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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.
And the others were guilty? This really looks like 'oh, while trying to send the Jews into concentration camps, we made some mistakes and sent there some non-Jews'...
Do it now!
Is that an elected politician saw an opportunity to purge any resistance to his regime and the fact that innocents were caught up in it didn't mean a damn thing to him.
Dictators have always seen enemies everywhere; they need them to make themselves appears to be defending their country. Erdogan is a paranoid, ignorant git, no different than any other tin-pot dictator elsewhere.
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.
It wasn't "Gulenist" either. That's just the convenient excuse for our esteemed chief high goatfucker.
I'm pretty sure mose people put in jail are innocent under western rules. Under goatfucker rule, they're guilty as sin. Obvious reasons are obvious. But as long as the Turkish people acquiesce and continue down this path, much, much more of this will continue to happen.
So, get a clue, dear Turks. Get a clue. We've seen how this works, we've seen this very playbook in Europe, we've seen where it leads. The pixel isn't the point. The people in jail over tenuously alleged sympathies are. Not that I care much: Gulenism is but a hair different from Erdostanism. Nobody willing to put a religiously-inspired ideology over the good of the people is innocent. You had the vote, and yet you all still voted for the guy who explicitly said that democracy is but a train to get off of when you get where he wants to be. You made your bed.
I am more concerned for the other 120,000 people who this 'purge' swept up. Calling the thousands who were also swept up 'innocent' implies something about the other 120,000 victims that many would say is inappropriate.
... is the West's reaction/response to what Erdogan has done in Turkey.
Nothing.
This is almost certainly because Turkey is geopolitically important to the West as part of NATO.
If you think about it objectively, you realise that western governments have not previously hesitated to apply sanctions to nations which mistreat minorities or suppress democracy in the way that Turkey has done. Yet no such outcry met these actions.
Much as we might be horrified at the thought, evidence on the ground suggests that as long as Erdogan supports the West with respect to Syria, acting as a buffer against regional economic migrants [i.e. refugees] - and of course having the potential to be a staging area for any form of military action in the region [ for example, Turkey was used as a launching point for air strikes against Iraq during both Gulf Wars] - then the West will simply turn a blind eye to this.
If we could find an "honest politician" who was also willing to talk about this "on the record", chances are they would tell us that the West will continue to do this because this would be the "least worst" option - that condemning Turkey for the Human Rights abuse would risk moving Erdogan away from NATO and towards Russia. Not something that the West would find appealing...
But this is just guesswork.
The fact that 150,000 people were jailed and/or tortured over their use of a piece of communication software proves that a revolution is needed. KMaybe 30,000 didn't actually use the software. It doesn't mean that abuse of the other 120,000 was justified.
Screw Erdogan -- hope the next revolution succeeds and the last thing he sees are the raised Kalashnikovs of a firing squad.
The "Ceaucescu treatment" is better than the old bastard deserves.
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.
This is where the west is going with all its surveillance and data collection. Calling the 120'000 that were actually using the messaging app "guilty" is "justice" about as perverted as it gets. It just needs a continuation of the current slow slide into fascism the west does and all that data collected about you _will_ be used in the same way. While worthless to "fight terrorism" or "protect the children", Turkey nicely demonstrates the primary use a dark and unjust state has for mass-collected data about people: To accuse people of thought-crimes and then get rid of them.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The most distressing part of this story is that this could happen almost anywhere... here in the US while we may not be a dictatorship(Yet???), our government has already been caught spying on us. Whats to say that they haven't used methods this extreme in the past to apprehend "suspects"? Tech can be very scary sometimes, it holds both wonder and danger at the same time. I won't get into "The Singularity theories" because it is beyond the scope of this comment, however Tech can most certainly be used for ill, and a lot of the time the "criminals" get away with it. The upsetting part is that, most of these "Criminals" are governments and their agencies, who use clandestine methods/technologies to "Better the lives of their people", but usually these operations have the opposite effect. Don't get me wrong there is something to be said about civil security, however all governments MUST fear their populaces, simply be cause they are usually VASTLY outnumbered! (I know, don't flame me for the reference to V for Vendetta, but this is truth) All of this being said nothing can/will change this until we as humans find a way to govern ourselves fairly(which I truly doubt is possible). We are all(Americans at least) raised to believe that we are all equal... this is true only in the sense that no one "Life" is more precious than another, but intellectually/physically we are most certainly NOT equal. I will skirt racism and say that Africans/and their descendants are better runners than most(there are always statistical outliers mind you), and this has been proven. What you will not hear me say is that (Tentatively said)"Blacks are superior athletes, because this is too broad to be proven... I for one have never seen an African American Curler(I'm certain there are some...) but my point is we are not all equal, and because of this fact there will never be a way to govern all equally. Someone will feel cheated, but this will/might be blamed on greed(no I will not discuss Religion or other Meta-physical garbage) which is why we have societies in the first place. A millennia ago the "smartest" cavemen decided that they didn't want to hunt anymore, so they made others do it for them, and "Pay" them (in meat) for keeping the women folk alive while the hunters were out... it might seem like cooperation, but it could just have easily been exploitation(this is just a theory). So I rambled a bit, but the point is that technology can be a dangerous tool, and it must be watched carefully by ALL parties involved. (I do not condone the use of a dictator for any country, it is simply too dangerous a path, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and I know that some people have no/one choice{Stay, Exile [I would chose exile]}) BTW: I know very little about the situation in turkey, I just wanted to feel like a part of the group... LOL
X = -([squareroot] [infinity]) X = (i^2 * [infinity]) or (-1 * [infinity]) X = "A Black hole"
Disregarding the political/moral issues, the idea of using a closed source messaging app and expecting it to be secure is incredibly stupid. Closed source software can literally be doing anything. It could be sending your photos, text, passwords, anything to anyone. People need to learn that closed source software is not secure, especially when it runs on a device connected to the Internet.
