After Twitter, this was expected. Just couple of hours ago, leaked audio recordings were uploaded to Youtube which show "Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, National Intelligence Organization (MİT) Undersecretary Hakan Fidan, Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioğlu and Deputy Chief of General Staff Gen. Yaşar Güler are heard discussing possible intervention into Syria and possible reactions from the world"
They were planning to organize artificial attacks from Syrian border and put the blame on Syria and strength Erdogan's position before local elections.
It's pretty ghastly that people are willing to fabricate rationale for getting into war. I really hope that the Turks dispose of their leaders expediently and forcefully.
Yeah, like US and UK populations voted out their chief warmongers pronto, once it came out that the rationale for getting into the Iraq war was fabricated... oh wait
I'm very sorry but I really don't like that argument. That doesn't make it any less ghastly for others to be like that as well.
The argument you bring seems similar to what people say about the Crimea-Crisis (that 'the west' isn't allowed to complain because of Bosnia). Just because 'the west' interfered illegally in Bosnia, doesn't give Russia a free pass to do so as well.
I was just responding to the patronising tone of the comment above, showing how it's rarely the case that such manipulation is directly punished by the masses.
Not really. The particular concern about limiting future expansion of European colonialism at its center (inasfar as the part of it that might justify US action is concerned) hasn't really been a concern really since the early 20th Century, though the name was dusted off by some (misleadingly) in the Cold War for applications of the Kennedy Doctrine within the Western Hemisphere, and the doctrine was explicitly described as being dead by Secretary of State John Kerry last year.
> It allows for the invasion of foreign country's when the us feels threatened right?
Not as actually articulated by Monroe (in fact, if the country was in Europe, its specifically negated some justifications for involvement).
I think there's a bit of a difference between a fairly length debate about the extent to which statements about weapons of mass destruction were 'sexed up', where the government position is eventually discredited and a Youtube recording of government ministers conspiring to start a war.
There are people here who come from countries that were the target of America's equally fabricated reason to get into WWII. I would love to thank the US government for fabricating that (at the very least blowing one incident way out of proportion). My family has killed people for simply being on the wrong side of that battle, merely to make some profit selling pigs, or repairing plumming. You know what ? They were right too.
The problem with Syria is that the government is in the right. Or at least, it's less wrong. The rebels want to do religious cleansing of the country and the government wants to survive, and it's own ethnic group to survive. Of course Iran, equally being the target of the sunni muslim religious cleansing, supports their not-quite-brothers. Erdogan wants to "help" the rebels because he's on the side that wants to do ethnic and religious cleansing in Syria, and presumably because it would distract from his local problems. The problem in Iraq is the same basic thing. The good thing is that sunni muslim attacks in Syria, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan are mostly their actions out of western nations.
But please don't be so stupid as to think they're ok with the US and generally the rest of the world just because they don't want to turn a 5-front war into a 100-front one. And also don't make the mistake of assuming they don't have support in America or don't have massive support in Europe. Both from local muslims living there, and from the governments that are afraid of these mad attacks.
As for Turkey, what do you really expect the leader of a sunni muslim religious party to do, except declare himself caliph and behave like he owns the world ? What exactly do you think he means when he says that "some" parts of sharia should be introduced ? You think he means to stop at "some" ? Really ? Religious freedom ? Sadly there are hundreds of millions of people who believe doing this is the answer to all the world's problems.
Please keep in mind that before Kemal Ataturk, Turkey, then the Ottoman empire, effectively the state of sunni islam that so many muslims are trying to recreate, had waged a 1500-year long war against the Europe, Asia and Africa. Then in WWI allah's caliph was overthrown, all but declared illegal (you wouldn't believe the number of imams killed and threatened in the 1918 - today period), and the war stopped, to be replaced with the cold war. The nightmare scenario is that this original war resumes.
There's a popular conspiracy theory that Roosevelt knew Pearl Harbor was going to happen and allowed it as a pretext for entering the war. No conclusive evidence either way though.
