Turkey passes draconian internet law, Turks say goodbye to their freedom of speech

5 hours ago Feb. 6, 2014 - 3:23 PM PST

The Turkish government has long had a fractious relationship with the internet, marked by periodic bans on sites like YouTube for content that contravenes Turkish laws like the law that makes it an offence to insult Turkishness. But new amendments to the countrys internet legislation that were passed by parliament on Wednesday take this internet-phobia to new levels, and represent an unprecedented attack on the free speech rights of Turkish citizens.

Among other things, the amendments allow the authorities to block access to specific content on the internet with as little as four hours notice, and without a court order. The legislation goes beyond the kind of blanket site-wide banning that Turkey has used in the past against services like YouTube, and allows the government to block specific pieces of content at the URL level, in much the same way that Chinas Great Firewall does.

In many ways, the new Turkish law is the rough equivalent of SOPA and PIPA two anti-piracy bills that were proposed by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives in 2011 and sparked a huge outcry about surveillance and free speech, to the point where both were withdrawn. The Turkish amendments, however, have been passed by parliament and now just require the signature of the countrys president, Abdullah Gul.

Like those laws, the Turkish legislation forces ISPs to act as agents of the government in a variety of ways, including a requirement to store virtually all data about their users online activity for at least two years. The amendments also authorize the government to use methods such as deep packet inspection in order to bypass anonymizing tools and other technologies that Turkish dissidents might use to get around content blocks or bans.

Turkish nationals, including University of North Carolina sociologist and social-media expert Zeynep Tufekci, have been criticizing the proposed legislation for some time because they see it as an infringement of their rights to free speech. Some see the crackdown as a response to the recent corruption scandal, in which some senior ministers have reportedly been receiving bribes. Turkey also routinely censors and restricts its national news media, making internet sources and especially social media an even more important factor.

As noted by the site BoingBoing, one Turkish citizen has written a goodbye letter to the internet and posted it on Medium, saying: This is a farewell to our freedom of speech, privacy and World Wide Web, and an unwanted welcome to Turkey Narrow Web. Ahmet Sabanci described the legislation in this way:

ISPs going to log everything we do together. Theyll keep these logs for years and government can check these logs whenever they want. Theyll use URL-based censorship on you. That means, if my essays on Medium counted as harmful, other people can see Medium but theyll never be able to read my essays on Medium. And most of the people wont be able to notice this.

In a recent interview with Wired magazine, the creator of the web Sir Tim Berners-Lee said that one of his fears about the future of the global network was that it would become Balkanized, with countries taking control of portions of the net and restricting information. He said he wants a web thats open, works internationally, works as well as possible and is not nation-based. Unfortunately, that kind of free flow of information isnt in the interests of repressive regimes.

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Turkey passes draconian internet law, Turks say goodbye to their freedom of speech