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A Single Line of Computer Code Put Thousands of Innocent Turks in Jail (www.cbc.ca) 180

Posted by EditorDavid 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.
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A Single Line of Computer Code Put Thousands of Innocent Turks in Jail More

A Single Line of Computer Code Put Thousands of Innocent Turks in Jail

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  • And the others..? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28, 2018 @07:14AM (#56019403)

    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'...

    • Re:And the others..? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Sunday January 28, 2018 @07:47AM (#56019503)
      Exactly -- the revolution was justified. Hope the next one succeeds and Erdogan gets a firing squad.

      • Re:And the others..? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Sunday January 28, 2018 @11:55AM (#56020561) Journal

        I for one never believed that the coup failed.

        I suspect that Erdogan had it planned all along and his coup worked as planned.

        • Evveryone I know thinks the same.
          Lets see if it evver gets disclosed.

        • Well, regardless, he certainly grabbed total control of the country afterwords and could purge anyone disloyal without any repercussions.

        • So did I, from the beginning. The army was the "guardian of the state and the constitution". Erdogan put his people in charge.

        • You might be correct. But according to TFS it's about some guy called Edrogan and a coupe, so all bets are off.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by chthon ( 580889 )
          Damn, no more mod points today. But I have also always been of this thought. If the army really wanted to get Erdogan, then they would have gotten him. What I mostly suspect is that minions of Erdogan were able to influence some hot-headed officers into a rash decision.

        • We're talking about a military that routinely ousts governments. Thrice so far since WW2 alone. They know how to do something like this. They are well trained and equipped, I mean, we're talking about a neighbor of Syria after all. In that area, you want a well staffed, well run and well equipped military.

          And that military, of all the militaries in the world, runs a coup d'etat that does not try to occupy information centers, does not try to cut communication of the enemy, does not try to arrest the governm

    • Re:And the others..? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Kiuas ( 1084567 ) on Sunday January 28, 2018 @07:49AM (#56019513)

      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 [wikipedia.org] 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'.

      • Re:And the others..? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Sunday January 28, 2018 @08:26AM (#56019603)

        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'.

        And that is the truly despicable and repulsive thing here. Not that this has not happened before...

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Yes, spot on. It's entirely predictable how extremists manage to turn whatever they touch to shit.

          FTFY

      • Re:And the others..? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Hal_Porter ( 817932 ) on Sunday January 28, 2018 @10:26AM (#56020037)

        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... [washingtoninstitute.org]

        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-... [bbc.com]

        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... [yahoo.com]

        And then threatened to unleash a wave of refugees on the EU unless Turks get free movement

        http://nationalpost.com/news/w... [nationalpost.com]

        And big pile of cash.

        https://www.independent.co.uk/... [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

        • Don't mistake official EU doctrine from actual opinion. Nobody in the EU believes the bullshit story about a military experienced with coups stages such an idiotic one. But Erdogan holds the finger on the plug to the flood of migrants. You don't piss someone like that off unless you want another million or two invading your country.

          If we didn't need him for that, for all we care he could rot in Anatolia like the son of a rotten bitch that he is.

      • Agreed. One small correction though:
        The Kurds want their own state, which means separating parts of Turkey, Irak and Syria to become one separate state, Kurdistan.
        That's why they are the enemy of Erdogan.

      • 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

        • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

          by ItsJustAPseudonym ( 1259172 )

          Remind you of someone in the west...

          Yes.

          Erdogan is a role model who the president of the USA has learned a lot from.

          This is incorrect. The president of the USA is entirely petulant, ignorant, and reactive to whatever he has seen in the last 24 hours. "Learning" would require a degree of retention that he does not seem to possess. At most, Trump may witness a tough-man action by Erdogan, send an admiring, disturbing, and disruptive Tweet, and then move on to the next hamburger.

        • No, but he reminds me of Obama and friends. Change "religion" with "progressive thinking" and it's similar.

      • 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.

        In other news Erdogan is complaining that the Turkish ascension to the EU is taking too long while he's busy breaking the fundamental reason the EU was created in the first place.

