Turkey Is Building Domestic Replacements For Gmail and Google

from the national-culture-and-values dept

Tue, Jan 10th 2017 3:23am — Glyn Moody

Turkey has a long history of blocking Internet services. It's become such a thing, there's even a site called TurkeyBlocks that is exclusively about this phenomenon. A couple of recent stories on the site suggest the Turkish government is aiming to tighten its local control over the online world even more. First, in order to prevent people circumventing social media shutdowns, the Turkish authorities are going after Tor:

The Turkey Blocks internet censorship watchdog has identified and verified that restrictions on the Tor anonymity network and Tor Browser are now in effect throughout Turkey. Our study indicates that service providers have successfully complied with a government order to ban VPN services.

But even that is not enough it seems. Here's the latest plan:

Turkey is building a domestic search engine and email service compatible with national culture and values, according to statements made by Ahmet Arslan, Minister of Communication, in a television interview on Friday.

Minister Arslan explained the urgency of the plans in the live show on NTV, citing the need to store user data within the country and ensure that communications can be analysed domestically. Details such as the service's name, logo and organisation structure have yet to be announced.

It's interesting to see data localization being invoked here, just as it was in Russia. Fear of surveillance by the US seems to be one reason for the move, but the second part about allowing communications to be "analysed domestically" is also noteworthy. It could be a reflection of the fact that Gmail uses encrypted connections that prevent the Turkish authorities from monitoring who is saying what. One obvious step would be to ban Gmail and Google completely in Turkey in order to force people there to use the new domestic offerings. That would allow the government to monitor its citizens more closely, and to control the flow of online data more strictly.

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Filed Under: blocking, censorship, data localization, email, fragmentation, search, surveillance, turkey

31 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2017 @ 3:28am

Dictators will Dictate..
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Ninja (profile), 10 Jan 2017 @ 3:56am

Orwell would be shocked if he found out he was being prophetic. It should be an interesting experiment thoguh, to see how much impact a ban of the top players in these fields will have.
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Yes, I know I'm commenting anonymously, 10 Jan 2017 @ 4:31am

Well, it is a streamlinging effort..
It would eliminate the need for judicial approval and/or NSLs before accessing the data.
The permission to let the government search through your email and search history can be given in the TOS while a law can be introduced that forced everyone to use this service.
Citizen rights are unimportant (at least, until the `unimaginable' loss of an election occurs...).
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Anonymous, 10 Jan 2017 @ 4:31am

Re:
How is he a dictator... ?
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2017 @ 4:32am

Re: Re:
(look of disbelief)
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2017 @ 4:34am

Re:
How are Gmail and Google not Orwellian?
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2017 @ 4:48am

Why is encrypted email so hard still?
Only tangentially related to the article, but every time I think about the likes of Google and Yahoo and Microsoft controlling a significant portion of email traffic I wonder why we still don't have easy to use email encryption. I wouldn't expect it to be difficult for the developers at any one those companies to come up with a simple pgp implementation that is easy to use. We are past the point of needing it just from the perspective of protecting personal financial information and reducing spam by allowing signed messages.
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2017 @ 4:52am

Re: Why is encrypted email so hard still?
I guess you're better off running your own TLS-enabled web server with a simple form element instead of email.

Just ask people to contact you at https://example.com/contact and whenever you send an email send an email to them saying:

You've got a new message at https://example.com/messages/1 (maybe use something like ZeroBin)
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orbitalinsertion (profile), 10 Jan 2017 @ 4:57am

Re: Re:
They are not the government and they don't order you to do anything or limit your rights. Pohlian, perhaps.
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2017 @ 5:01am

Re: Re: Re:
They are not (yet) the government, but they sure do co-operate with the govenment... so, yeah.
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2017 @ 5:55am

Re: Why is encrypted email so hard still?
Key management and key validation. You nneed to be able associate separate key with sending and receiving communication with each person you wish to communicate with. Also, even with a secure public key management system, you need to validate via some other means, that the key you are using actually belong to the person you are communicating with, and not some man in the middle who is relaying you messages.
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Machin Shin (profile), 10 Jan 2017 @ 6:11am

Re: Why is encrypted email so hard still?
You seriously don't know the answer to this?

Yes, it would be easy for them to setup such a system. The issue is that if they encrypt your e-mail then they can't scan them to place "more relevant ads". They need to be able to read your e-mail for their business model to work. These services are not "free" you pay for it with the contents of your e-mails.
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2017 @ 6:29am

Oh yeah?
I am reminded of the frequent ignorant comments posted to stories about government censorship that go something like "No worries, they can never censor the internet ... blah blah blah ... people will just use VPN's or TOR or ... blah blah blah ... they can't/won't ever block those ... blah blah blah ...".

Oh yeah?
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2017 @ 6:37am

Re: Re:
Are you a five year old?
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2017 @ 7:01am

Re: Re: Re:
> Are you a five year old?

Is that anyway to speak to your elders?
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2017 @ 7:03am

Re: Re: Why is encrypted email so hard still?
You mean I can't just email Joe my key so he can send me encrypted emails? Oh...
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Baron von Robber, 10 Jan 2017 @ 7:38am

Guess they got their cue from Conservapedia ("I reject your reality and substitute my own.")
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2017 @ 8:19am

Turkish Google might have more respect for user privacy than 'murica Google.
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2017 @ 8:19am

Re: Why is encrypted email so hard still?
Encrypted emails shuts gmail, yahoo and the like out of the loop and makes data analysis impossible. This is a huge revenue stream and they are not interested in cutting it of. Add to this that average Joe does not care about it and you have a service that

a) Cost them money to develop
b) Removes a revenue stream
c) Very few users care about

A very bad combination. I would suggest you look up something else. Protonmail works and is easy to set up. You get a small mailbox (500mb, no folders, no IMAP support) for free. Want more, it will cost you ~5$ a month. It is not a perfect system by any stretch of the imagination as of now. Normal PGP support is not there for example, but they are getting there. They have however really nailed the "easy to use" part. You really don't notice encryption is used
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2017 @ 9:03am

Re: Re: Re: Re:
Is that question Orwellian?
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DannyB (profile), 10 Jan 2017 @ 9:39am

Re: Re:
Are you up on current events?
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DannyB (profile), 10 Jan 2017 @ 9:46am

Re:
Orwell would be shocked to find out that he was laying out a roadmap that would be carefully followed by others.

IoT devices: the new telescreens.

They're always listening in your home. Amazon Echo even has a button used to notify Amazon that you're about to talk about something particularly interesting.

How similar are telescreens to smart TVs equipped with a mic and camera for video conferencing?

Snowden revealed the government is always listening, and saves everything just in case it is needed later. After all, it's not a privacy violation if they merely store it and don't search it.

Don't forget the whole spiel about secret courts, warrants, arrests, secret trials, secret evidence, convictions, secret prisons, etc. And for profit prisons. New for profit policing.

It's really happening. What affect will the incoming administration have?
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2017 @ 11:44am

Re: Re:
"They're always listening in your home"
- can't spy on me with Echo when I do not have one
- My tv is dumb and I like it that way
- I realize there are many more vectors
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2017 @ 11:45am

Re: Well, it is a streamlinging effort..
They might be surprised when people start talking on code
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2017 @ 1:28pm

Re:
Till Turkish people start randomly disappearing.
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Lawrence D’Oliveiro, 10 Jan 2017 @ 2:39pm

Re: (look of disbelief)
You must be a Gulenist! Or a PKKer! Or both!
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2017 @ 5:59pm

Re: Re: (look of disbelief)
Ahhh - no, why would you think that?

I found it astonishing that someone would not consider Erdogan a dictator. You think he is not?
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Jan 2017 @ 7:30am

Re: Re: (look of disbelief)
Don't forget about Daesh (ISIS), after all it's common knowledge that every "terrorist" in Turkey is simultaneously a member of Daesh and the PKK even though those two groups hate each other much worse than either of them hates the Erdoğan regime. (Of course we could question the extent to which Daesh and the Erdoğan regime are actually enemies at all, but then again pretending to fight Daesh as a pretext for fighting one's actual enemies is what more or less *every* foreign combatant has been doing in Syria, so maybe Americans living in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.)
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LoveTD, 12 Jan 2017 @ 1:02am

Adding Country of Turkey to blacklist
Turkey, Straight TERRORISTS, they're gone.
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Anonymous Coward, 12 Jan 2017 @ 10:38am

Re: Re: Well, it is a streamlinging effort..
Or poisoning the well - a script that sends random lengths of /dev/random to random email addresses will increase the noise level so high that they won't be able to identify an actual encoded message.
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Lawrence D’Oliveiro, 12 Jan 2017 @ 8:27pm

Re: (look of disbelief)
And not forgetting Erdoğan’s own past associations with Gulen. Given the massive purges going in in Turkey over the last few months (since the attempted coup) on the pretext of associations with Gulen, I wonder when he will get around to purging himself...
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