maratumba writes:
"Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan vowed to "eradicate" twitter and possibly other social networking sites.
For a few months now, a series of unverified incriminating surveillance tapes are being released regularly on Twitter alleging that they 'prove' that high ranking government officials including the PM, are committing bribery, corruption and censorship. The tapes and footage are alleged to have been collected as a part of secret criminal investigation which became public in late December by arresting relatives of ministers close to Erdogan. With a quick maneuver, the government removed all the state attorneys, judges, and police which, it is claimed, he deemed a threat and ordered to destruction of all the collected evidence to prevent the investigation from proceeding.
But it is alleged that the evidence collected for the investigation is now being leaked on Twitter and this is said by some to 'show the depths of the corruption for anyone with a Twitter account'. Erdogan, who has been trying to discredit the evidence, has now moved to shutting down the social networking sites altogether, which might start happening after the local elections in 10 days."
[Eds Note: Under the Turkish Constitution, members of the Turkish Parliament have judicial immunity, not only for what they say but also for what they do, including crime.]
Related Stories
maratumba writes:
"Within the same day as the PM announced his intention to do so (previous story here), Twitter has been blocked in Turkey. Reports say that it is currently possible to circumvent the ban by using Google DNS. But the word is, they will not only prevent this method, but also block Facebook and Youtube."
(Score: 5, Informative) by maratumba on Friday March 21 2014, @04:18AM
They blocked twitter even before the story got published on SN.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26677134 [bbc.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Appalbarry on Friday March 21 2014, @06:21AM
Hey Turkish Government... Some days I love the Internet. And wonder if all governments are so totally clueless about it.
#twitter blocked in #turkey tonight. folks are painting #google dns numbers onto the posters of the governing party. http://pic.twitter.com/9vQ7NTgotO [twitter.com]
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 21 2014, @08:08AM
Turkey will soon have a say on how the whole internet functions when the US relinquishes control
Something to look forward to
(Score: 2, Interesting) by unauthorized on Friday March 21 2014, @08:33AM
Oh please, as if the US government is any better [slashdot.org].
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 21 2014, @09:02AM
Yes. They are.
The US respects my right to say that I think that their president is a donkey for screwing up health care so badly.
In other countries I could be jailed for that.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday March 21 2014, @01:31PM
That's silly: I'm pretty sure most countries would be perfectly accepting of you calling Obama a donkey for screwing up health care so badly!
(Not my joke, of course: Ronald Reagan told the same one about Soviet Russia)
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1) by wantkitteh on Friday March 21 2014, @08:57AM
You mean a National government, with power of life and death over every one of it's citizens, will be given a bit more control of the Internet infrastructure sited within it's borders? America doesn't hold that power for benign reasons, it usurped the sovereign power of other countries to maintain control of their own national assets for it's own self-interest.
However abhorrent the actions of some of these backwards ****wits are, no-one can object to Russia annexing The Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine and not object to America for annexing DNS control from the entire world without being a massive hypocrite.
Besides, exactly how much difference do you think these people will be able to make? The UK government, a developed nation with vast technical resources, can't stop me from accessing The Pirate Bay. Up against domestic and international efforts from Internet activists determined to maintain the flow of information, they don't stand a chance of keeping a lid on anything.
(Score: 4, Informative) by The_Deacon on Friday March 21 2014, @10:13AM
Yeah, I'm going to stop you right there. Keep in mind that the internet and the supporting protocols were funded, invented, and implemented first in America (Arpanet in 1969, followed by NSFNet in 1990), then the rest of the world asked to join their networks to the US NSFNet beginning in the early 1990's. So technically DNS control was never "annexed", as you put it, because the rest of the planet was perfectly free to implement their own networks and leave the Americans to their own devices. Did they do that? No.
Instead other countries chose to join their homegrown networks to the American legacy internet, and as a result agreed, as part of their interconnection, to be governed by the systems/rules American network operators set up to govern THEIR OWN NETWORK. (Which was a larger and more mature network than the networks trying to join, e.g. the Americans had more to lose by letting a bunch of newbs on their network, so it is perfectly reasonable that they'd maintain operational control of their resources).
Stop with this revisionist history crap. It was an American network to begin with, so of course it was going to be controlled by American network operators! The rest of the world wanted in to play instead of building their own (better) network, and Americans let them connect when they could've told them to pound sand. No good deed goes unpunished, apparently.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by wantkitteh on Friday March 21 2014, @10:52AM
Apologies - lack of coffee affecting the bone in my head that makes me explain stuff. I am sufficiently aware of the development of today's Internet to know that enough of the essential infrastructure was US based and that technically control of DNS records has always resided within the borders of US. You rebuttal is very good but looks on this issue in a very simple manner and as such doesn't really hold a lot of water.
By leasing a domain your continued right to use it is predicated on your conformity with US law whether you are operating within it's jurisdiction or not and whether your actions are legal in your applicable jurisdiction or not. I seriously doubt that anyone involved in the development of DNS ever intended for this extension of the reach of US law into places it should never be, so I stand by my assertion that the recent actions taken to seize domain leases from foreign nationals who broke no laws in their country is usurpation of their national legal protection by the US Government, and that devolution of power by the US to allow nations control of their domestic domains should have happened a long time ago.
(Score: 1, Troll) by isostatic on Friday March 21 2014, @10:06AM
And this is a country that wants to join the eu?
