Erdogan's Turkey and NetClean Planning to Curtail Internet Freedoms?

Erdogan's Turkey and NetClean Planning to Curtail Internet Freedoms? (GlobalvoicesOnline).

For a few weeks now, digitally active circles in Turkey have been displaying concern over a move by the Turkish government to introduce new Internet controls.

A recent Hürriyet Daily News piece reported that Turkey is planning to work with a Swedish company, NetClean, to fight against child sexual abuse cases (CSA) as part of a supposed €40M deal.

But the Hurriet Daily News report also implied exactly what many digital activists already fear, namely that CSA is just a pretext to intensify state pressure on Internet freedoms in Turkey: the last two restrictive Internet Laws passed in Turkey were created primarily in the name of fighting against CSA.

Nevertheless, the government passionately falls back on the same apparent motivation in each subsequent attack on the web.

Perhaps the best-written post about NetClean's cooperation with Ankara is a Turkish language blog post written by the blogger Kus on network23.org. Kus emphasized that NetClean services will primarily be used for URL-based bans. With the notorious new Internet Law approved earlier this year, the government planned to move towards URL-based blocking instead of shutting down websites. However, with weak domestic cyber-capacity, the government appears to have decided, like many authoritarian states do, to buy targeting services abroad.

Many activists believe NetClean's appearance across the country's internet space may mark the beginning of a real Deep Packet Inspection system of surveillance by the Turkish State, justified under the new law. Prof. Kırlıdoğ's guest post at the EDRi site sums up these anxieties.

DPI surveillance implies that user content may also be subject to increasing government control from now. As noted in a post on the ars technica blog in January last year:

Microsoft has released a security advisory concerning a fraudulent digital certificate for all Google domains apparently created by the Turkish government.

The certificate, which was created by a subsidiary Certificate Authority issued to the transportation directorate of the city government of Ankara, could have been used to intercept SSL traffic as part of a “man in the middle” attack to spoof Google's encryption certificate and decrypt secure Web sessions to Google Plus and GMail. Hmmm....Anyone with half a brain can see this is about to become an Iranian style Turkey....Islamic totalitarian rule.