Thank you for taking the time to study the massively unfortunate case of Turkey and arrests based on encryption in your article.
As a Turkish citizen I would like to add two things:
First of all, it is widely discussed that the failed coup attempt was destined to fail as it was “orchestrated by the government” to diminish any opposition and gain illegal power by destructing democracy. This is a conspiracy theory spelled by many criticizers and they seem to propose three evidences for the theory:
- Gulen Movement in it’s 50 years of history, never has been involved in any violent act or any crime reported to be related to them. They have no institution to promote violence. Their institutions are all related to education and interfaith dialogue.
- Turkish government, years before the coup attempt, started cracking down Gulen Movement related institutions, taking down Turkey’s most selling newspaper, Zaman, shutting down tens of media outlets related to movement and fired thousands of people claimed to be linked to the movement. More interestingly, at the day of coup, without any formal investigation, Erdogan announced that the coup was being done by the movement and the arrests started immediately after the coup was announced to fail. Many argue that arrests are being made using the already prepared lists of thousands of people as the government practically couldn’t be investigating and preparing such lists in a few short days. Another claim that seem to support the idea is the fact that main beneficiary of failed coup attempt was Erdogan himself with his party. Erdogan started shutting down the Gulen related institutions after four of his ministers were announced to be linked to a corrupting with further claimed evidence that Erdogan was also part of the corruption.
- After the failed coup, Turkish government announced to form a committee for investigating the coup. Fethullah Gulen was interview about allegations to cause the coup and Mr. Gulen invited Erdogan to form an international committee of secret agencies, investigators and UN to get involved in the coup findings and to conclude the claims, Erdogan did not respond this invitation and the government-formed committee resolved without properly announcing the primary actors and whether there actors were from the Gulen movement and the evidence related to the claimed link. As a result, even after 1 year of investigation, Erdogan and his party could not convince United States to exile Mr. Gulen and turn it to hands of Erdogan. As an interesting side note, 3 major intelligence services, US, UK and Germany announced that there is no clear evidence linking Gulen movement to the coup attempt. This is another factor used by the conspiracy theorists to claim the coup attempt as being orchestrated by Erdogan.
Secondly, use of Bylock by no means can be claimed to cause a coup attempt as those involved in the coup were in the order of hundreds and those that are claimed to part of a secret organization are in the order of hundreds of thousands. This fact aside, government agencies consistently used Bylock as a seemingly effective evidence of crime. This was due to that fact that in and of itself, encryption lead to many questions. Encryption, when not equated with privacy, but equated with crime, can lead to many suspicion. And this is exactly what Turkish government did: equate Bylock with crime and arrest thousands of people. More interestingly, those arrests were not made silently, all made very publicly and announced in twenty some pro-Erdogan media outlets. Major reason for such a move was to fabricate the suspicion of a non-existent crime organization in order to prove Erdogan’s claims, at least in the minds of Turkish people, as controlling the minds sometimes equates to easy win.
Another interesting aspect related to Bylock is the suspicious claims done by the Erdogan’s government that all Bylock uses were known in detail. This is a very bold claim considering Bylock in itself is an encryption service. A service cannot be an encryption service, if a government is able to decrypt everything about it. This, when further investigated and linked with the owner of the app not publicly announcing an explanation, can be concluded that either government found a way to decrypt the service logs, or the government, with tons of money, purchased the service from the app owner to use it against the movement. And if the app was, as claimed, used by the movement in big magnitude, then the government or some source promoted the app as ‘trustworthy’ in order to gain people’s trust and get insight into the movement. Interestingly, there hasn’t been any public declaration as to how the app logs related to coup. Erdogan and his media, if found anything, would very publicly declare each and every conversation to each and every detainee. Since the authorities stayed very silent all the while still using Bylock as an evidence, can lead to two things: either government is not the new owner of the app, or the government did not find any real evidence in linking Gulen and Hizmet movement to the coup.
I would like to thank you again for investigating the case of Bylock and it’s massive impact on privacy and security of Turkish people.
