HACKERS ANNOUNCE ‘OPERATION TURKEY’
By Ayla Albayrak

Emerging Europe
June 7, 2011, 3:32 PM CET.

The online anarchist group Anonymous has threatened to attack Turkish
agencies that impose censorship, siding with Turkish Internet users
against a new filtering system that the government plans to roll out
this summer.

“Turkish government, expect us,” the group said in a video posted on
YouTube Monday.

Anonymous swamps its targets with so-called denial-of-service attacks
that disrupt and disable websites. Most recently, the group claimed
responsibility for disrupting the sites of MasterCard, Visa and
PayPal, after they stopped servicing WikiLeaks under pressure from
the U.S. government.

Reuters A demonstrator protests Internet censorship in Istanbul last
month.Turkey’s Internet regulator, the Information and Communication
Technologies Authority, or BTK, issued a directive earlier this year
in which it said that as of Aug. 22, Turkish Internet users would
need to sign up for one of four filters it would create: children,
family, domestic and standard.

The BTK said the filters aimed to protect families from inappropriate
material such as pornography, but the proposal triggered a significant
backlash among a public already wary of government censorship of the
Net. Since a new law was passed in 2007, the BTK has blocked thousands
of websites – including for over two years, YouTube. Porn sites are
already blocked for all users.

The BTK since clarified that sign-up for the filters would be
voluntary and that the “standard package” would be no different from
Web access today. However, no new draft regulation has been published
and Internet freedom advocates are skeptical. After the BTK statement,
tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest on May 15.

Anonymous is skeptical, too.

“(The filtering system) will make it possible to keep records of all
the people’s Internet activity. Though it remains opaque why and how
the system will be put in place, it is clear that the government is
taking censorship to the next level,” Anonymous said in an announcement
headed “Operation Turkey” its website. It accused the government of
ignoring popular protests against the filters.

Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party is expected to win
national elections on Sunday, but it has come under growing criticism
for suppressing media freedoms and censoring the Internet. The
government has dismissed such criticism as politically motivated.

A spokeswoman for the BTK said Tuesday she was unaware of the threat
and had never heard of Anonymous. She said there were currently no
plans to redraft the directive to make clear that the filters would
be voluntary, and said the standard option would not involve a filter.

“There is no censorship of the Internet in Turkey,” the spokeswoman
said, adding that websites were closed only because they were illegal
under Turkish law.

Turkish Internet users on Twitter greeted the announcement by Anonymous
enthusiastically Tuesday. “Now we know we are not alone,” one person
wrote in Turkish, echoing numerous similar Tweets.