1,845 Cases Filed For 'Insulting' Turkish President In Just 18 Months

from the thin-skin dept

Okay, so it was already fairly obvious that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had something of a thin skin. This is the guy who is trying to put a local doctor in jail for posting a picture comparing Erdogan to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. Erdogan, when he was Prime Minister, also sued his own government for failing to shut down or block accounts on Twitter that were saying things about him that he disliked.

And the stories keep on coming about prosecutions for "insulting" Erdogan. The most insane one started making news a few weeks ago, when a Turkish man filed a complaint against his own wife for apparently insulting Erdogan in their home.

According to news reports, the man, identified by the Yeni Safak newspaper as Ali D., had warned his wife of three years, G.D., not to curse Erdogan -- a popular albeit polarizing political figure -- when he appeared on television. She supposedly defied him, and dared him to lodge a legal case against her.

He duly obliged.

"I kept on warning her, saying why are you doing this? Our president is a good person and did good things for Turkey," the husband is quoted as saying.

Incredibly, it appears that such complaints, which need to be approved by the Justice Ministry are coming in at a rate of over 100 per month. Erdogan has only been President for 18 months, and...

"The justice ministry has allowed 1,845 cases on charges of insulting Erdogan to go ahead," Bekir Bozdag said, responding to questions in parliament.

"I am unable to read the shameful insults made against our president. I start to blush," said Bozdag, who is from Erdogan's ruling Islamist-rooted AK Party.

As the NY Times notes, while the law against insulting the President has been on the books, it has almost never been used until Erdogan took over the Presidency. And, frankly, it seems like Erdogan continuing to pursue such a strategy does much more to hurt his reputation than people telling jokes making fun of him:

The idea that Mr. Erdogan is so delicate that he would be grievously wounded by any language is hard to believe, and really beside the point. He is a ruthless and intolerant ruler who has proven that he does not really believe in and cannot abide his country’s democratic system. Democracy requires that citizens are able to speak out when necessary against their leaders.

Filed Under: free speech, insults, recep tayyip erdogan, turkey

Turkey's YouTube Ban Breached Right To Information, Says European Court Of Human Rights

from the not-just-for-cat-videos dept

Last week Techdirt wrote about a curious case involving the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Gollum. In passing, Mike mentioned that the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) had just made an important ruling involving one of Turkey's many bans on YouTube. Here's what the ECHR found (pdf):

that there had been a violation of Article 10 (freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The case concerned the blocking of access to YouTube, a website enabling users to send, view and share videos.

The Court found in particular that the applicants, all academics in different [Turkish] universities, had been prevented from accessing YouTube for a lengthy period of time and that, as active users, and having regard to the circumstances of the case, they could legitimately claim that the blocking order in question had affected their right to receive and impart information and ideas.

One interesting aspect is how the court describes YouTube -- not just a place to find cat videos, but:

a single platform which enabled information of specific interest, particularly on political and social matters, to be broadcast. It was therefore an important source of communication and the blocking order precluded access to specific information which it was not possible to access by other means.

A post on Access Now points out that this latest decision is the second such ruling involving Turkey and the ECtHR -- Techdirt wrote about the earlier one back in 2012:

This ruling builds on the earlier ruling by the ECtHR in Yildrim v. Turkey (2012), which found against the Turkish practice of blocking entire sites and web services when content might have been illegal in only some instances. In the 2012 decision, the court recognized the claim of the owner of a service using Google Sites; in this case, the plaintiffs were not site owners, but users. In short, this ruling recognizes the rights and standing of internet users under the [European Convention on Human Rights]. The academics also successfully petitioned the court to recognize the concept of "citizen journalism" for the first time. This opens the door for more non-credentialed, unlicensed, or independent journalists and bloggers to fight for their rights.

Those broader implications make the win by the three Turkish academics even more valuable, since the ECtHR judgment can now be used to fight censorship in any of the 47 countries that have ratified the European Convention on Human Rights (pdf).

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Filed Under: ban, echr, europe, human rights, recep tayyip erdogan, turkey
Companies: youtube

DailyDirt: Meet Your Meat, And Cook It Thoroughly

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Penicillin and its derivatives haven't actually been around for that long in the scheme of things, but antibiotics have enabled an incredible age of prosperity without people having to worry about common infections killing us off. Unfortunately, nature has a way of evolving and adapting to our not-so-clever use of antibiotics, and we've been breeding superbugs in our hospitals and in our industrialized food chain. Sketchy meats have been around for a long time, but hopefully, it won't take a public health nightmare to get folks to take a closer look at food safety.