That still makes no sense. Even if one tries and fails to destroy the US Pacific fleet (which, technically, is what happened) that's still an act of war, whether or not the President knew about it.
Ah, yes. In the U.S. we had Operation Northwoods, where not one of those psychopathic "leaders" who concocted it was disposed of, either expediently or forcefully:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
DoD proposal that "called for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or other operatives, to commit acts of terrorism in US cities and elsewhere... public support for a war against Cuba by blaming it for terrorist acts..."
Well the odds are probably against it. The re-election of Bush in 2004 is one of the most recent instances I can think of where an electorate was more concerned about stability of their country than fabrication of a war. If the majority of the Turkish people are like most western populations they will put their heads down and vote conservatively because they feel threatened by events surrounding them, even if that threat is being manipulated by their own government.
I am not so sure. Kerry was a terrible candidate, the virtual definition of a limousine liberal. Also as the BBC said, he is a serial message bungler, although Bush was not that much better. Someone like Obama could have won in 2004.
Mmm... perhaps. PR needs a simple message. But reality is never simple. You can need to get into a war for very good reasons, without having a clear, simple story to tell the press.
Makes you wonder, if everything had gone to the original plan in syria already, nat gas pipelines would be headed to europe by now and the IMF wouldn't bother with the gazprom bill to russia…
Also interesting how there has been very little action about the blackouts from the State Dept talking heads (beyond the toothless shaming), if this had been a country not doing the bidding of tptb we would probably hear of sanctions against turkish corps in the us.
Are you suggesting that a "western conspiracy" was responsible for the turmoil in Syria? That their people did not have serious grievances with a regime that tortured and murdered tens of thousands of people for political reasons even before the current conflict started?
Not necessarily (because the conflict is not black and white), just that "the west" (if you include Qatar, Saudi Arabia[0], Israel, etc…) and "the east" all have interests in the region and have manipulated the conflict on multiple levels regardless of environment before Syria went "hot". Just like everywhere else in the world where someone is trying to make a buck…
Some of those interests have been well stated by the CFR[1] and RAND years…
Besides, "the west" didn't step into Iraq until the beginning of the 90's (and even then didn't dispose him until the 00's) while Saddam who was being bankrolled by the west was doing their bidding as well as torturing and murdering tens of thousands of people in the 80's… and even now, thousands more continue to die in northern Iraq and I don't hear people parroting that around, so lets not try to evoke the knee jerk emotions and remember all "sides" have blood on their hands in pursuit of their self interests…
There is no such thing as "no intervention". Any action or inaction will shape events. In democracies it is inevitable to have an opinion of these things and to voice them. Otherwise leaders like Putin or Assad step all over you, and then demand "deescalation".
Also, Assad left any shred of legitimacy when he started decimating his population with artillery, and I don't how care how many "legitimate targets" where among the hundreds of thousands of civilians that were targeted.
For me, the only tolerance a democracy can have towards the governments in Syria, North Korea and some other countries, is that nobody can or wants to depose them. Nothing more, nothing less. That does not mean regime change works all the time, it just means there cannot be any apologetics for mass these murderers any more.
>Are you suggesting that a "western conspiracy" was responsible for the turmoil in Syria?
Who are you quoting? And is "conspiracy" just a pejorative word for 'intervention' or 'decision?'
>That their people did not have serious grievances with a regime that tortured and murdered tens of thousands of people for political reasons even before the current conflict started?
Are you suggesting that your first statement and your second statement are equivalent? That people did have serious grievances before the current conflict would lead me to ask 'why now?'
No where in that recording mention about strengthening Erdogan's position before local elections. On the contrary they mention that Erdogan actually not acting on it all, one of the voice proposes that Head of Turkish Army and couple of other officials should get together while PM present and clarify on how to help rebel groups.
Is there any information about when the recordings were made?
I ask because, well, after weeks knowing that their conversations were being intercepted, it would be utterly stupid to still discuss sensitive matters on the phone.
If on the contrary, they're old recordings, this seems like a strategy by the spies to slowly release damning evidence. Nice.
