Turkey Doubles Down On Censorship With Block On VPNs, Tor (vice.com) 99
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: In what's a significant escalation in its censorship efforts, the Turkish government now wants to block the very same tools that tech-savvy citizens use to get around the government-imposed social media blocks. On Friday, the Turkish information technologies and communications authority, or BTK, ordered internet providers in the country to block Tor and several other censorship-circumvention Virtual Private Networks or VPNs, such as VPN Master, Hotspot Shield, Psiphon, Zenmate, TunnelBear, Zero, Vypr, Express, according to multiple local reports. Earlier in the day, the government had already blocked Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, and restrictions on messaging apps like WhatsApp and Skype were also reported. The independent monitoring organization TurkeyBlocks also reported throttling and other forms of censorship on Friday, linking the disruptions and blocks to the arrests of pro-Kurdish party leaders.
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And this is the government that kept up a pretense of wanting to join the EU.
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No, this was the government that really wanted to join the eu but gave up.
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Probably. It is also the government that never understood what joining the EU means and that it is not only about economics.
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I think if Europe had a better understanding of what kind of a cutthroat political game is going on there they would have been more patient and less biased(current bias is against AKP and Erdogan, and for Gulen , the Kurdish resistance in Iraq/Syria and all the opponents of Erdogan).
European bias is a turnoff for the Turks I think. Hard to admonish the Turks for going overboard now when you can't even acknowledge there has been a coup.
So Europe is also giving up leverage. I think that's stupid, in the sense
Re:Goodbye democracy (Score:4, Interesting)
Turkey is going int full-blown religious fascism at this time. Next step introduction of a death-penalty, and you can bet it will be applied for anybody accuses of "anti-government activity", "insulting the president", and the like. With the current state of the prisons and the number of people in there, that the government does not like, they already effectively have concentration-camps.
The only good thing is that this way, they will not get to be part of the EU anytime soon. They will have to come back out of the darkness first, and that takes a long, long time, and currently they are very intent on going much deeper into evil.
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Turkey is going int full-blown religious fascism at this time. Next step introduction of a death-penalty, and you can bet it will be applied for anybody accuses of "anti-government activity", "insulting the president", and the like. With the current state of the prisons and the number of people in there, that the government does not like, they already effectively have concentration-camps.
The only good thing is that this way, they will not get to be part of the EU anytime soon. They will have to come back out of the darkness first, and that takes a long, long time, and currently they are very intent on going much deeper into evil.
The death penalty is in effect. Jail a dissident, and suddenly, for no reason, he dies in prison.
I appreciate the country is on a war footing ... (Score:5, Insightful)
... but even IS confiscating all phones and computers has failed to cut the population completely from the outside world. The actions of the Turkish authorities are leading them down a slippery slope to a total, hated police-state.
Re:I appreciate the country is on a war footing .. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, they should do it like we do in America. Require all the big companies to scan and funnel data to the government or provide you with important pieces of information whenever you ask. Then pass some laws so they're not allowed to tell you they're providing all this information to them. Then invite all the CEOs over to the Big House for lavish parties or recruit them to be your next big political appointee. Then watch the online dissenters drop like flies.
Isn't it great (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't it great that we live in the US, where we have freedom of the press.
The press is free to report on any story without worrying about how the government will react. They are free to cover both sides of a story, to give a different perspective, and not have to worry about what the people in charge will do.
The press is also free to leak information which would paint the government in a bad light, and which might uncover corruption, collusion, or crime. Additionally, the press isn't liable for publishing this information, as the pentagon papers have clearly shown. (Here I'm making a distinction between "publishing" and "getting". Just publishing, without addressing how the information was obtained, is allowed.)
There's also a strong sense of "protect your sources" in the mainstream media, so that anyone can feel safe identifying themselves to members of the press as they pass information.
Living in the US is great, because we have freedom of the press.
Yay.
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Can you take the rest of the ACs with you? The Mugabe relatives who now own the farms over there need people who can do forced labor.
