Turkish Forum

Tag: Twitter

  • Russia threatens to ban Google, Twitter, Facebook

    Russia threatens to ban Google, Twitter, Facebook

    RasPutinBy Cory Bennett

    Russia is warning Google, Twitter and Facebook that they could be banned in the country if they don’t agree to hand over data on Russian bloggers and allow the Kremlin to block certain websites, Reuters reported.

    Moscow claims failure to do so would violate Russian Internet laws that President Vladimir Putin promotes as security measures, but critics say amount to censorship.

    A spokesman for Russia’s media watchdog said the three firms use encryption technology that prohibits the government from blocking sites that promote “unsanctioned protests and unrest,” which is allowed under Moscow’s Internet laws.

    The laws also mandate that companies turn over data on any Russian bloggers with more than 3,000 readers per day.

    The media oversight agency wrote each company, pressing them to comply with these dicta.

    “In our letters we regularly remind [companies] of the consequences of violating the legislation,” the spokesman, Vadim Ampelonsky, told Reuters.

    Russia has passed a series of Internet control laws in recent years.

    The Kremlin granted itself the power to remove, without court order, sites promoting unauthorized protests. Another law requires popular bloggers to register with the government.

    It’s not clear how Google, Twitter and Facebook will respond to the request.

    According to transparency reports from the three tech firms, they have previously rejected most, if not all, of Moscow’s requests for specific user data.

    “We realize they are registered under U.S. jurisdiction,” Ampelonsky said. “But I think in this case they should demonstrate equal respect to national legislation.”

    thehill.com, 22.05.2015

  • Turkey’s Twitter Shoot: Lessons Learned

    Turkey’s Twitter Shoot: Lessons Learned

    Turkey’s Twitter Shoot: Lessons Learned

    Network engineers can gain insight into resilience, indirection techniques like NAT, and Internet governance from Turkey officials’ none-too-successful attempt to shut down the popular messaging service.

    In March, the nation of Turkey attempted to shut Twitter down within the country. There are several lessons network engineers should glean from Turkey’s efforts to shut down a single service, including lessons on resilience, indirection, and the interaction between Internet governance and the technology decisions engineers make when designing protocols and networks.

    First — because of resilience — it’s become very difficult to turn off “one service” on the Internet. Turkey tried to shut down Twitter by blocking access to Twitter’s DNS records. Using DNS to block access to a service isn’t very effective, though; it’s easy enough to switch to a public DNS server, such as those run by Google, thus restoring any services rendered unreachable through this sort of blocking.

    Let’s assume, though, that Turkey had decided to block the IP addresses of Twitter servers rather than the DNS records. Would this have worked? Probably not. Just about any service can be deployed across a number of different IP addresses, even changing IP addresses on a periodic basis to make it difficult to find and block each individual instance of the service. Putting the service behind a large-scale network address translator (NAT), would make it virtually impossible to block without blocking a large number of sites that are “innocent bystanders.”

    Indirection such as NAT is often considered a very bad thing in network and protocol design and engineering. If we had a truly “transparent” Internet, where every person or service had to be identified before sending traffic, we’d certainly have a lot less spam. But without the indirections, Twitter service could not have been restored to people living in Turkey.

    So the first lesson is this: To block any particular service, you almost have to block the entire Internet. IP networks are just too good at routing around blocked paths or dealing with mapping information being removed from one source. Resilience is a two-edged sword — individual services are much more reliable, but they’re also much harder to block or otherwise shut down.

    Second, this level of resilience comes with another sort of cost in terms of security. DNS servers are often used to reflect or amplify denial-of-service attacks specifically because of the resilience built into the DNS system as a whole. Are we potentially facing another version of the CAP theorem? Just as a database cannot be made to be consistent, available, and partitionable all at the same time, maybe network protocols cannot be resilient, reliable, and secure all at the same time.

    Finally, while we sit outside Turkey, smugly condemning an attempt to block Twitter, “free speech zones” are becoming increasingly common in the US. Free speech isn’t just about technology. It’s also about accepting that you’re not going to agree with anyone all of the time — and, in fact, you might just find what they say offensive. This is perhaps a little more of a personal lesson, but as engineers we need to realize that, while we can’t anticipate all the potential consequences of every decision we make, there is still some interaction between the technical world and the political one.

