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A Single Line of Computer Code Put Thousands of Innocent Turks in Jail (www.cbc.ca)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the wrongfully-accused dept.

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.

9 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. And the others..? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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'...

    1. Re:And the others..? by Kiuas · · Score: 5, Informative

      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'...

      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
    2. Re:And the others..? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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;
    3. Re:And the others..? by whoever57 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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!
  2. The bigger issue here by gijoel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. A Thunderbird? by alternative_right · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:A Thunderbird? by rgbatduke · · Score: 5, Funny

      And a coop is where we can put people after a coup, drinking celebratory champagne from a coupe, after driving them there in our coupe'!

      --
      Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
  4. Much More Worrying... by ytene · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... 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.

  5. Proof that a revolution is needed... by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.