Hackers Arrested as Turkey Embraces Big Brother

Posted on Jun 13, 2011

Flickr / crawford.l

Turkish police made a successful foray into the hacking community Monday with the arrests of 32 suspected local members of Anonymous after the group’s attack on a government telecommunications website Thursday.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government has plans to introduce a filtering program that would force users to self-identify under one of four classifications for all online activities, an obligation that members of Anonymous rightly suspect would enable state authorities to gather personal information through the close monitoring of individual Internet use. Anonymous members worry that the information would then be used to suppress dissent. —ARK

The Guardian:

Members of the Anonymous collective said that attack was carried out as a protest against internet censorship by the recently re-elected government of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, of the moderate Islamist Justice and Development party (AKP).

Turkey is due to introduce an obligatory nationwide internet filtering system in August that will see users forced to sign up to one of four filters.

These are labelled “domestic”, “family”, “children” or “standard”, but hacker activists gathered under the Anonymous umbrella claim they will lead to state control of individual internet use, and allow authorities to keep records of such use.

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