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"We don't need any frickin' State."
...
"Oh, sorry, what we really meant was, 'We'll go start our own State---with blackjack, and hookers!'"
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"Well... okay... We were just kidding about the blackjack and hookers."
Re:Isn't it great (Score:4, Informative)
Well, these things are all true today. Next year, who knows?
Trump threatens to weaken First Amendment protections for reporters [pbs.org]
Donald Trump vows to "open up" libel laws to make suing the media easier [washingtonpost.com].
"With me, they're not protected, because I'm not like other people. We're gonna open up those libel laws, folks, and we're gonna have people sue you like you never got sued before." [politicususa.com]
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In the United States, truth is not only a defense to libel claims, it is in fact a burden of the plaintiff to prove falsehood. This is quite different from the UK.
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Considering the crap that the "press" has pushed in just the last year? They sure could use some opening up. See Rolling Stone/UVA, other false claims and then we can start with the media hit pieces which are claimed to be news stories, but are in-fact opinion. Then again, this is the same media with reporters running around flapping their arms that the Hogan trial would cause the end of reporting because someone with enough capital could back someone else's lawsuit against Gawker. And how it was "all g
Re:Isn't it great (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you talking about the same US that shoots journalists who interview someone who isn;t liked by the government?
https://www.facebook.com/erins... [facebook.com]
Re: Isn't it great (Score:4, Insightful)
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With your country being nr. 41 on the list of press freedom I'd say you can't really claim to be that free...
Funny that many of the countries where press freedom is ranked higher than the US have stricter laws about things like "hate speech". I'll take the United States protection of free speech over any of those countries.
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Well, if you take into account who owns most of the press and what kind of stories most people actually get to say, I would say this is more a theoretical situation than actual reality.
Re:Don't worry (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems like this is a plan that everyone could get on board with. Syria and Iraq have some serious territorial integrity problems right now with ISIS, so they can hardly complain. Iran probably wouldn't go for it without some concessions, but they might do it just to spite some of their neighbors or if embargoes were lifted. Turkey obviously wouldn't like it, but since they're well on the way to becoming a complete despotic shithole, I don't think we should care at this point.
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Given a choice between Erdogan's neo-Ottomanism and the Kurds' moderate progressivism, it's a slam dunk.
And it's about time the Kurds had their own country in any event. Maybe when Turkey considers an alternative to making everyone within their current borders "Turkish" whether they like it or not, we can talk about that EU thing again.
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Turkey want to do with the Kurds the same way they did with the Armenians over a century ago.
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We're in an era where moderate politics is a vacuum waiting to be filled. Probably not a good time to do anything in haste. Besides, the U.S. has adversaries who would just love to partner up with Turkey if it means an opportunity to destabilize relations in the west. So humiliating Turkey by kicking them out of NATO would absolutely backfire. Not to mention Turkey is a supplier of the F-35 center fuselage and committed to buying 116 of the aircraft... An arrangement that would get awkward pretty quick.
The
NATO? (Score:2)
Just shows what NATO has been allowed to become with Turkey as a member. Basically an empty arms and munitions sales club with total disregard for how those arms and munitions are used. Supply them to terrorists, not a problem, let sex slavers use them to take over towns and cities leading to a million rapes (let them kill themselves till they tire of it - Hillary Clinton, I guess that's what those under age sex slaves do, tire of it and them kill themselves, no excuse the corporate whore knew exactly what
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It was a cold war Faustian bargain for several strategic advantages.
It provided control of the Bosphorous Straight, which would have bottled up the Soviet Navy in the Black Sea, depriving them of a southern and warm water port and easy access to the Mediterranean.
It gave the US access to an airbase at Incirlik, which allowed for electronic eavesdropping on the Soviet southern border as well as a bomber route into the southern Soviet Union.
It put a buffer between Russia and the oil fields of the middle east.
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FTFY.
Too late, Turkey (Score:2)
We're going ahead with Thanksgiving.