• The overuse of antibiotics in the meat industry could be creating superbugs in our food chain -- and a surprising amount of these resistant microbes are already in commercial foods. Consumer Reports looked at a variety of meat samples and found over 80% of the turkey meat it tested contained superbugs. Ugh. Cook your Turkeys thoroughly next Thanksgiving.... [url]
• The 1993 E. coli outbreak from hamburger meat killed at least four kids and poisoned hundreds of people. That outbreak was followed years later by other infectious contamination in produce, cheese and cookie dough... and the food safety system still isn't perfect. Salmonella in chicken is another potential problem, and the food industry is responding -- though perhaps a bit slower than some would like. [url]
• Bacteriophages as biocontrol agents in foods were approved by the FDA in 2006, but it's not approved for infant formula. Bacteriophages -- viruses that specifically attack bacteria -- are abundant everywhere, so they're presumably safe and environmentally friendly -- and could prevent babies from getting terrible illnesses. These phages could be an important tool to combat food-borne microbes, but we may still want to be careful not to over-use them or over-engineer them to the point that they might attack microbes indiscriminately. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, check out this holiday gift guide for some awesome deals at the Techdirt deals store.

Filed Under: bacteriophages, e coli, fda, food, food safety, hamburger, meat, microbes, outbreak, penicillin, salmonella, superbugs, turkey
Companies: consumer reports

Turkish Court Establishes A Special 'Expert Panel' To Determine If Comparing Prime Minister To Gollum Is An Insult

from the what-about-mocking-the-whole-thing? dept

The government of Turkey has a really... weird relationship with the internet. The government seems quite quick to attack internet services and to shut them down if anyone says anything even mildly critical of the government. Starting about six years ago, we noted that Turkey would do things like banning all of YouTube or Blogger to try to block a single mocking or critical video or blog post. These bans seemed to come and go -- sometimes leading the actual citizens of Turkey to protest the outright censorship of useful services. In the last couple of years, things have ramped up a bit. An attempt to block a single blog post resulted in 60 million Wordpress sites being blocked. Turkey's President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan at one point ordered a ban on all of Twitter... even filing a lawsuit against his own government over this. There have also been attempts to ban Facebook. Oh, and Minecraft. In fact, just the other day the European Court of Human Rights said that Turkey's earlier YouTube ban violated freedom of expression in Turkey.

Indeed, that's pretty clearly the point. The Turkish government, and Erdogan in particular, don't want freedom of expression. Almost all of this stems from people posting jokes or mocking content about the government -- and Erdogan in particular. Erdogan seems to have incredibly thin skin for a ruler of a major country. But even with all of that as background, the latest story out of Turkey is super weird. A Turkish physician, Bilgin Ciftci, is in court for potentially insulting Erdogan via social media for sharing this image on social media: On the right are three photos of Erdogan. On the left? Of course, that's Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies. In other words, it's a silly social media joke, the kind you see all the time. Except Erdogan got offended and now Ciftci faces up to two years in jail. Except, making the situation even more bizarre, the judge in the case can't decide if comparing someone to Gollum is an insult, so he's establishing a special expert panel to determine whether or not the image is an insult:

The court ordered that the investigation be conducted by a group composed of two academics, two behavioral scientists or psychologists and an expert on cinema and television productions.

The chief judge gave the decision after Hicran Danisman, a lawyer representing Ciftci, asked him whether or not he had seen the movie series “The Lord of the Rings.” Saying that he had seen only seen parts of them, the chief judge postponed the hearing until Feb. 13, 2016. Danisman stated in a previous hearing that neither the prosecutor nor the chief judge had seen the movies, even though the character of Gollum was at the center of the case.
Ciftci claimed that Gollum was not a bad character and that he did not insult anyone.

I'm not sure I'd agree that Gollum "was not a bad character," but this is a joke on the internet. What kind of President gets upset about that? Ciftci, for his part, seems to recognize how ridiculous this is:

The 47-year-old doctor told The Independent that he was “very surprised” when he learned he would be prosecuted. The case, he said, showed that Turkey was going through “a very difficult time.” Asked if he regretted sharing the images, he said: "I see it as a question of freedom of speech and of humour. I don't think I've done anything to regret."

Maybe Turkey should just ban the internet from Erdogan's home and office.

In the meantime, of course, what's happening is that this silly jokey picture that Erdogan is apparently so offended by is getting shared absolutely everywhere, because what better way to point out how ridiculous it is to try to censor this image than to make sure it's seen by just about everyone. One wonders if Erdogan knows or cares about this -- or if he's just trying to create a chilling effect for others in the future. Still, if he wanted to cement his reputation as being particularly thin-skinned about public commentary and criticism, it's difficult to think of a better way to do so.

Filed Under: bilgin ciftci, chilling effect, free speech, gollum, insult, joke, recep tayyip erdogan, turkey

Coming To A Surveillance State Near You: Lip-Reading Computers

from the I'm-sorry-Dave,-you-can't-say-that dept

One of the most famous -- and important -- scenes in Stanley Kubrick's film "2001" is when the two astronauts sit in a space pod in order to avoid being overheard by the ship's computer, HAL, which they believe may represent a threat to their lives. Although they have prudently turned off the pod's communication system, what they don't realize is that HAL is able to follow their conversation by lip-reading, and hence is alerted to their disconnection plans.

Although it is unlikely that the Turkish authorities were inspired by the film, the following incident, reported by Politico.eu in a post on the growing censorship in the country, reminds us that the use of lip-reading for surveillance purposes is not science fiction:

Last week, at the funeral of a solider in Osmaniye, south-eastern Turkey, mourners voiced anger at the government's decision to commit troops to conflict with PKK forces in the south-east, leading to several arrests.

Veli Ağbaba, deputy president of the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), and his colleagues visited two suspects in prison, and have stated that they were arrested on charges of "insulting the president" after footage of the funeral was scrutinized by lip-reading experts.

Calling in lip-reading experts to check whether somebody was insulting the President of Turkey at a funeral might seem a one-off product of an increasingly-paranoid security apparatus. Moreover, using humans is a surveillance technique that doesn't really scale -- unlike metadata analysis, say -- so you might hope this is unlikely to be a problem for most of us. But it turns out that we are very close to building real lip-reading HALs. Here's a 2014 article from The Week:

A Jordanian scientist has created an automated lip-reading system that can decipher speech with an average success rate of 76 per cent. The findings, in conjunction with recent advances in the fields of computer vision, pattern recognition, and signal processing, suggest that computers will soon be able to read lips accurately enough to raise questions about privacy and security.

Moore's Law and other advances in computing pretty much guarantee that 76 percent success rate will rise inexorably, until high-accuracy lip-reading becomes a standard feature for CCTV surveillance systems, especially as very high-resolution cameras fall in price and are deployed more widely. HAL would be proud.

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Filed Under: lip reading, lip reading computers, surveillance, surveillance state, turkey

Vice News Employees Charged With Terrorism In Turkey... Because They Used Encryption

from the insanity-rules dept

If you thought US law enforcement's freakout about "going dark" due to encryption was insane, leave it to Turkey to take the insanity to new levels. Two journalists and a "fixer" working for Vice News in Turkey were arrested and charged with "engaging in terrorist activity" because they used the same encryption tools that ISIS uses. Really.

Three staff members from Vice News were charged with "engaging in terrorist activity" because one of the men was using an encryption system on his personal computer which is often used by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a senior press official in the Turkish government has told Al Jazeera.

[....]

The Turkish official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Al Jazeera: "The main issue seems to be that the fixer uses a complex encryption system on his personal computer that a lot of ISIL militants also utilise for strategic communications."

In the article, some point out that this may really just be about scaring journalists away from the area, though it may also serve a double purpose of scaring more people away from using encryption. Just the idea that using encryption is seen as "suspicious" is already ridiculous, but to be charged with terrorism solely because you encrypt your messages is utter insanity.

Filed Under: encryption, isis, journalism, reporting, terrorism, turkey
Companies: vice

Turkish Censorship Order Targets Single Blog Post, Ends Up Blocking Access To 60 Million Wordpress Sites

from the if-single-bullet-misses,-deploy-uranium-enriched-warhead dept

There is no such thing as "targeted censorship." Discuss. (h/t to Techdirt reader wereisjessicahyde)

Last week, a Turkish court ordered an access ban on a single post in the vast sea of more than 60 million individual blogs on WordPress. But for many users, that meant their Internet service providers blocked WordPress entirely.

A lawyer and Turkish Pirate Party member tracked down the root of the sudden ban on all of Wordpress: a court order seeking to block a single blog post written by a professor accusing another professor of plagiarism. This post apparently led to several defamation lawsuits and the lawsuits led to a court order basically saying that if blocking the single post proved too difficult, fuck it, block the entire domain.

