Turkish delight: A for Arrest, B for Bots & C for Censorship

Uta Meier-Hahn, Efe Kerem Sözeri, Melih Kırlıdoğ, Başak Çalı This
panel, organised by Internet Policy Review, discusses the
latest political and social dynamics at play in Turkish society,
with a focus on the battle for the control over communications. The
speakers – a technology journalist, a lawyer on international law
and a computer scientist – will provide in-depth information about
the current state of political online communication in Turkey.
Since the internet law of 2007, the imposition of internet filters
in 2011, the repression of the Gezi protests in 2013, the 2014
defamation amendment, the 2015 national security amendment and more
recently, the post-coup amendments and attacks, the Turkish
authorities have progressively increased their appetite for an
authoritarian rule. Purges in the military, suppression of critical
journalists, persecution and lay-offs of “Academics for Peace”,
massive lay-offs in public posts after the July 2016 coup attempt —
which was regarded as “a gift from heaven” by President Erdoğan,
intimidation and repression of targeted groups (e.g., Kurds and
left-wing movements) and many more events in the run-up to the
Turkish Constitutional Referendum 2017 were constantly accompanied
by an ever-increasing control over the means of communication by
governmental interests. Online media and independent voices in
social media have progressively been targeted by pro-government
trolls, have seen their websites under DDoS attack or taken down.
Fake Twitter accounts have taken this social network by assault,
especially around election time. Censorship has started morphing
into different shapes and it is now increasingly clear that
government-backed forces are surveilling opponents. There are
traces that agencies responsible for internet governance in Turkey
are surveilling communications such as mobile via IMSI-catcher.
Internet service providers (ISPs) are required by law to use deep
packet inspection (DPI) since February 2014 in order to keep
detailed traffic logs for 2 years. In a post-coup-attempt
amendment, cyber-crime police units are authorised to access these
logs. In addition to the usual blocking of social media sites and
other domains, the government is quite creative in communication
control to the extent that Turkey became a pioneer for applying
unusual internet blocking methods such as bandwidth throttling.
Internet blocking circumvention tools such as Tor and VPNs are
blocked and cannot be used extensively in the country. Cutting down
the internet and telephone communications altogether in crisis
regions where mass protests are expected can also be added to the
list. Nevertheless, there is a stubborn and vivid opposition in the
country which uses the remaining venues of communication
effectively. An example is the sendika.org independent news website
which has been “permanently” closed by the government or its courts
19 times before. Yet, it is currently (April 2017) operating as
sendika20.org. The speakers will retrace the road to extensive
internet censorship in Turkey, expose methods and strategies used
by pro-government forces to reign-in online communications. They
will assess ways forward in light of Turkey’s suspension of the
European Convention of Human Rights. Finally, they will hint at
some of the tactics that civil society, academia and the
independent media is using to dodge censorship and to advance a
progressive agenda. Moderation: Uta Meier-Hahn, PhD candidate at
Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin Speaker 1:
Prof. Melih Kırlıdoğ, Visiting researcher at Humboldt Institute for
Internet and Society, Berlin Speaker 2: Efe Kerem Sözeri,
Independent journalist, The Hague Speaker 3: Prof. Başak Çalı,
Professor of international law at Hertie School of Governance,
Berlin