The raids were conducted within 48 hours of the 'coup'. That can mean two things. Either the Turks have an incredible intelligence system that can pinpoint tens of thousands of 'guilty people' in such a short time, locate and capture them in no time. Or they planned this all months in advance and the whole coup was faked.
My money is on option two.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Sounds familiar. Dissenting opinions can be punished by the state, or the herd, but either way, the outcome is the same.
Alternative Right.
Thoughts shouldn't be a crime
Last time that I checked, nobody got sent in the US for just writing n|gger on the internet. Correct me if I am wrong.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
https://www.theguardian.com/uk...
http://volokh.com/2013/05/03/l...
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-eng...
https://www.theguardian.com/la...
https://www.cnet.com/news/lond...
https://www.amren.com/news/201...
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
https://www.thenewamerican.com...
Alternative Right.
The remaining people are in jail being accused of installing the wrong chat application. Unfortunately the real reason is that they pose a threat to the Erdogan regime.
This initally might not make sense to go into an educated at the moment, however the make up of these people tell a lot. There are thousands of judges, academics, prosecutors, teachers, police officers, journalists who were put away. Looking at this, basically those who can uncover his bad deeds, publish it to the masses, and who can put them into jail for those wrongdoings are taken care of.
It was covered in many places, however the stories are still heartbreaking:
http://www.dw.com/en/turkeys-p...
I'm still optimistic for the future though. The Turkish people have exercised democracy for over a century, and was heavily integrated with the modern society in the recent decades. These kinds of "blips" happen in the history, but hopefully they don't last long.
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.
Are you aware that the UK is a different country from the US? Seems not. Just to let you know, the UK has always had significantly less protection for freedom of hate speech. The westboro baptist church wouldn't last a minute in the UK, but they're safe in the USA.
This space intentionally left blank
That's what Erdogan deserves
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
Erdogan decides to throw people in jail for looking at him funny and the blame is on the particular die he decides to roll for the arbitrary selection criterion?
That's like Trump going out in the middle of 5th Avenue and shooting a random stranger with the blame going to the guy who sold him is shoes.
Donald Trump is salivating SO HARD right now as he wets his panties, dreaming of being able to purge the country like Stalin or Erdoan.
Expect the next presidential briefing to cover "pixels" and how to track them.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
How did they know someone's phone had the Evil Pixel? phone company records of IP addresses, or did the pre-dawn raids also involve searching the house for any phones and then trying to get a file manager app to show the appropriate directory? My phone isn't rooted, and it won't show me anything unless I threaten to hit it. I've never been able to get ES File manager to locate anything, even if I know roughly where the file should be.
Also, slightly amazed that people in some places are being targeted for using the wrong app. I thought things were weird when the Rwandans had to check ID cards during the Tutsi/Hutu genocide.
UK.
The site has "conspiracy" in the name - got a more reasonable source? Searching the name turns up some harassment charges but the warrant cites "I hate you so much I would like to see you butchered," alongside pictures of mutilated barbie dolls which isn't un-PC it's just violent.
UK.
UK.
UK.
UK,
Singapore.
Hey, this one is the US. But the arrest is for "let's lynch her" an explicit threat of physical harm toward a specific person, not for un-PC speech.
UK,
So got any actual US arrests for peaceful un-PC speech in the US?
And the others were guilty? This really looks like 'oh, while trying to send the Jews into concentration camps, we made some mistakes and sent there some non-Jews'...
No need for comparisons, Turkey provided Hitler the template for the Jewish massacres under the guise of The Armenian Genocide. They've never apologized to the Armenian people and to this day deny that it happened.
At least the Germans faced up to what they did under Hitler, Turkey has *never* faced the consequences of their fascism and remains as one of the primary examples of a culture falsifying reality so they don't have to bare the shame they so rightly deserve. Turkey has yet again provided a template for the next round of human rights violations a century after they did it the first time.
Fascism is alive and well in Turkey so if anyone needs an example of what a 21st century Stazi would look like, now you know.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Might want to look that one up; he's a law professor of some repute.
Here's some more information of interest:
https://www.cato.org/survey-re...
https://today.yougov.com/news/...
http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...
I believe, if you scroll up, that the original post was:
Alternative Right.
Alternative Right.
You misspelled Erdogan, swapping the 'r' and the 'd'. If you go to Turkey, you will face jail or worse for disrespecting Dear Leader. Besides, in Turkey noone is really innocent, if they harbor even a shred of the fraction of an idea that perhaps they do not always love Erdogan completely with all their heart fully and wholly.
Disclaimer: my immediate reactions to this whole thread may be biased from having watched yesterday the first episode of the documentary Apocalypse: Stalin. If you want to learn about horrible dictators, that is a pretty good starting point.
A new interrogation technique "Watermark Boarding"
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
I don't know whether to be appalled by this post, or applaud it.
After careful calculations, examined and verified by 3 independent accounting firms, I've concluded the correct response is golf clap, non-sarcastically.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
I'm thinking it was not the code.
I'm thinking it was an authoritarian regime not being entirely good at oppression.
Oh, well. As they say, you can't make an omelet without breaking heads.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Let's talk about lives being destroyed by accusations of racism, which fits with my original point:
Alternative Right.