99% of political activity runs over phone lines. Not using phones would basically shut down the whole government and parliament, throwing a country back to the XIX century, it just can't be done.
What you can do is to change phones and to loudly complain with your counter-espionage and police arms that this stuff shouldn't happen. Except Erdogan has lost most of those constituencies already, which is why these leaks are happening in the first place.
I disagree with your last sentence. Because of the problem in Syria our borders are not secure and Turkey is trying to solve this problem diplomatically for a year.
Recently ISID threatened Turkey to attack Sulaiman Sah and after that government started to think about a military attack to that area.
You can't just say "they want to attack Syria to strength Erdogan's position."
It was interesting when we saw governments attempt it last time, too. And then they stopped, because they were overthrown.
I wonder if this is going to be a law, now ... a government that attempts to dismantle the internet a piece at a time in their country is going to fail.
This reminds me of the "information wants to be free" and "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" slogans of yesteryear. The internet isn't magic. There is no natural law that means it will always emerge victorious.
Well, it does "route around damage", but there's a difference between an infrastructure damage (be it a denial of service, or a tactical nuclear strike) and a continuous, intentional action of a sentient adversary.
Unfortunately, conflating those two concepts is a common mistake when designing or thinking about systems.
TBH it's mostly about the fact that the "route around damage" really applies only to a very small stack. What does the browser do, to "route around damage"? What does a DNS client do? Very little, if anything. They were not built to "route around damage", they were built to do client/server.
The user isn't part of the internet, unless it's someone with a cranial implant of some sort (surely coming soon...).
The phrase originally referred to protocols like TCP/IP and SMTP that used relays and packet forwarding to cope with the fact that any given set of servers might be disabled. In this respect Bittorrent is much closer to the original conception than HTTP.
I think you'll find that people mean the BGP protocol when they say the internet routes around damage. While this is true, it doesn't route around firewalls forcibly installed around a country by it's government.
Also, I'd contend this is not really true in practice. While BGP does repair some faults, what happens in reality is that ISP engineers route around damage. BGP itself might keep reachability intact, but any error will still lead to massive capacity loss. This is then repaired by NOCs around the world. That's what really keeps the internet rolling.
The latter is quite a clever slogan, however it conveniently omits that the internet is ran and used by people. They need to put those mechanisms in place.
Tor software has the public keys of Tor directory authorities built-in. But it needs to trust those directory authorities to provide true up-to-date information about the network (Tor clients download the public keys for all the relays which are currently online and are deemed to be OK by the authorities, from the authorities (or their mirrors - everything is signed by dirauth keys.)) If the dir authorities are compromised, Tor clients are screwed.
You have to start trusting someone in a web of trust (or in wherever.) Just because you can do smart end to end encrypted communication with all the relays / with everyone you want to, someone has to guarantee that you're not being MitM'd (during e.g. DH key exchange.) At least that's my understanding anyway.
Sorry, haven't looked into namecoin. But I would presume that as long as you already know the domain name, no MitM can happen, and no explicit trust has to be placed onto anyone. This is true for, e.g., Tor hidden services, wherein if one knows the .onion name, they'll know if messages coming from that service are actually from that service, because they'll be signed by an ephemeral key that is itself signed by a key the fingerprint of which is the .onion name itself. (This is a gross oversimplification, and I could have made a mistake anyway..)
If a similar scheme is true for namecoin addresses, then the situation is better indeed.
They haven't taken down the Internet, just a couple of sites. Information can (and does) still easily get in and out of the country. So my first thought was, it shouldn't really matter that much.
However, on second thought, while information can still travel freely, the question remains who to send it to and who to receive it from. That's because people have outsourced their social graph to single remote entities (case in point: Twitter). They could still communicate with everyone, but have made themselves reliant on a single point of failure.
Of course none of this refutes your point -- the Internet isn't magic. But I think the powers that be are very reluctant to through out the baby with the bathwater.
