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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'...
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.
... 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.
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.