
Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it - plg
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/terrifying-how-a-single-line-of-computer-code-put-thousands-of-innocent-turks-in-jail-1.4495021
======
mbrumlow
This seems to be a growing trend, mostly in journalism; Blame technology.

Just recently there was a article going around about how Google's search
algorithm was at fault of keeping two sisters apart. And entire multi page
write up on how our lives are at the whims of computers and algorithms. Then
to be told that the one sister could not find the other because she changes
her name online to protect her identity.

Now we have this. A big pile of junk trying to set the reader up to think this
single line of code is responsible for the arrest of people. Again trying to
instill fear of technology and computers into the reader.

I worry this type of article will sway the public's view of technology for the
worst.

In the end it is people who are to blame for the problem described in this
article. And it all centers around lack of understanding how these
technologies work. Articled like this are just going to make that worse.
Further more the entire thing is bogus because the notion that one can't have
access to a given technology is entirely man made and has nothing to do with
any "lines of code".

~~~
danso
While the government policy is ultimately what causes people to be jailed, you
don’t think it’s important to focus on how technology uniquely exacerbates the
problem by making it scalable?

This is one of the few tech headlines that mention number of LOC that is
basically and technically accurate. It does seem that a single — and trivial —
line of code has led to the tragicomical punishment of thousands of innocent
citizens:

    
    
           <iframe src=http://bylock.net width=1 height=1>
    

Yes this government has been for many years unjustly suppressing its own
citizens — but the story here is how the targeted group used a very simple
hack to frustrate the government’s idiotic tactics. To just summarize this
story as “Turkish government wrongly jailing citizens” doesn’t do justice to
the absurd details and process involved.

~~~
makmanalp
> the targeted group used a very simple hack to frustrate the government’s
> idiotic tactics

It's just a tracking pixel - what gives me pause here is that the government
either doesn't know or doesn't care that "any IPs that every talked to our
list of bad IPs" is a really inaccurate way to conclude that people are
criminals - this should be obvious to anyone who claims knowledge in digital
forensics. So the story is that "technology" can be used to magically create
evidence against someone, as long as the court is ignorant about the quality
of the evidence. This is very scary.

The fact that this is even being presented as a "trap" seems sketchy to me,
and seems like an after the fact excuse. Of course we should catch bad people,
but not at the expense of due process.

~~~
bitL
> the government either doesn't know or doesn't care

Read on how governments use random arrests to instill fear and terror to
control its populace. Do you really want to give them the benefit of the doubt
just because you consider those thoughts to be abominations, whereas some high
ranked officials to be their way of doing things?

------
tim333
>nearly 150,000 Turks detained

>An estimated 30,000 are believed to be among the innocent swept up in this
particular campaign

I'd say an estimated 150,000 or so are innocent of anything that would be a
crime in any normal country. I note Turkey is not getting anywhere with
getting Gullen himself extradited because it would require showing evidence to
a US court that he'd done something beyond being a political opponent of
Erdogan.

~~~
Cyph0n
I'm not too familiar with the whole Gulen thing in general, but I have heard
that the Gulenists were an almost cult-like group that favored each other and
made sure only they got into the highest levels of power.

I'm sure Erdogan did blow the story out of proportion (it benefits him to do
so), but I also think that Gulen and his followers are not fault-free.

~~~
tim333
Sure yeah they were a "almost cult-like group that favored each other" but so
are freemasons, old Etonians and so on. It doesn't mean you should arrest all
those. (Well, maybe Dave and Boris... but not all of them).

------
reificator
The code in question had nothing to do with it. Once you're putting people in
jail for network activity on the same wifi network, it's way beyond pretending
you were just confused by an iframe.

------
segmondy
This is the creepiest thing I've ever read.

As a teen, I was absolutely sure the Internet would liberate us all never saw
it being a weapon of oppression as much as it has become. :-(

~~~
StavrosK
That's because most people don't care about privacy before it's too late.

"The government can monitor what sites you access!" "Oh, I have nothing to
hide." Then the government changes, and _the thing that was considered okay
before is now something that you need to hide_ , but you have no privacy
because you didn't see why you'd need it. Now you're in jail because of a
tracking pixel.

"I have nothing to hide" implies "yet". Do you think you will never have
anything to hide in the future as well? Most people don't think that far
ahead.

------
SCHiM
A dutch security company was asked to provide a technical review of the
'evidence'. Their conclusion: it sucks.