Trouble is the Islamic infestation that forces this.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Friday March 21 2014, @11:30AM
The university I went to was in a town with a very large immigrant population and triple the national average per capita of Muslims. Shortly after I left, the pub the computer science lot had colonized every Friday night was burned down in anti-immigrant race riots. I can say from first hand experience that the problem is not related to religion at all, it is irrational intolerance towards the actions, thoughts or genetic makeup of others, sometimes mutual but more often not, that leads to these kinds of confrontations in society.
The various laws around the western world restricting the freedoms and equalities of homosexuals appear to come primarily from religious grassroots movements, usually Christian despite having no arguable basis within The Bible to support their position. When perceived from within a Western liberal culture, any similar action in a strict religious culture appears amplified and thus extreme.
I smell a lot of "usually" and "apparently" coming off this post, damnit! ;)
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday March 21 2014, @03:11PM
Wait...so who are you saying burned down the CS pub? It sounds like a pretty poor way of protesting immigration to burn down your own watering hole. Or by "anti-immigration race riots", do you mean people of some race rioting against anti-immigrationists?
I thought they kept striking down those laws in the U.S. lately...I was under the impression that homosexuals were more lacking legislation explicitly giving them more rights than they had before (since they're still legally equivalent to "this person I know" versus "my spouse" vis-a-vis hospital visitation rights or whatever). But maybe I'm just splitting hairs and/or being ignorant.
Inasmuch as the reasoning for anything in Bible is (except for the Epistles) "because God said so," sure. It wasn't just Jesus saying, "That's not cool, bro;" there were directives by God back in the Old Testament outlawing homosexuality, too.
I think a lot of the time me explaining The Wrong Viewpoint comes off as either me supporting it, or being a pedant. Sigh.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Saturday March 22 2014, @04:07PM
The Riots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Bradford_riots [wikipedia.org]
The US does seem to be fairly good at striking down laws when they get passed, whether they support or attack homosexuals or equality. Gay marriage, both recognition of and the right to, has been a contentious semi-religious issue for decades and I don't see that being resolved to everyone's satisfaction any time soon. The film "Milk" is worth watching, the true life characters and events have been liberally played with but the gist of the problems facing grassroots homosexual political figures and activist groups is represented pretty damn well. Sean Penn is awesome and totally earned his Oscar for this role.
Leviticus chapters 18 and 20 both have lines in that appear to ban homosexuality, but only when taken out of context and mistranslated in a certain way, something modern church organizations do a hell of a lot these days. Those sections specifically deal with how the Israelite nation was told to deal with their exposure to pagan fertility rituals and the word "abomination" doesn't mean the same now as it used to. There are loads of studies of those verses online you can find and I thoroughly recommend a 2007 documentary film called "For The Bible Tells Me So".
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday March 24 2014, @02:43PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviticus_18#Sexualit y [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_the_ Hebrew_Bible [wikipedia.org]
The way a lot of this is worded smells to me of commentators desperately trying to find a way to "make being gay okay with the Bible." Admittedly, Wikipedia isn't a great place to go for bias, but when we're arguing about whether God disapproves of being gay, or male-male anal sex, it seems like we're kind of missing the forest for the trees...
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Monday March 24 2014, @05:41PM
This whole argument is basically a Rorschach test - "look at these Bible passages and tell me what you see" - and without further evidence either way, two and half millennia after Leviticus was written, all anyone can do is push an explanation that fits their own opinion.
Full disclosure: I see a conflict between the anti-homosexual condemnation position and that new commandment Jesus issued, "Love One Another". Of course, that's using two parts of the same book of unreliable evidential standard to form an argument...
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday March 24 2014, @07:05PM
There's a saying, "Hate the sin; love the sinner." I think a lot of people being unaware of/ignoring that is a large part of the problem.
Not to mention, why it was decided that homosexuality is problematic in the first place. Because it reduces (not) reproducing to a hedonistic act, presumably?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Wednesday March 26 2014, @10:32AM
Same reason for a million other large-scale discriminatory social trends. Here's my perception of how these situations form, it's depressing how many times I've seen this:
People naturally fear that which is different to themselves. They unconsciously form rival groups by socially attaching to others with similar views and preferences. Individuals who believe their group to be superior become sufficiently empowered by the perceived tacit approval, unwittingly provided by their peers, of a sociopolitical position. They take the initiative, organize supporters and launch an attack on another group with a contrasting position.
This is the critical moment when news of the attack, often distorted, raises awareness of the situation. Positions, opinions and group memberships are retroactively rationalized using language lifted from news coverage on hand. Commentators choose aspects of the situation and then subject them to public political deconstruction. The free-for-all then begins in earnest.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by cmn32480 on Friday March 21 2014, @11:56AM
The internet in general and social media in particular are fantastic tools for those that are not in power to expose the corruption, over reach, and dishonesty of the government.
The people in power will do what is necessary to stay in power. They always have, and they always will.
The government in the US is no different. Social welfare programs are intended to keep the unwashed masses voting for the party that feeds them, and anyone that thinks people should stand on their own and work for a living gets called out as unfeeling and not compassionate toward those less fortunate. Should we let people die in the streets? No, of course not. Should we be pushing people to get off their ass and work by making welfare just enough to keep you alive, but not enough to live a nice life? Absolutely.
I have to get back to work now, millions on welfare are depending on taking my tax dollars.
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson