A recent legislative decree making all Internet data available to Turkish police without any court decision made the telecommunications sector concerned about a possible emergence of a new wiretapping. Internet data will be available to the police without need for court decision. The police was already given the authority to access identity information of Internet users. Internet providers were charged to give related information to the police.
NO NEED FOR A COURT DECISION
Even without the need to wait for a court decision, police will be able to contain, monitor and save the data carried by data traffic among internet sources and internet link addresses only by the consent of the Office of Cyber Crimes in Security General Directorate.
According to the representatives from the telecommunications sector, a regulation should be made about the recent legislative decree in order to answer the theoretical and technical questionings about this authority given to the police, daily Habertürk reported. They indicated that this kind of an authority could cause an emergence of new wiretapping problems.
Emergency rule enables the government to bypass parliament in enacting new laws and to limit or suspend rights and freedoms when deemed necessary. It was imposed after the attempted coup and then extended for a second three-month period in October. Turkey's parliament on January 4, approved extending the government's emergency powers until April 20.
TÜRK TELECOM ALREADY MONITORS USERS VIA ISRAEL-RELATED COMPANY
It has been recently revealed, in an article in Forbes, that Türk Telekom requested not just a feed of subscribers’ usernames and passwords for unencrypted websites, but also their IP addresses, what sites they’d visited and when.
According to the article by Thomas Fox-Brewster, Türk Telecom ordered, via a Turkish company named Sekom, a software from the California based IT company Procera to pursue fraudsters. However, that software permits monitoring all the web traffic of the Turkish Internet users.
One of the engineers of the company, Kriss Andsten, had resigned saying “I do not wish to spend the rest of my life with the regret of having been a part of (Presindent Recep Tayyip) Erdoğan’s insanity, so I’m out.”