It is the second sentence in the order, however, that caused the complete ban of WordPress in the country. “If the access to the single page cannot be possible due to technical reasons,” it reads, “block access to wordpress.com.”

According to the Daily Dot's Efe Kereme Sozeri, this tactic has often been deployed by Turkish government censors when outsmarted by the internet. If the targeted URL proves difficult to block, court orders demand ISPs block entire domains as Plan B.

This is Turkey's inelegant "solution" to a problem it shouldn't be trying to solve. Sozeri points out that its domain blocking efforts have, somewhat oddly, made oft-affected US tech companies much more responsive to its censorious demands.

The reason that Turkey had to request Google, Facebook, and Twitter to remove content is because they use SSL certificates, which secures users’ communication with their servers. (SSL certificates are what allow the implementation of HTTPS.) They’re technically quite difficult to intercept, but these companies still bow down to Turkey’s requests. Why? Because Erdoğan has completely banned access to their domains time and again when they failed to comply.

In order to continue doing business in Turkey, these companies have acquiesced to multiple censorship requests. Sozeri also has more bad news: Turkey's ISPs are commonly blocking domains at the DNS level, providing for more complete censorship while bypassing the targeted entity's participation in government censorship.

This incident also serves as an example of why targeted censorship so often fails. In most cases, those asking for content to be blocked are largely unconcerned about collateral damage -- whether it's rights holders trying to "protect" their intellectual property or governments seeking to control the content accessible to their citizens. And because they don't care who else is harmed, they'll push for the most "effective" form of censorship: deploying a nuclear weapon to kill a single person, to mix metaphors. And because the only good censorship target is a dead censorship target, they're not above using everything from overly-broad blocking orders to man-in-the-middle attacks to achieve their aims.

Filed Under: censorship, free speech, site blocking, turkey, wordpress.com
Companies: automattic

Turkish Ministry Recommends Banning Super-Violent Minecraft

from the not-too-crafty dept

Insanely popular game Minecraft is known for a lot of things. It's a fantastic creative outlet and the digital sandbox of youngsters' dreams, for instance. The game has also been known to raise the ire of unrelated companies who somehow think all that creativity by gamers is something that can be sued over. It's known for amazing user-generated content, including games within games and replicas of entire cities. The nation of Turkey is known for very different things. It's a country that absolutely loves to censor stuff, for instance. And, thanks to recent developments, Turkey is also known as a great place to get a front-row look at the incredible violence done by the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

But the Turkish government has a plan to keep its youngsters from witnessing too much violence: it is calling for a Minecraft ban.

Turkish websites Hürriyet Daily News and LeaderGamer report that the country's Family and Social Policies Ministry is now calling for Minecraft to be banned in the region. The ministry's report has been sent to the legal affairs department, along with instructions for the legal process for the ban to begin. Ultimately, whether the game is banned or not will be decided in the Turkish courts.

When it comes to the issue of violence corrupting the national youth, one would really think that the Turkish government might have bigger fish to fry than a sandbox game in which battling fictional and non-human monsters is almost an aside from the actual gameplay mechanics. The point of the game is to build, to be creative, to express. For a Turkish government with the barbarians quite literally at its doorstep to call for censorship of one of the more benign gaming titles in recent memory would be comical if it were parody. But it isn't.

Nor are some of the hilariously contradictory claims to Ministry made in its report.

Although the game can be seen as encouraging creativity in children by letting them build houses, farmlands and bridges, mobs [hostile creatures] must be killed in order to protect these structures. In short, the game is based on violence," the report stated (via Hürriyet Daily News). The ministry feels as though children may confuse the in-game world with the real world, and even begin torturing animals, oblivious to the pain they're inflicting. The report added that not only would Minecraft cause "social isolation," but that the online component might lead to internet bullying.

Ah, of course! It's a video game, so it has to create isolation amongst players, except it's a video game, so it must also create bullying problems because of the all the interacting going on between those isolated players. Don't think about that sentence for too long or your brain will storm out of your noggin in protest.

Turkey may be censorship happy, but going after Minecraft over violence concerns? C'mon guys...

Filed Under: ban, minecraft, turkey, violence

The Cost Of Mark Zuckerberg's Broken Censorship Promise Is Everyone Thinks They're Winning When Nobody Is

from the empty-promises dept

As you probably have heard by now, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, Mark Zuckerberg came out with a seemingly wonderful statement on the value of free and open speech, clearly in the context of his social media empire. The language was wonderfully clear on the matter, in fact.