I think you're gravely underestimating the effects of propaganda and herd thinking. Significant parts of the US populace appear the seriously believe - despite undisrupted internet access - that evolution is a lie, the world has been created 4000 years ago etc. And that's without a state-sponsored actor trying to influence people.
Unfettered access to information does not mean people will access, accept, understand, and use that information. If you have a massive state-run media monopoly, you're able to manipulate people in remarkable ways.
"Information wants to be free" doesn't apply to North Korea because they never had access to the Internet as we know it? Information is only dependent on the Internet insofar as the Internet is a transmission medium. Other media exist even in NK- print, broadcast, word-of-mouth.
Information can be exchanged freely by whispering voices.
That information has a much higher chance of corruption while in transit, and the bandwidth is low. People can't broadcast photos and videos through whispers for instance.
Whether the information is corruptible isn't the issue. Freedom to share it is. Before the Internet, we had entire civilizations (even free ones) built on communication that was less than perfect. I'm sure that in the early years of the USA broadcasting photos and videos wasn't a high priority, yet, somehow, freedom to share information was acknowledged as a basic human right that must not be removed.
China's great firewall works pretty darn well. Plus the fear embedded in the populace, if they are aware of things they're not supposed to know (i.e. Tienanmen Square).
>It was interesting when we saw governments attempt it last time, too. And then they stopped, because they were overthrown.
Any examples? Because sure as hell many governments do just fine by making whole lots of stuff illegal, from marijuana to certain internet access, and are not overthrown at all.
We'll see. Turkey seems to be more stable. Do we have any reason to believe the Turkish government will certainly be overthrown, aside from the affront to our collective geek prides?
Rising conflicts between popular groups would, if they seriously undermined Erdogan's claim to be in command of the country, provide a pretext for a coup.
This understanding is outdated. AKP has gutted the old secular military establishment and instituted reforms that no longer make this a realistic scenario.
"Gutted" seems strong to me: the military has lost its influence over the judiciary, but they are a very strong, well-funded and influential arm of the state, and they seem to be gaining some measure of public respect that they lost. I could be wrong, but I think the ethos of being guardians of the constitution is still there. (And, for its own reasons, the AKP has been stressing the possibility of a coup as a reason for weakening the army).
How realistic a scenario a coup is depends on just how messy the months ahead get, I think.
Blocking social media sites and expecting it to reduce tension is like turning off TV & radio broadcasting and expecting people to remain in their homes; it's a failure to understand modern systems of control. Orwell doesn't work at all. Huxley is your only hope Turkey :P
Orwell does work, North Korea and Cuba are examples of that. But you can't create an Orwellian police state over night, and those sorts of oppressive regimes tend to be unstable (Libya, East Germany, Romania, etc. all gone now).
"But you can't create an Orwellian police state over night, and those sorts of oppressive regimes tend to be unstable (Libya, East Germany, Romania, etc. all gone now)."
Only if there is an "outside", to force reality in. If you are the emperor, and control everything, the Orwellian state works very nicely..
They aren't that naive -- it's one of very many systems to exert control over. Their issue is that Twitter doesn't bow to pressure in the same manner that CNN Turkey does.
I totally agree. There are so many venues on internet you can express yourself. However on a limited time frame it works. Only a week away from the elections, not many people will be able to reconnect through other means.
It is amazing the DNS system lasted this long. Turkey seems ready to push over this house of cards. Hopefully a namecoin type system will rise from the ashes. Trust without cryptography is dead.
For this kind of censorship, namecoin wouldn't have helped. Turkey could've just watched the namecoin blockchain and update their IP blacklist directly from it.
IP blacklisting is not as appealing to governments as DNS blocking because of virtual hosts. The collateral damage from breaking DNS is bad enough. IP blocking runs the risk of breaking essential economic services.
It is possible for governments to invest in session interruption like what China does is possible.
A Turkish scholar have nice analysis on this. She thinks that the Turkish government does not seek to completely ban the spread of information and knows that it's not possible. Instead the government tries to demonize the social media to keep it's supporters away from it.