    Engineering decisions have social outcomes as well as technical ones. It’s important to remain as neutral as possible, providing technology for a narrow set of requirements at hand, but it’s also important to get our heads out of the technology sandbox and try to come to terms with the real-world implications of what we’re building from time to time.

    via Turkey’s Twitter Shoot: Lessons Learned – Network Computing.

  • Turkey’s Twitter Problem, and Our Own

    Turkey’s Twitter Problem, and Our Own

    Turkey’s Twitter Problem, and Our Own

    Always castigating the opposition as extremists is no way to run a modern society.

    download

    Erdoğan’s trouble starts with T and stands for Twitter.

    By Alejandro Crawford

    “If Twitter, YouTube and Facebook will be honest, if they’ll stop being so immoral, stop attacking families, we’ll support them.” So says Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. If one were trying to do comedy about the vilification of the Internets and their corrupting influence, it would be hard to come up with something much better (or more suitable for re-tweeting). Mashable has published acraziest quotes list, but the list is in dire need of updating. Since Turkey’s courts impelled him to lift his ban on Twitter (YouTube and tens of thousands of other sites remain blocked), Erdogan has come up with even better lines.

    The joke is an old one, though. When the confidence man in the classic Broadway show “The Music Man” needs a convenient source of trouble, he scapegoats an activity popular with youth in order to stir up concerns about the dangerous liberalizing of social mores. The satire works because the con man is able to pick a relatively arbitrary activity (playing pool) and associate it with the erosion of traditional rules for language, attire and the like. In Erdogan’s version, there is indeed trouble in Turkey; it starts with T, which stands for Twitter, and it must be rooted out.

    [Read more from Alejandro Crawford on the cost of Turkey’s censorship.]

    Never mind the fact that social media platforms are conduits for communication for millions of decentralized users. “All our national moral values are being set aside,” Erdogan has explained. Worse still, Twitter is “the product of an American company.”

    The rhetorical force that guilt by association with the United States carries in many parts of the world can be difficult for us Americans to comprehend. Yet what happens if you switch out the bad guy in Erdogan’s formulations, but keep the conviction that corrupting forces need to be held at bay? Change the name of the scapegoat, and Erdogan’s rhetoric sounds not all that different from what we hear every day here in the good old U.S. of A.

    When it comes to the Muslim world (Turkey is a secular Muslim state), with a straight face we talk about a fundamental clash of civilizations. Has history not demonstrated conclusively enough the productive power that is released when disparate societies expand their commerce with each other? Yet we cast our vital economic partners as the threatening Chinese buying everything up or those illegals from Mexico taking American jobs. What to do but put a fence along the border watched by guys with guns? And if you see someone who might be foreign, ask him for his papers.

    [See a collection of political cartoons on Chinese hacking.]

    Even amongst those to whom we’ve granted the right to participate in our economy without having their identity cards checked, the picture isn’t pretty. Our social and political bugaboos have the look of cartoons – latte-drinking East Coast intellectuals at universities, corrupting young minds; bumpkins in pickup trucks waving the confederate flag while shooting off guns. It’s not that neither type exists. It’s that interpreting the world according to these types shortcircuits our ability to see what the other camp might have figured out (or more importantly, what we might be able to come up with if we put our collective mind to it).

    We possess the innovative capacity, the market mechanisms and the capacity for good government (yeah, that’s a thing, or at least it used to be) required to free us from petroleum’s noose, for example. We have the wherewithal to achieve economic growth and global competitiveness beyond anything we have seen before. But at a time when we need to be applying the best of all our tools, we’re enacting an epic battle between the scissors and the knife. We hear incessantly of evil capitalists, perpetuating a system that by its very nature rapes the planet and exploits the “99 percent.” Meanwhile we are regaled with tales of those dangerous socialists, fundamentally corrupting our free enterprise system with their health care regulations and wild notion that the climate might indeed have changed.

