Anything you say can and will be used against you in a targeted advertisement" - Adam Harvey