The Internet was designed to withstand damage due to nuclear warfare and other external disruptions. It apparently was not designed to reliably withstand serious attacks of malicious third parties controlling some segments of it.
I am not supporting Turkish Govt here, nor I have any concern with this country.
If a classified video is made live on a Turkish Video website, would US Govt block it or not?
or Do you approve of releasing classified videos or calls?., because according to my understanding regardless of the content of those videos or calls, they are in violation of 'privacy' and perhaps are classified too.?
I am just making sure, that I do not become a victim of double-standards here... :/
The US government practices pretty much no direct censorship of the internet. You can read about the number of laws that have been struck down, and the handful of cases where domains/servers have been seized:
I am a native Turkish speaker and I listened the recording. For one thing I did not hear anything you would not expect to hear from most of the statesman in the west in a similar situation.
Conversation is about the future stance of Turkey for the civil war in Syria and lack of enough resolve for the last 3 years to intervene properly, and that does not mean directly involving but not supplying ammo to rebel groups against Assad regime. They are complaining that the civil war took a turn toward total destabilization of the region, especially after Al-Qaeda linked group called ISIL[1] started taking over anti-Assad rebel groups. They fear that if ISIL becomes an armed power next to Turkey's border it will be a huge security concern. The head of intelligence agency says that if Turkey going to engage against them in the future it should be done so on their terms but not the other side's choosing. The mention of alleged provocation of the head of intelligence by his minions firing rockets from the Syrian side into Turkish side is correct. He says his men can do that. However he says that in the context they want to be the one starting the assault on ISIL, not the other way around. They argue that if they should wait for the ISIL to attack first. So again it is about engaging al-Qaeda linked group but not starting war with Syria. In this recording foreign minister mention that they want to avoid any conflict with Syria due to their capabilities. I do believe that any war with Syria destabilizes Turkey grossly and it is definitely something they would want to avoid and they did.
The al-Qaeda linked group (ISIL) invaded one the Syrian village about [4] 30-40km away from the Turkish border about a week ago. And like many Turkish I learned something new last week. In that village there's the tomb[2] of the grandfather of the founder of Ottoman Empire. Surrounding of that tomb which is a tiny tiny land in that village belongs to Turkish Republic. The monument is protected by Turkish soldiers who reside there permanently. After ISIL invaded the surrounding village they demanded [5] that Turkish soldiers leave the monument. However that land is part of Turkish sovereign land and Turkey reacted that she would intervene forcefully. Even we have been reading that couple of F-16 fighters are kept ready to take off on the tarmac and special ops can intervene in 90 seconds.
In the recording, foreign minister mentions the option of intervention to ISIL using the Tomb as an excuse, even if they do not attack monument and the soldiers. They mention that world would support such intervention since this is a al-Qaeda linked group. So they would like to attack ISIL fully in the whole region.
They are not warmongering against Syria, and they fear that ISIL's presence could become permanent and can become something of huge security concern for years to come.. In the recording, head of Turkish intelligence mention about lack of resolve of the government. He says if they did not intervene while thousands of people died, still attack on the Tomb of Suleyman Shah is a weaker argument to start an attack.
Probably we need to consider how US would react if an Al-Qaeda linked group starts taking over northern villages of Mexico while a civil war is going on in there.
However the main post is about YouTube ban due to this recording. I just wanted to give another perspective.
> I did not hear anything you would not expect to hear from most of the statesman in the west in a similar situation.
What are you talking about?!?
The head of secret service states: "If need be, I'll send 4 lads to Syria. I'll make them fire 8 rockets back to Turkey in order to produce a valid reason to go to war. We can make them attack the Soliman Shah mausoleum"
Is this NORMAL in your opinion? Does that have anything defendable?
Many times in history people lie or scheme to go to war. For instance the Gulf of Tonkin incident that prompted US entry into Vietnam, or the sinking of the Lusitania before the US entry into WWII where the German government placed ads in newspapers telling people not to get on the ship as it would be sunk.
>Probably we need to consider how US would react if an Al-Qaeda linked group starts taking over northern villages of Mexico while a civil war is going on in there.
Why would "al-Qaeda linked" groups be considered more dangerous than the mass-murdering cartels? Mexico is almost a failed state and we haven't invaded.
Unlike Islamist terror groups' views on secular Turkey, the mass murdering cartels have no particular interest in US regime change. That said US military units can and frequently do carpet bomb parts of Latin America with herbicides as part of the War on Drugs, so it's a stone cold certainty that the US military has discussed strategies for targeting Mexican cartels and what level of provocation/support would be needed to prompt direct military involvement.
If US politicians were publicly stating willingness to intervene militarily in Mexico to protect a purely symbolic target, as appears to be the case here (link [5] above) I'd expect that behind closed doors leaders would be discussing what would be necessary to win international support, and sceptics would be expressing similar cynicism about whether the talking tough was really more about domestic politics.
There is not a civil war in Mexico, is it? Mexican government is not bombing Mexican cities with fighter jets either. 120,000 (actually 658,000 if proportioned it to Mexican population) people have not died in Mexico in the last 3 years, and 3 million (12 million) people have not displaced as refugee in bordering countries either. Would you like me to go on?
Mexican government is fully cooperating with US and not acting like an enemy towards US, eh?
edit: I'm not using Mexican figures to say that fabricating evidence in order to invade is wrong - it just is. I'm saying that using the US as a justification is illegitimate. The US has a record of invading countries in order to enrich itself. To say that Turkey is invading for the same reasons that the US invades is to say that Turkey is going to lie to its own people and the world in order to make a resource grab. That's awful, and a lot of people think that Blair and Bush should be in prison for it.
Nowhere I said Turkey should invade or anything. This is a bit getting out of hand. I just wanted to draw attention giving an example. However creating a temporary buffer zone where a terrorist group already taken control of is not unthinkable either.
Your text seems almost like Turkish gov't pawn propaganda.
a 4 hour account, and a very well put together defense of the recording. Any one that speaks Turkish and listened to the full recording will not mistake the following for anything else, "I can send 4 of my guys there (Syria) to fire rockets".
>For one thing I did not hear anything you would not expect to hear from most of the statesman in the west in a similar situation.
So lets cut the bullshit. Attacking your own people to create fear and thus justify war means is TERRORISM.
Yes, if you take the sentence out of its context and clip it that how it sounds. You have every right to criticize what's in that recording, but you should do it honestly. The rest of the statement you omitted is "they would fire 8 rockets into empty lands".
Here's the Turkish statement he (the head if intelligence) made in the recording:
"Biz gerekçeyse gerekçeyi üretiriz, ben öbür tarafa 4 tane adam gönderirim, 8 tane boş alana füze de attırırım."
So he intends to say that he would send 4 of his men but have them send the 8 rockets to empty lands.
In other part of the speech he is more concerned about human life. He says along large swath of the border millions of people's life are at risk that should be enough for intervention but on the other hand we're talking of the Tomb and 22-28 soldiers over there (this is not a translation of the following but gist of it).
Turkish:
" yani işte vatan toprağının işte bu oda kadar yaklaşık 10 dönümlük bir yer için silah kullanmayı göz önüne alıyoruz, ordaki 22-28 tane askerimizin şeyi için, yahu kaçbin kilometre vatan toprağı var sınırda kaç milyon insanın hayatı için almıyoruz"
People are already afraid of stray bullets and artillery shells on the Turkish side. Even couple of people died because of that. In a border town called Reyhanli, 60 people already died because of car bomb.
What these people in the recoding are talking to find a more legitimate reason to intervene on the the other side of the border, especially to ISIL. Something that world can back them. They are not looking for war with Syria. Minister of Foreign Affairs says:
"zaten adamların kapasitesini bildiğimiz için biz girmeyelim diyoruz."
"since we know their[Syrian] capability we say we should not get involved".
So they do not want to get involved (create a circumstance) for an all out war but use other options like manufacturing ammo and selling them since Qatar is already out for purchase. Here's the Turkish for that part:
"şimdi bakın efendim. mke bizim sayın bakanın emrinde değil mi efendim? efendim yani şu anda parayla katar mühimmat arıyor. peşin para üretsin versinler. sayın bakanın emrinde."
I listened both videos. It is apparent that you either did not listen it or did not read my comment completely. Why don't you show us your critical thinking while linking it to the text without fabricating anything.
I hope enough copies of whatever damning evidence the Turkish government wants to suppress are being disseminated outside of Turkey as well as inside the country.
What's really interesting to me is that it seems like some very, very powerful and well-connected player, who either has access to the communication networks or people at the top of the Turkish totem pole is trying to use social media to destabilize/overthrow a government.
I don't know much about what's going on in Turkey and the corruption that's being exposed is definitely hugely damning, but I'm curious if there is any credible idea as to who is behind all this leaking? It definitely isn't a group of your average concerned citizens.
Isn't this the wrong approach, though? I mean, sure you can try to block people form finding the truth, but at least be covert about it; this is plain naïve.
Their methodology is just putting them (the government) into the spotlight. Shouldn't they try and divert the attention?
This ensures people find the truth sooner rather than later. I feel like they've been played by some high-up in the government techs person who just got sick of the corruption and decided to add a catalyst.
Usually the Turkish army would have stepped in and restored some sanity by now. Turkey is in the odd position that it's military coups tend to increase democracy. However, as I understand it, as Turkey wants (wanted?) to be an EU member, the army has been hesitant this time around, and the politicians have used this moment of political weakness to defang any unfriendly military chiefs.
Just to add to this point: There are regional elections in Turkey on Sunday and the ruling party is expected to receive a serious blow. One of the rumours has always been that this government could even risk going to war rather than losing power. Well... now we have proof that it is the case.
All my support goes to the Turkish government for trying to abrupt the Western propaganda and disrupting the influences of American secret national agencies. It is no secret that the protests and revolutions in Syria, Egypt, Tunis and the like were caused by internal fabrications from American soil so they could use the uproar for settling marionettes and proper satellite states instead of having to deal with nations which are against America and Israel.
Hopefully the Turkish government is successful in its endeavors to protect its citizens from a faux-revolution fed by propaganda easily spread in this digital age (i.e. Youtube and Twitter, Facebook is of high concern too).
Personally I think this reasoning is totally bullshit.
People have a brain and can easily discern and analyze the information they get from different sources.
Internet, in this sense, is the main "method" to get information for gazzillion different sources, compare them, discuss with other people with other ideas and, in the end, come to a objective conclusion.
Shut it down is not at all a counter-measure... rather I suspect that only will push the people to rage against the oppressors of freedom to get information. That's a suicide measure and also the worst one because people will instantly think "woah, so this guy must have something really bad to hide if he is literally trying to shut down the internet".
Isn't the saying something along the lines of "a person is smart but people are dumb"? It was proven there were NGO's stirring up things in Kiev. It was also proven they totally lost control and now we have armed militants (neonazi's?) even demonstrating their 'power' by showing up in parliament. (This made Putins say, now he can claim to protect the Russian minority).
Your argument seems to be that the happenings in your locale are attributable to avaricious, power-mad sociopaths operating governments in other places. I should point out that, while this may be true, it does not rule out the hypothesis that avaricious, power-mad sociopaths are also operating the government that claims you as its subject.
While it is also true that the Internet is filled to the brim with lies, propaganda, jokes, sarcasm, pornography, and cute cat videos, it also contains some genuine facts. As I am well aware that certain employees of my own government are unable to locate their own buttocks with two full-time assistants and a 350-page illustrated instruction manual, I very much prefer that the determination of whether something I find on the network is worth seeing be left to me, and me alone.
Arguing for censorship is arguing that you are an idiot that needs to be protected from your own poor judgement. If you truly find yourself unable to use the Internet responsibly, please just disconnect yourself from it rather than advocating for its destruction.
They were planning to organize artificial attacks from Syrian border and put the blame on Syria and strength Erdogan's position before local elections.