      • Turkey has much bigger problems than a secular vs religious divide. The country is hodgepodge of different cultures [wikimedia.org]. You see, the end of the first World War saw the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (who fought on the losing side). The European victors carved up the territory [wikipedia.org] into most of the modern Middle Eastern countries we know today. They did so completely oblivious to the cultural boundaries of the indigenous people, which is the root cause of much of the instability in the Middle East today e.g.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sootman ( 158191 )

        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... His goal is obviously to ensure that his base stays ignorant so he can continue to enjoy their support.

        Anyone else in the U.S. get deja vu while reading that? :-/

      • 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.

        sed 's/Erdogan/Trump/g'

        works.

        damn, I hate that this actually 'works' when you replace one evil person with the current

    • It's more like you go into work with a bit of a hangover and your boss who is a teetotal Islamist is telling you to get rid of all the liberals. So you do the equivalent of 'rm - rf/turkey/liberals". And then you realise that has side effects and a high false positive rate. So you tell your boss the Jews hacked the system and flee to Germany where you tell the authorities you're being persecuted by Islamists and tell all the expat Turks it was the Jews.

      Meanwhile the influx of Turks cause a rise of the far

    • North Korea on the Bosphorus is far warmer in the summer and there are so many things to see.

    • I'm confused.

      (((Innocent)))?

      • We do not need to import antisemitic memes from whatever vile corner of the Internet you frequent, even under the guise of humor. Take that shit and fuck off.

    • The problem facing the dumb ass that ruling turkey is that those that were innocent are now not.

    • 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'...

      No need for comparisons, Turkey provided Hitler the template for the Jewish massacres under the guise of The Armenian Genocide [wikipedia.org]. They've never apologized to the Armenian people and to this day deny that it happened.

      At least the Germans faced up to what they did under Hitler, Turkey has *never* faced the consequences of their fascism and remains as one of the primary examples of a culture falsifying reality so they don't have to bare the shame they so rightly deserve. Turkey has yet again provided a templat

  • The bigger issue here (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gijoel ( 628142 ) on Sunday January 28, 2018 @07:16AM (#56019407)
    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.

    • Reminds me of a pithy saying: being a democratically legitimate leader isn't entirely about being elected, it's about stepping down when someone else gets elected. We don't owe respect or legitimacy to elected leaders whose principle is one man, one vote, one time [economist.com].

      The Western world has been taken too many times by this. Elections are a necessary but not sufficient condition for democratic government.

  • Enemies Everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gtall ( 79522 ) on Sunday January 28, 2018 @07:16AM (#56019409)

    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 Thunderbird? (Score:5, Informative)

    by alternative_right ( 4678499 ) on Sunday January 28, 2018 @07:17AM (#56019415) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • That "coup" did not fail. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28, 2018 @07:23AM (#56019433)

    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.

  • I am more concerned for the other 120,000 people who this 'purge' swept up. Calling the thousands who were also swept up 'innocent' implies something about the other 120,000 victims that many would say is inappropriate.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The 120k are intended victims. The 30k are unintended victims.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Since this is primarily about scaring the population into quiet compliance, it could be argued that the 30k are not so unintended after all...

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 )
      Is it really a stretch to say that there are 120,000 Fethullah Gulen loyalists in Turkey? Gulenists in Turkey are millions strong. Here's a good writeup of the man and what he believes. [city-journal.org] Among other things, he ran off and America gave him shelter. CIA officers vouched for his green card (ouch!). He believes in segregating women. He's huge in the charter schools movement. His charter schools replaced qualified American workers with H1Bs and then paid them more than the Americans got. By befriending Gulen
      • No one is pretending that Gulen is the good guy. Remember: he and Erdogan used to be real chummy until they had a falling-out. The point is: the 120.000 people in jail may or may not be Gulenists, and may or may not have thought about rising up, but the only reason they are in jail is for opposing Erdogan.

