Turkey: YouTube ban adds fuel to the sharing file

A week after access to Twitter was blocked, Turkey has now blocked access to YouTube over a security leak. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs made the demand after an audio recording from a top-level security meeting was uploaded on the website earlier in the day. The meeting is purported to be about Turkey’s possible military actions in Syria.

The Ministry told the Telecommunication and Communication Authority (TİB) the recordings posed “first degree of national security threat."

YouTube, for its part, appears to have blocked access to the two videos from Turkish IPs.

The “security leak” in question is a new kind of recording. It’s not a phone conversation; rather, a recorder seems to be have been placed in the room, at a security meeting attended by the Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, his undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioğlu, head of Turkish intelligence Hakan Fidan, and Deputy Chief of Staff Yaşar Güler. It is not about alleged government corruption, the prime minister’s villa or back-and-forth joking between a minister and a journalist, as the previous leaks were.

The meeting, as Al Jazeera Turk confirmed, took place on March 13 at the Foreign Ministry — many weeks after the first illegally obtained wiretap was released. The prime minister has spoken in fury about “the organized crime network,” which he accuses the Gulen Movement of being, that is tapping his phones and revealing conversations that were never meant to be heard by the public. It is astonishing that a high-level security meeting could still have been tapped and leaked at that point, as it is revealing about the huge security gaps at the top of the Turkish political establishment.

The situation proved an appropriate time for the TİB to use its newly acquired authority to block websites without a court order.

Last week after individual citizens complained to courts with issues like slander and identity theft, the courts ruled to ask Twitter to remove that content, which Twitter ignored. The TİB then said it “had no choice” but to the block the entire website. Many said that the actual content the government sought to have removed was the illegally tapped phone conversations of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, his family and key ministers. Erdoğan refers to the recordings in his media appearances and election rallies, but he does not address their content. He frames the situation as an ambush against him and his government and calls the recordings “blackmail.”

With this most recent and arguably most alarming leak the Foreign Ministry was the first official body to respond, confirming the recording to be authentic but the content tampered with. Speaking in his hometown, Konya, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said “it is obvious the perpetrators are cooperating with the Syrian regime and [the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant]. That meeting was about discussing measures in the face of terrorist acts and security threats from ISIL against our soldiers in Syria.”

Davutoğlu said “the wiretapping of phones and rooms of state officials — most of them in very critical positions — is an open act of war against the Turkish republic and people” and that “any state anywhere in the world has the right to take such a measure” in the face of such a leak.

But many ask what blocking access to YouTube achieves. The videos have already been copied, uploaded to other video sharing websites, transcribed, translated, tweeted and shared on Facebook thousands of times. Blocking access only adds fuel to the sharing fire. Although the TİB’s controversial authority to block websites allows for URL-based blocking, which in this case would mean blocking the URLs of the two videos, not the entire website, the system that will allow all ISPs to block access simultaneously is not expected to be in place before May. As it happens, most people did not even notice YouTube was blocked at first, because they have VPNs (virtual private networks) set up to get around the Twitter block.

This is not the first time YouTube has been blocked in Turkey. For more than three years from 2007 to 2010, the website was unaccessible through regular means because someone had posted a video smearing Atatürk, the founder of the republic. Both Abdullah Gül and Erdoğan openly defied that block, saying they were going on the website and everyone else should too. Laws protecting Atatürk have ceased to be Turkey’s biggest embarrassment under the current AKP government, which now has much bigger problems to deal with.