    Business school students learn of the dangers that come with sidelining conflicting viewpoints on a management team. Under the pressures of competing in the marketplace, a manager who surrounds himself with others who gratifyingly confirm his assumptions often veers off course. The cost lies in critical problems unexamined, worthy solutions not derived, smart strategies left unpursued. On the scale of the larger economy, what is the loss when we fail to convene with those who might lead us to question those assumptions and our modes of operation?

    Here in the U.S., we allow our social media chatter to go on without direct interference (our government has distinguished itself more in the monitoring department). Yet even as this chatter continues, our conversation has effectively split into separate streams. It is an everyday matter in the United States to cut short meaningful debate through casting media and other institutions as beholden to those whose viewpoint we want to write off. Americans are regularly treated to folks on the right invoking “the liberal media” to discredit arguments they dislike, while their counterparts on the left decry “corporate media” or “the media industrial complex.” Whatever the biases of the owners and editors of traditional media, at this point the charge has become a reflex. Whoever is ranting at the moment considers himself to be a reasonable thinker exasperated by the bias of what he encounters. Depending on where he sits, the game has been rigged either by unpatriotic moonbats or jingoist wingnuts, by government beholden to trough-feeders and hangers-on, or by corporate interests bent on marginalizing the rest of us.

    [Read more economic analysis from our Economic Intelligence blog.]

    This evidences a fairly severe kind of breakdown. Think of a couple you know, each member of which is convinced that the other is “nuts.” Put such a couple on a roadtrip or make it responsible for the care of a child, and you don’t tend to see a lot of constructive decision-making, much less creative problem-solving and the development of worthwhile ideas.

    We can’t have a problem-solving conversation when we have effectively written off the other half.Name-calling and condemnation of the discourse itself have become standard-issue equipment for today’s great enterprise of digging into one’s own insular viewpoint. This is at a time when our future depends on finding real solutions that release economic energy and keep up with the ever-accelerating demands of the global economy, while enabling us to stop effectively living off the equity in our common building. Can we think the unthinkable? That the left might have to recognize that their own incomes result from someone having hung up a shingle somewhere, or having dirtied her hands through dealing with business (oh dear) – and the right might have to deal with the fact that we’re actually going to have to guzzle less gas and get over it with the guns (the horror)?

    This is not to say the other side is not crazy. The more we fail to participate in a common conversation, the more normal our own crazy becomes – and the more crazy the other crazy sounds. This perpetuates extremes of thinking that really are somewhat nuts, because they have been too long unchecked by contrary frames of reference and modes of living. The irony is that putting two kinds of crazy together can be extraordinarily generative, but only if both crazies manage to stop ranting long enough to understand what’s making the other so nuts.

  • Turkey’s Prime Minister Threatens to Pursue Tax Evasion Case against Twitter

    Turkey’s Prime Minister Threatens to Pursue Tax Evasion Case against Twitter

    Posted by: Jasmin Harper in Technology April 12, 2014

    turkeyTwitter may have been off the hook in Turkey when the Turkish Supreme Court ruled that banning it in the country is unconstitutional. But the microblogging site is set to continue worrying about how the Turkish government would run after it.

    Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan today launched a new set of tirades against the highest court of his nation, specifically regarding the recent rule on the lifting of a two-week ban against Twitter. He said the court decision simply puts the rights of international businesses above the rights of their country.

    After saying that he still does not respect the ruling of the high court, Erdogan released another bomb that may explode into Twitter’s face soon. He declared that he would ‘go after’ the Website through filing a tax evasion case against it.

    Profit-making foreign firms

    In his speech, Erdogan reiterated that Twitter, along with Facebook and YouTube, is an international company that generates profits. He emphasized that those international companies should abide by the Turkish laws, constitution, and tax rules.

    He criticized the constitutional court’s recent verdict to retain Twitter services in the country by describing the decision as an advocacy to commercial law for foreign companies. He said that decision does not defend Turkish rights, even calling it as ‘interference in politics.’

    Going against national sentiment

    It could be recalled that Erdogan enforced a ban on Twitter in Turkey on March 20. That measure came after the social media site became a portal where leaks pointing to corruption in his government were posted. Those tweets sparked an outrage among the NATO allies of Turkey. Most international human rights groups also viewed the prohibition as a setback for democracy within this EU-hopeful nation.

    But as history has it, Turkey’s high court decided to lift the ban on April 3. That was after the court said it found that the blockade of the online site serves more as a breach of the right to free speech. During the two-week ban, over 12 million Turkish Twitter users were affected. Many of them had discovered ways to circumvent the ban through relying on posting tweets through sending text messages. Some Twitter users even discovered adjusting their Internet settings to continuously access the Website despite the national ban.

    via Turkey’s Prime Minister Threatens to Pursue Tax Evasion Case against Twitter | Morning News USA.

  • Turkey’s culture of dissent

    Turkey’s culture of dissent

     

    Caged tweets

    Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is like a mousetrap salesman; the moment he plugs one hole, the mouse peeks out of the other.

    His latest move to block dissent in Turkey is to ban Twitter, but millions of Turkish tweeters have, with characteristic ingenuity, found ways to circumvent this ban.

    On the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth in 2009, a former Turkish judge at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), Rıza Türmen, noted about the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, “What they are attempting to achieve today [after coming to power in 2002] is social engineering, a radical transformation of society.”

    This includes a reform of the education system, which makes it possible for pupils to attend religious schools (imam-hatip schools) after only four years of primary education, the easing of restrictions on Quran courses and an abolition of the coefficient system to enable students from imam-hatip schools to enter universities on equal terms with graduates from other high schools.

    This is in keeping with Prime Minister Erdoğan’s declared goal to raise a “religious generation,” and also involves other forms of social engineering such as a ban on the sale of alcohol in municipal and public restaurants in most of Turkey’s provinces. This culminated last May with a new law that imposes severe restrictions on the consumption and sale of alcohol.

    Although both the preamble and Article 24 of the Turkish Constitution stipulate that no one shall be allowed to exploit or abuse religion or religious feelings for the purpose of personal or political influence, this is precisely what Prime Minister Erdoğan and his AKP government have done. Or as the Turkish imam, Fethullah Gülen, now Erdoğan’s arch-enemy, put it in the Financial Times, “The reductionist view of seeking political power in the name of a religion contradicts the spirit of Islam.”

    Gezi Park 

    Four days after the alcohol legislation was passed, a boiling point was reached and the occupation of GeziPark in İstanbul began. What started as an environmental protest developed into nationwide protests against Erdoğan’s tyranny, which now proves to have far-reaching consequences for Turkey. As Alev Yaman, author of the English PEN’s report on the GeziPark protests, concludes, “A culture of protest and dissent has been established among a previously politically disenfranchised younger generation.”

    Social media played a significant role during the Arab Spring, and in Egypt it contributed to the downfall of President Hosni Mubarak. After the demonstrations in Tahrir Square, Erdoğan advised Mubarak: “Listen to the shouting of the people, the extremely humane demands. Without hesitation, satisfy the people’s desire for change.” However, during the GeziPark uprising, he failed to take his own advice but instead supported the police crackdown on demonstrators.

    Research by Eira Martens from DW Akademie on the role of social media during the revolt in Egypt showed that Twitter and Facebook mobilized protesters and helped develop a collective identity, or more precisely, a form of solidarity. Consequently, images of police brutality, also on YouTube and Flickr, made people not only angrier but also lowered their threshold of fear.

    The same applied to the GeziPark protests, but whereas in Egypt the most popular hashtag was used in less than one million tweets, an analysis by New YorkUniversity estimates that out of more than 22 million tweets related to the protests in Turkey, the two main hashtags were mentioned about 6 million times. In Turkey’s case, around 90 percent of all the tweets came from within Turkey, whereas in Egypt only 30 percent were from inside the country.

    In Turkey, it is estimated that the AKP government has the final word over 90 percent of the media, that is, newspapers and television. This was evidenced in an interview on CNN Türk with Fatih Altaylı, the editor-in-chief of the Turkish daily Habertürk, who complained that instructions were “pouring down” every day from somewhere.

    Leaked wiretaps, one of which Erdoğan has confirmed is genuine, reveal constant pressure from the prime minister’s office and Erdoğan himself on media owners and executives. In one recording, Erdoğan’s son, Bilal, allegedly informs his father that the next day’s headlines have been agreed upon with the pro-government media.