      • Re:The other 120,000 (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday January 29, 2018 @04:49AM (#56025173)

        He isn't the good guy. Erdogan and Gulen are like Hitler and Thälmann. Both threats to democracy, but one of them is now in power.

        Don't make the mistake and oust the one to let the other one take power. They both have to go if you want a democratic rule.

  • Much More Worrying... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ytene ( 4376651 ) on Sunday January 28, 2018 @07:40AM (#56019479)
    ... 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 whole point of having Turkey in NATO is that it allowed us to flank the Soviet Union. Thus, in Operation Barbarossa Part II, we would be able to present the Communists with an invasion from two directions: West Germany and Turkey. Now that the evil empire of Soviet Union is long gone and the far less threatening Russia is in its place, for some reason NATO is still around despite the wealthy first world nations of Old Europe that are well able to defend themselves.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tomhath ( 637240 )

        NATO is still around despite the wealthy first world nations of Old Europe that are well able to defend themselves.

        Look at what led up to World War I, those same countries had very strong armies and navies. But they were all afraid one would attack another, so they kept building even bigger armies and navies until one little spark set the whole thing off. An alliance like NATO makes everyone more comfortable (or at least less uncomfortable).

        • The threat from the USSR is long over. NATO doesn't need to exist any more. What, France is going to invade Spain or something? Laughable.

          Assuming NATO is going to exist, it is a MUTUAL defense pact. What does Old Europe contribute? Today, the nations of Old Europe are ungrateful freeloaders, refusing to contribute even the bare minimum to their own defense, while criticizing their American defenders for being militaristic baby-killers because they actually pay for a military. The Texas National Guard

          • What's laughable is equating the relationship between France and Spain to, for example, the relationship between Finland and Russia, or Ukraine and Russia. But then I suspect you'll call the bomber flyby penetration testing and annexing of Crimea "fake news".

            Applying pressure for more equitable NATO funding would be a positive, but in the meantime, we could unilaterally withdraw from the pissing contest in Afghanistan (great security we're providing there...) and use those resources for actual defense aga

            • The difference is that the economies of Germany and France (you know, the arch-enemies from a century ago) are so fundamentally dependent on each other that it would be economic suicide for either nation to start a war against the other one.

              It's similar with the rest of Europe. We're about to see what happens to an economy that is by no means as tightly coupled but still quite heavily interwoven with the rest of (western) Europe in a bit when the UK leaves for good. And when you look at how this goes down,

          • I thought Texas was part of Mexico?...
            Anyway, I think NATO disagrees with you, considering the attempts to whip up an anti-Russia 'Feindbild' in Europe and the US in order to justify continuation of its existence.
            NATO is a bureaucracy, and bureaucracies don't want to die, even if they become useless.
            Although... Russia may not be militarily threatening to invade Europe (anymore), but the economic block that would arise if Russia would join Germany economically is actually a big threat to the American Emp

            • The very last thing the USA could want is if the economic power of Europe united with the raw materials, the political and military power and the workforce of Russia.

              • Exactly.
                However, maybe the USA should be as concerned about China...
                Or, and I think that's a better idea, just start to be willing to pay for what is consumed.

    • ... is the West's reaction/response to what Erdogan has done in Turkey.

      Nothing.

      Not quite. Firstly what is going on here is the application of the democratic laws of the country within that country. What the USA or the West thinks of Erdogan is irrelevant given the laws were passed in a democratic way and are properly being ruled on by the courts of the country. We may disagree with it, but you'll likely find that a lot of Turks don't. That's the thing about democracy, it's not global, it is local. Frankly I'm surprised we don't sanction the USA for not doing something about their gun

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      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...

      I think if you found a honest politician they'd say Erdogan is already a lost cause and Turkey is well underway to become a new Iran/Saudi-Arabia. I just hope we'll manage to save the Kurds somehow, even though it's a political minefield in Syria, Iraq and Iran too. They've made a massive effort against IS and deserve so much better than their governments are treating them.

  • Proof that a revolution is needed... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Sunday January 28, 2018 @07:45AM (#56019497)

    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.

