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A Single Line of Computer Code Put Thousands of Innocent Turks in Jail (www.cbc.ca)
Long-time Slashdot reader kbahey writes:
Can a single pixel cost you your livelihood and/or freedom? Apparently, this has already happened in Turkey to thousands of people and their relatives. It all stems from the purge by president Edrogan following a failed coupe. The result is that many innocent people lost their jobs (and source of income), their freedom, their reputation, and more.
The details are frightening. The underlying technology is the use of 1x1 transparent pixels, as most web sites do, to track their visitors. This particular pixel was used by Bylock, a messaging app that the Turkish government deemed seditious, in their purge against Fethullah Gulen loyalists. Pre-dawn raids by police were conducted on those who have this pixel. The long legal proceedings caused a digital forensic expert to challenge those cases, because [the pixel using] the servers for Bylock was also being used by other applications for music streaming, and prayer times/direction of Mecca.
30,000 innocent people may have been swept up among the 150,000 Turks detained, arrested or forced from their jobs under state of emergency decrees since the summer of 2016. One 29-year-old high school teacher "wished the worst" for the revolutionaries accused of using Bylock, "until authorities said he was one of them."
The government eventually exonerated 11,480 of the wrongly accused, but some had already spent months in prison, and reportedly some even committed suicide.
The details are frightening. The underlying technology is the use of 1x1 transparent pixels, as most web sites do, to track their visitors. This particular pixel was used by Bylock, a messaging app that the Turkish government deemed seditious, in their purge against Fethullah Gulen loyalists. Pre-dawn raids by police were conducted on those who have this pixel. The long legal proceedings caused a digital forensic expert to challenge those cases, because [the pixel using] the servers for Bylock was also being used by other applications for music streaming, and prayer times/direction of Mecca.
30,000 innocent people may have been swept up among the 150,000 Turks detained, arrested or forced from their jobs under state of emergency decrees since the summer of 2016. One 29-year-old high school teacher "wished the worst" for the revolutionaries accused of using Bylock, "until authorities said he was one of them."
The government eventually exonerated 11,480 of the wrongly accused, but some had already spent months in prison, and reportedly some even committed suicide.
A coupe is a car.
A coup is the death knell of an old order and regime change.
Neither end up being what their aficionados see in them. The coupe is a mid-life crisis; the coup usually means a society moving into senescence.
Alternative Right.
Hmm, nope. They have (recently) achieved the magic 0% open defecation rate necessary for non-shithole status. All the Trump-designated shitholes have nonzero rates, with most scoring well into double digits.
That's pretty much exactly what it is. Erdogan was elected with a very very slim margin and he knows the country is split in the middle. The cities are highly educated and well off and in favour of a secular state and against totalitarianism. The countryside, Erdogan's base, is less educated, more conservative and more religious, and this is the group he's been pandering to the whole time. This is why he's slowly dismantling the secular basis of the state and inching it closer to a theocracy, which is for example why they made a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in schools. His goal is obviously to ensure that his base stays ignorant so he can continue to enjoy their support.
Whether or not the 'coup' was an actual attempt or state-sanctioned theatrics to justify the subsequent actions doesn't even really matter at this point. What matters is that Erdogan's done after that is unjustifiable: he's thrown out judges, teachers, shut down newspapers and stations, increased censorship and blocking of sites online, and so on. At the same time he's been consolidating more power for himself and amped up the campaign against the Kurds, despite the fact that the Kurds are in fact helping to combat Isis, , but he knows that all totalitarian states need both internal and external enemies. For him the internal enemies are now the 'Gulenists' as well as the Kurds at times and the external enemy is Isis.
Not to mentioned with the courts now manned by Erdogan approved judges, what do you think are the chances for a fair trial for someone accused of treason? I mean this article demonstrates the standard of evidence that passes in the courts, it's essentially: 'you've visited these sites/used this app/shared this content, that makes you an enemy of the state'. Think about the fact that about half the country never voted for him, so how easy do you think it will be to find something 'anti-Erdogan'/anti Justice and development party that they've shared/liked at some point? Hell, if I was Turkish this comment alone would likely make me a candidate for facing a trial. I know for a fact that my Turkish ex-girlfriend who's an outspoken atheist and has been active in demonstrations against Erdogan for years certainly has a profile that makes her a target for prosecution, but I do not know if she's still free or not. And she's no 'Gulenist' as she's against the whole religion to begin with, but again, that doesn't matter to tyrants.
So yeah, the country with 2nd largest army in NATO after the US and previously the largest muslim majority secular state is slowly turning into a totalitarian islamist theocracy and the attitude of the entire West is mostly 'oh well, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, can't be helped'.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead