Don’t even try to understand – Hurriyet Daily News and Economic Review: “Don’t even try to understand
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Wednesday, March 9, 2011
ERSU ABLAK
In his speech this week, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan claimed that he doesn’t understand why foreigners are all talking about the lack of freedom of speech in Turkey.
Justice and Development Party, or AKP, Vice President Hüseyin Çelik said Turkey was years ahead in its legislation and many times more free in terms of press freedom than the United States. All this happens in a time when journalists are being arrested and jailed for various reasons but mainly after being accused of being a member of Ergenekon, an illegal organization allegedly working to organize a military coup against the AKP. I am sure that you have read the detailed news about these journalist arrests and what they were asked about by authorities when they were taken into custody.
The indescribable nature of Ergenekon lets prosecutors blame everyone. If you know someone who is already arrested, there is a good chance that they will come for you, too, one morning. According to the six degrees theory, anyone can be linked to the Ergenoken case in the world, even the pope himself. This is exactly why many journalists began protesting the morning arrests.
However, I understand that this vagueness will go on and will spread to the government’s Internet regulations. After Aug. 22 we will have a totally different system. The government is so kind and father-like that it wants us to be fully protected from any kind of harm that the Internet can bring about. This is why they have decided to provide Internet services to us filtered from the source. It is too much hassle to ban websites one by one, therefore they will have bundles and lists. According to the current plans there will be four types of bundles available.
These will be called Standart Profile (Standart Profil), Children’s Profile (Çocuk Profili), Family Profile (Aile Profili) and Domestic Internet Profile (Yurtiçi İnternet Profili). All of these profiles will be censored to various degrees so that we will be protected just as our profile needs to be, because our government knows best.
Each profile will have two lists assigned; A black one and a white one. In the black list there will be websites that will be banned and in the white one there will be websites that are allowed to be surfed.
The government says that they ban websites at the source so that our children will be fully protected. There will be no room for the human error of parents. Banning websites will be fully automatic. However, the people who will be in charge of these practices and the standardization of establishing these lists are very vague. The government will be able to censor any website at will. You won’t even notice it.
I would also kindly like to warn any foreigners against deigning to think that the new system to be introduced on Aug. 22 violates freedoms. And please don’t voice your concerns. Our prime minister can get angry at you. In fact, don’t even try to understand it because our government is way ahead of you.”