Yet as I reflect on yesterday's attack and my own experience with extremism, this is what we all need to reject -- a group of extremists trying to silence the voices and opinions of everyone else around the world. I won't let that happen on Facebook. I'm committed to building a service where you can speak freely without fear of violence.

Almost before the boss of Facebook's fingers had lifted away from the keyboard, the social media giant spun around on its digital heel and mooned all those that had been cheering on Zuckerberg's words.

Only two weeks after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a strongly worded #JeSuisCharlie statement on the importance of free speech, Facebook has agreed to censor images of the prophet Muhammad in Turkey — including the very type of image that precipitated the Charlie Hebdo attack. It’s an illustration, perhaps, of how extremely complicated and nuanced issues of online speech really are. It’s also conclusive proof of what many tech critics said of Zuckerberg’s free-speech declaration at the time: Sweeping promises are all well and good, but Facebook’s record doesn’t entirely back it up.

But the real issue isn't really that an international company that happens to be led by an American has divorced itself from a moral stand. That kind of thing happens all the time and can be chalked up to the simple fact that, in capitalism, money is king and values are the jester entertaining the masses. And, just to be clear, I'm not arguing that there is even anything wrong with the above. The problem is the promise and what it is designed to do.

That promise was meant to accomplish two things. The first is the obvious public relations benefit Facebook received from going all Western values in public. The audience that would read Zuckerberg's proclamation was always going to be largely in favor of the values expressed. That same audience likely largely won't ever make themselves aware of Facebook's kneeling before the censorious Turkish government. And that's not a bug, it's a feature.

What the divisions in values allow statements like Zuckerberg's and the subsequent actions Facebook took in Turkey to do is make everyone feel like they've won something, while the status quo is maintained. Westerners cheer on as the gauntlet is thrown down for free speech in the arenas which will appreciate such a stand, while a Turkish government and the religious zealots that appear to live solely to show their subjects that Western values are as fleeting as a wisp of smoke claim victory as well. Everyone is in exactly the same place as they were before, except perhaps slightly more emboldened, but feels like they're progressing their agenda.

And that's about as dangerous as it gets in the arena of an exchange of ideas and ideals. The cure for the plague of censorious government and/or organizations, be they religious or otherwise, is for the clash of culture to happen. That will never happen so long as companies like Facebook bend to the will of the enemies of speech while also successfully placating the pro-speech populous with PR statements. That promise is what lets us pat ourselves on the back, thinking we have an ally, when that ally is really a con-man playing both sides against the middle for the most cynical of reasons: money. Please don't let them get away with it, even if only in your own mind.

Filed Under: censorship, charlie hebdo, free speech, mark zuckerberg, turkey

Turkey Tells Twitter To Block Turkish Newspaper's Feed; Twitter Plans To Push Back

from the and-here-we-go-again dept

The Turkish government has been battling with Twitter for quite some time. It's gone after citizens for comments on Twitter, blamed Twitter for social unrest and even tried (temporarily) banning Twitter entirely in the country. There was even a lawsuit by the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, filed with the Constitutional Court, over his own government's "failure" to implement rules for removing content on Twitter.

The latest, as turned up by Mathew Ingram, is that the Turkish government got a court order demanding that Twitter start blocking the feed of a Turkish newpspaer, Halkin Gazetesi (which means "The People's Newspaper.")

The order says the public prosecutor’s office “is currently conducting an investigation” into an incident involving trucks owned by the National Intelligence Agency, and that this crime involves a number of suspects and members of criminal organizations who cannot be identified.

A source close to Twitter said the court order was filed after the newspaper published information on its front page that the Turkish government claimed might compromise its investigation or be used in the course of military or political espionage, and then proceeded to tweet links to the story from its official account, which is @Birgun_Gazetesi.

Twitter has responded saying while it has blocked the information requested, it is going to file an objection with the court:

"Based on the attached court order received from Turkish authorities requesting removal of two entire Twitter accounts, Twitter, Inc. has been legally compelled to withhold access to one of the accounts and to withhold access to certain Tweets posted by the other Twitter account, as well as several other accounts' Tweets which were Retweeted by the identified accounts. Twitter will be filing an objection to this order as soon as possible."

As an aside, the information that Ingram mentions about how it involves an "incident involving trucks owned by the National Intelligence Agency" is actually redacted in the document -- but in truly amateurish fashion, it appears that whoever did the redactions did so in such a way that you could just copy and paste the text and see the text (this is like a failure of redacting 101)...

Filed Under: censorship, free speech, newspaper, turkey
Companies: halkin gazetesi, twitter