    Consequently, Turkish media coverage of the GeziPark protests was nothing short of scandalous; CNN Türk broadcast a documentary on penguins and seven pro-government newspapers ran identical headlines with the same quote from the prime minister. Four television channels that covered the events were fined for “harming the physical, moral and mental development of children and young people” and 845 journalists lost their jobs

    In its report on the role of social media in the Turkish protests, New YorkUniversity said that part of the reason for the extraordinary number of tweets was a response to the lack of media coverage; furthermore, it said that Turkish protesters are replacing traditional reporting with crowd-sourced accounts expressed through social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. The report concludes that this is an impressive utilization of social media in overcoming the barriers created by semi-authoritarian regimes.

    There is also the fact that, according to another study, Turkey has the top Twitter penetration rate, with 31 percent of an Internet population of 36.5 million being Twitter users.

    No wonder Prime Minister Erdoğan calls Twitter “a menace” and finds social media to be “the worst menace to society.”

    Dec. 17 

    The anti-corruption operation that went public in İstanbul on Dec. 17, and the subsequent scandal, constitutes a major challenge to Prime Minister Erdoğan’s government. The response has been a massive cover-up, with the removal of thousands of police officers and hundreds of prosecutors and judges who could continue the investigation and therefore threaten the government’s legitimacy.

    The AKP has made use of its parliamentary majority to block the reading of indictments that involve four former government ministers, and it has also blocked the formation of an investigative commission. As Fethullah Gülen noted in the Financial Times, “A small group within the government’s executive branch is holding to ransom the entire country’s progress.” And one of the founders of the AKP, Abdüllatif Şener, has even said that Erdoğan is prepared to drag Turkey into a civil war to retain his hold on power.

    The immediate threat to the AKP government is the outcome of the local elections on Sunday, which will act as a barometer for the party’s popularity. Some 35 percent are reckoned to be the AKP’s core voters and, according to a Sonar survey, 80 percent of them don’t use the Internet. Added to this is the fact that Turkey has a relatively low newspaper circulation (96 papers bought daily per 1,000 people), which increases the importance the government attaches to the control of both public and private TV networks.

    Nevertheless, since February, almost daily tweets from Haramzadeler (Sons of Thieves), joined by Başçalan (Prime Thief) and Hırsıza Oy Yok (No Votes for Thieves), have contained links to wiretaps on YouTube and other social media allegedly involving Prime Minister Erdoğan, his family and ministers in bribery, tender rigging, media manipulation and interference with the judiciary

    Despite widespread international criticism, President Abdullah Gül, “Mr. Nice Guy,” has approved new legislation giving the government control over the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK) and the powers to block important websites. Prime Minister Erdoğan has now (ab)used these powers by imposing a blanket ban on Twitter through the Telecommunications Directorate (TİB), which has also blocked access to Google’s domain name server (DNS). Furthermore, Erdoğan has threatened to block access to YouTube and Facebook.

    In the first few hours of the ban, there was a massive increase in the number of tweets sent in Turkey, and Turkish users have found ways to circumvent the ban by using virtual private networks (VPN) or Tor. Nevertheless, there has since been a marked decrease in the number of Turkish tweets. Following several complaints, a Turkish administrative court has also ordered a stay of execution, which Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç said the government will implement

    Erdoğan has, in turn, elevated the conflict to a “new war of independence,” with a TV commercial showing Turks from all walks of life rallying round the flag. However, as Turkish economist Emre Deliveli remarked on his blog, “There are several million people in Turkey who would believe the world was flat if Gazbogan [Erdoğan] told them so.”

    Robert Ellis is a regular commentator on Turkish affairs in the Danish and international press.

     

     

     

     

     

  • First they came for the Twitter, and I did not speak out– Because I was not in Turkey

    First they came for the Twitter, and I did not speak out– Because I was not in Turkey

    First they came for the Twitter, and I did not speak out– Because I was not in Turkey

    Then they came for Facebook in Turkey, and I did not speak out– Because I could still use Facebook.

    Then they came tried to stop the demonstration in Turkey, and I did not speak out– Because I was in another country.

    Then my government came to silence me–and there was no one left to speak for me as Social Media around the world was already silenced.

    Craig Burrows after Pastor Martin Niemöller