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Deutsch: Sag niemals "knusprig" im türkischen Internet!

The Turkish Telecommunication Communication Presidency (TIB) has reached an unprecedented level of censorship by recently banning 138 words and terms from the Internet, many of which being simple, every-day words.

On 28 April 2011, TIB sent a notification to all service providers and hosting companies in Turkey with the list of banned words and terms that included words like "animal", "sister-in-law", "crispy", "confession", "breath", "hot", "adult" or "local", placing thus sites of supermarkets, restaurants, food home delivery, football supporters' clubs and others in difficulty.

"Providing a list and urging companies to take action to ban sites that contain the words and threatening to punish them if they don't has no legal grounds," stated Yaman Akdeniz, a cyber-rights activist and a law professor at Istanbul Bilgi University, in a phone interview for the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review.

Akdeniz required information and documents from TIB on several issues in relation to the list, arguing that such documents were of public interest according to Article 1 of Law No. 4982 that stipulates "the right to information according to the principles of equality, impartiality and openness that are the necessities of a democratic and transparent government".

Based on Article 5 of the law, "the hosting company is not responsible for controlling the content of the websites it provides domains to or researching/exploring on whether there is any illegal activity or not. They are responsible for removing illegal content when they are informed and there is the technical possibility of doing so", said the expert.

Following the strong reaction against TIB's action, the authority said the list had been sent to hosting firms for informatory purposes. However, the notification letter said the authority would punish companies for not following its directions to ban domains containing "forbidden words," without specifying what kind of punishment it meant.

Devrim Demirel, founder and chief executive officer of BerilTech, said he had received TIB's letter via an email, which, in his opinion, was neither ethical nor secure. "Requests with such important implications should be sent officially to each company's office address, with the respective seal and signatures," said Demirel who also believes that "banning access to websites is in itself a censoring service."

Moreover, Demirel warned about the negative technical implications and expressed his opinion that "the TIB personnel who worked on the issues related to banning access are not endowed with the necessary technical knowledge and skills."

The financial implications should be considered as well. Banning access to certain domains that include the black-listed terms might lead to financial losses. "There is no guarantee in the existing related legislation that I will not be asked to compensate the company in such a case," said Demirel. Pushing things even further, the list does not include only Turkish terms but also English words because of their meanings in Turkish, such as "pic," short for picture, which is banned because it means "bastard" in Turkish or the past tense of the verb "get" because "got" means "butt" in Turkish.

138 Words Banned from the Internet (29.04.2011)
http://www.bianet.org/english/freedom-of-expression/129626-138-words-b...

TIB's 'forbidden words list' inconsistent with law, say Turkish web providers (29.04.2011)
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=tibs-forbidden-words-list-inc...

EDRi-gram: Turkey adds popular blogging platform to blocking list (9.03.2011)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number9.5/turkey-blocks-blogger