    • End of Kemalism (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Latent Heat ( 558884 ) on Sunday January 28, 2018 @11:22AM (#56020323)

      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.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Cederic ( 9623 )

        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.

        Fuck Russia and Assad, Erdogan's biggest threat are the Kurds. Once they've dealt with ISIS there's a good chance they're going to show how fucked off they are with Turkey illegally bombing them.

        The challenge for the UK, US and others is that Turkey is a NATO member. That makes it diplomatically close to impossible to engage militarily against Turkey, let alone join a Russian or Assad led offensive. Anybody attacking Turkey gets fucked by NATO.

        The Kurds on the other hand have a claim that they were attacked

    • proves that a revolution is needed

      Actually it proves that a revolution is in progress.

  • This is where the west is going with all its surveillance and data collection. Calling the 120'000 that were actually using the messaging app "guilty" is "justice" about as perverted as it gets. It just needs a continuation of the current slow slide into fascism the west does and all that data collected about you _will_ be used in the same way. While worthless to "fight terrorism" or "protect the children", Turkey nicely demonstrates the primary use a dark and unjust state has for mass-collected data about

  • The most distressing part of this story is that this could happen almost anywhere... here in the US while we may not be a dictatorship(Yet???), our government has already been caught spying on us. Whats to say that they haven't used methods this extreme in the past to apprehend "suspects"? Tech can be very scary sometimes, it holds both wonder and danger at the same time. I won't get into "The Singularity theories" because it is beyond the scope of this comment, however Tech can most certainly be used for
  • Disregarding the political/moral issues, the idea of using a closed source messaging app and expecting it to be secure is incredibly stupid. Closed source software can literally be doing anything. It could be sending your photos, text, passwords, anything to anyone. People need to learn that closed source software is not secure, especially when it runs on a device connected to the Internet.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • The result is that many innocent people lost their jobs (and source of income), their freedom, their reputation, and more.

    Sounds familiar. Dissenting opinions can be punished by the state, or the herd, but either way, the outcome is the same.

  • Thoughts shouldn't be a crime

  • The remaining people are in jail being accused of installing the wrong chat application. Unfortunately the real reason is that they pose a threat to the Erdogan regime.

    This initally might not make sense to go into an educated at the moment, however the make up of these people tell a lot. There are thousands of judges, academics, prosecutors, teachers, police officers, journalists who were put away. Looking at this, basically those who can uncover his bad deeds, publish it to the masses, and who can put them

    • No, the Turkish have pretended to have a democracy for over a century, while engaging in genocide and oppression. Don't whitewash turds.

  • That's what Erdogan deserves

  • Erdogan decides to throw people in jail for looking at him funny and the blame is on the particular die he decides to roll for the arbitrary selection criterion?

    That's like Trump going out in the middle of 5th Avenue and shooting a random stranger with the blame going to the guy who sold him is shoes.

  • Donald Trump is salivating SO HARD right now as he wets his panties, dreaming of being able to purge the country like Stalin or Erdoan.

    Expect the next presidential briefing to cover "pixels" and how to track them.

  • How did they know someone's phone had the Evil Pixel? phone company records of IP addresses, or did the pre-dawn raids also involve searching the house for any phones and then trying to get a file manager app to show the appropriate directory? My phone isn't rooted, and it won't show me anything unless I threaten to hit it. I've never been able to get ES File manager to locate anything, even if I know roughly where the file should be.

    Also, slightly amazed that people in some places are being targeted for us

  • You misspelled Erdogan, swapping the 'r' and the 'd'. If you go to Turkey, you will face jail or worse for disrespecting Dear Leader. Besides, in Turkey noone is really innocent, if they harbor even a shred of the fraction of an idea that perhaps they do not always love Erdogan completely with all their heart fully and wholly.

    Disclaimer: my immediate reactions to this whole thread may be biased from having watched yesterday the first episode of the documentary Apocalypse: Stalin [imdb.com]. If you want to learn about

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