Ataturk would be spinning in his grave (Score:5, Insightful)
Ataturk would be spinning in his grave if he knew of the things Erdogan has done to the country.
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The most unfortunate part is, a majority of Turks would probably say they support Erdogan because they have been blinded by the stupidity that is religion, and particularly Islam.
Actually, it's a combination of religion and ethnicity. The Turkic race is one that encompasses several historic dynasties [wikipedia.org] - and it's this pan nationalism that Erdogan has been driving. Ataturk was more like a Tsar Peter the Great of Russia in wanting to have Turkey made more Western: he replaced the Arabic script w/ Roman in writing Turkish, and did several things to substitute the cult of Islam w/ the cult of Ataturk. Instead, had he gotten the Turks to think like Europeans - particularly in being self
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I expect that Ataturk knew this would likely be coming and tried very hard to prevent it. He has failed, unfortunately. A modern Turkey is a thing that is not going to happen anytime soon. They are going straight back to the dark ages and a large part of the population is cheering this move onwards.
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Well, Ataturk tried to forcibly reform Turkey into a western style country through a dictatorship. He was always in favour of democracy ... in the future, knowing full well that he hadn't built any real support amongst the people for his plan but betting that over time the culture would change. Seems like he lost that bet.
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I don't really know anything about Ataturk, but just in general converting to a democracy is actually kind of hard. Telling someone that what they've known their entire life is wrong or bad can be pretty jarring, especially when their politics and religion is all mashed together to the point that democracy could almost appear to be denying God's will since many non-secular dictators tend to suggest that their power is granted to them by God.
And even if you switch to a democracy, you immediately need to gua
ssh (Score:2)
Are they really, seriously, going to stop their people from doing ssh'ing to cloud servers? Because if they are, they won't have a high tech industry at all. I might have been in the market for freelance django developers, but not from Turkey apparently.
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One can launch an instance in AWS EC2 giving it userdata to start an OpenVPN process on a different port than the default of 1194 (which they might block) without the need for SSH. If they try to block AWS HTTPS access, then they break web site control access for a few thousand Turkey-based businesses.
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Agreed but the advantage of ssh is that it gives you a web proxy using no server configuration at all. A vanilla ubuntu t2.micro instance does the whole job out of the box.
Signal should not have dropped encrypted sms (Score:2)
Because internet is easy to block. SMS is far more difficult to block because it is used by all kinds of industrial hardware so blocking it can cause serious issues for thre regime as well. Encrypted SMS is required as a backup service.
Fortunately the Turks can use the Signal fork Silence: https://silence.im/ [silence.im]
They'll just have to double down again. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is what happens when a government attempts to censor the internet. First, they start with a few "objectionable" sites. Then they expand the list. Then they clamp down on the workarounds that people use to accessed banned content. At some point, they'll have to either relent or go Full DPRK and cut off the external internet entirely.
Never go Full DPRK.
Current NATO and future EU member (Score:3, Insightful)
What a farce
Re: Current NATO and future EU member (Score:1)
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Considering the garbage that some current EU countries are already pushing like midnight raids on people for wrongthink, and posting "hate speech." And the media being in the tank for particular view points? Seems like they'd get along really well.
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Future EU member? Not in a VERY LONG time. The nationalistic parties that are gaining support in Europe are furiously against that.
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I don't think it was very likely to have succeeded. Turkey's occupation of Cyprus remained a sticking point. Similarly, Turkey couldn't join without Greece agreeing, and that wasn't likely to happen. With these complications, it's difficult to imagine how Turkey was ever on track?
ErdoÄYan drove a wedge in to an already gaping chasm.
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Ah so they will be included soon. The current political climate is to do the opposite of what any nationalists want. After all, they must be wrong, they are nationalists.
Human Rights Violation (Score:1)
Blocking encrypted speech over the Internet is a human rights violation. Those implementing the censorship are playing with the very rope that will hang themselves.
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They can still limit it to certain sites - or put a proxy in between that fakes the original certificate.