[https://www.fox-it.com/en/insights/blogs/blog/fox-debunks-
re...](https://www.fox-it.com/en/insights/blogs/blog/fox-debunks-report-
bylock-chat-application-led-arrest-75000-turkish-citizens/)

> Overall, Fox-IT concluded that the quality of the MİT report is very low,
> especially when it was weighed against the legal consequences of the
> conclusions which is the detention of 75,000 Turkish citizens.

------
gambiting
>>Beşikçi said it was due to a single line of code, which created a window
"one pixel high, one pixel wide" — essentially invisible to the human eye — to
Bylock.net. Hypothetically, people could be accused of accessing the site
without having knowingly viewed it.

And that's why I'm absolutely terrified of the British government requiring
that all ISPs store your browsing history for a year. You DON'T know what
addresses the websites that you are visiting are linking to. You go on a cat
forum where someone posted a picture - but unbeknownst to you, maybe the
picture is actually hosted on isis.com and now you're on a watchlist by the
government. It's bonkers, and while UK is not arresting people for downloading
apps, they certainly build themselves capability to do so if they ever wanted
to.

------
JDT
Essential reading for all those who say: "If you've got nothing to hide,
you've got nothing to fear".

------
empath75
I’m pretty sure that it was the Turkish government who put hundreds of
thousands of innocent Turks in jail. Installing chat software shouldn’t be a
crime.

~~~
21
> Installing chat software shouldn’t be a crime.

I don't think you understand how repressive regimes work.

And I bet that on HN you'll find a lot of support for jailing people who
install a let's say Nazi chat app on their phone.

~~~
acdha
> I bet that on HN you'll find a lot of support for jailing people who install
> a let's say Nazi chat app on their phone.

This is pure flame-bait and will not result in any positive contributions to
this conversation.

~~~
thrill
The magnitude of the down votes on his comment lend some weight to his
criticism.

~~~
danso
I downvoted not just because it was an empty rhetorical statement (wouldn't
upvotes also lend weight to his criticism?), but because such a claim should
be supported by links to examples. For example, I can find recent discussions
in which HN users have said companies like Cloudflare should feel obligated to
not serve sites like Daily Stormer -- and many users who think Cloudflare
should be neutral. Can't think of any significant group of users who have ever
argued for _jailing_ anyone involved in the situation, whether it be users or
the Daily Stormer itself:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15031922](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15031922)

------
lr4444lr
It's stories like this that makes Richard Stallman start to sound sensible.

~~~
tree_of_item
Stallman was always sensible; it's stories like this that make the people who
made fun of him look ridiculous.

------
integricho
I find it very frustrating to read about such oppressive regimes. It fills me
with anger, I cannot help myself, I just hate injustice.

~~~
lovelearning
Me too. I find it inexplicable that while our species has progressed so much
after 6000 years of civilization, one thing that doesn't seem to have changed
is the desire of large sections of people to be led by oppressive maniacs.
It's almost like many of us just love handing away our freedoms. Have
sociologists studied this phenomenon?

~~~
simonh
I think it’s that many of us just love handing away other people’s freedoms.
‘They’ are the ones we’re oppressing, ‘they’ deserve it. It’s seen as an easy
shortcut to oppress ‘them’.

Then you get the Syrian Christians who voted for Trump in droves because if
his anti-Muslim stance, but who’s communities are being gutted by deportations
because it turns out all the laws being used against Syrian Muslim immigrants
apply just as well to Syrian Christians. Oops.

~~~
ythn
How many people have been deported under Trump? I'm having trouble finding any
statistics on it

------
JepZ
> which created a window "one pixel high, one pixel wide" to Bylock.net

WTF, that is like condemning everybody of murder who owns a knife.

------
danso
Strange...the "bad" chat app is named Bylock, and downloading/installing it is
apparently evidence that you are part of an treasonous political group. But
the "single line" of code that the headline appears to refer to is code that
causes you to access Bylock.net, kind of like an email image ping:

> _Beşikçi said it was due to a single line of code, which created a window
> "one pixel high, one pixel wide" — essentially invisible to the human eye —
> to Bylock.net. Hypothetically, people could be accused of accessing the site
> without having knowingly viewed it._

This Bylock.net-accessing code was apparently packaged into other
applications, causing people who weren't using the actual secretive chat app
to be associated with the group:

> _Akif Demir, a self-described conservative nationalist, wished the worst on
> people accused of using Bylock and being associated with the Gülenists. That
> is, until authorities said he was one of them...In October 2016, when his
> wife was pregnant with their first child, Demir was called into his
> principal 's office. He wouldn't be allowed to work at the school — or
> anywhere else for that matter — anymore. He had been deemed a Bylock user._

The headline isn't inaccurate, but the main problem, or "bug", seems to be the
government's hyper-willingness to throw people in jail for having accessed,
even pinged, a forbidden server. And it wouldn't be surprising if this "bug"
were being exploited by the purported outlaw group behind Bylock to mock the
government's oppressive surveillance policies.

edit:

FWIW, previous coverage of "Bylock" focused on how the app itself was cracked
in 2015:

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/03/turkey-
co...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/03/turkey-coup-gulen-
movement-bylock-messaging-app)

> _Starting in May 2015, Turkey’s intelligence agency was able to identify
> close to 40,000 undercover Gülenist operatives, including 600 ranking
> military personnel, by mapping connections between ByLock users, the Turkish
> official said._

Visiting "bylock.net" currently yields an empty page:

$ curl -IL bylock.net

    
    
        HTTP/1.1 200 OK
        Content-Length: 0
        Content-Type: text/html
        Last-Modified: Fri, 03 Nov 2017 22:47:45 GMT
        Accept-Ranges: bytes
        ETag: "4c5039c4f554d31:0"
        Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
        X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
        Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2018 13:35:36 GMT
    
    

According to WHOIS, bylock.net was created on 2017-11-01. But that seems too
small of a timeframe for the trouble mentioned. Not sure how to use the Whois-
history lookups, but Internet Archive pinged the server in 2016:
[http://web.archive.org/web/*/bylock.net](http://web.archive.org/web/*/bylock.net)

edit 2: Googling around for "bylock.net", it appears an IT company (Fox-IT)
was asked by Turkish lawyers to analyze the government's methodology. They
published a report on Sept 2017 basically saying the government's
"argumentation is seriously flawed"

[https://foxitsecurity.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/bylock-
fox...](https://foxitsecurity.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/bylock-fox-it-
expert-witness-report-english.pdf)

~~~
soared
I was wondering if the pixel is just a relatively innocuous advertising
pixels. Advertisers/publishers place random pixels from vendors/etc on their
website all the time and rarely vet anything. I wouldn't be surprised is
bylock was advertising in those apps and asked each app to place a pixel to
track conversions/clicks/etc.

------
phyller
Thank God many of us live in countries where you are innocent until proven
guilty, and not the other way around.

~~~
simonh
_cough_ Civil Forfeiture _cough_.

That in a country with a written constitution guaranteeing property rights and
due process, and with the legal principle of innocence until proven guilty.

~~~
phyller
Speaking of civil forfeiture made me wonder whatever happened to all the
bitcoin owned by that guy that ran Silk Road. Government sold it, but with
some bad timing [http://fortune.com/2017/10/02/bitcoin-sale-silk-
road/](http://fortune.com/2017/10/02/bitcoin-sale-silk-road/)

------
benmmurphy
why did the gulenists use bylock when they could have used whatsapp or signal?
it looks like they are getting rounded up because their use of an obscure app
has become a strong signal that they are gulenists. though, signal might have
had similar problems. not sure how popular it is in turkey.

~~~
alpb
Basically poor call. They had someone code Bylock from scratch for them
because they thought it would be more secure.

------
uluyol
As bad as this is, it does seem seem to be the status quo when it comes to
forensic "science." I don't have any stats on hand, but it seems like more
people are more worried about closing/winning cases than making sure they are
not sending innocent people to jail.

~~~
21
Worse yet, many times the prosecutors find evidence that the accused is
innocent, but they will still fight a appeals just to save face that they
wrongly imprisoned someone.

------
intrasight
Vote with your dollars - don't visit Turkey or do business with Turkey.

------
cesarb
This reminds me of some Bittorrent trackers which added random IP addresses to
their peer list, so companies which accused people of downloading movies based
only on the list returned from the tracker would make false accusations:
[https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-tricks-anti-
pirates-...](https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-tricks-anti-pirates-with-
fake-peers-081020/)

------
qwerty456127
What is horrifying here is that people are actually forbidden to communicate
securely (ByLock is a secure messenger AFAIK). IMHO the right for privacy is
to be absolute, mo matter what. No kind of safety or anything is worth living
under constant surveillance and being unable to chat and be sure no 3rd party
can read that.

------
hi41
>Beşikçi said it was due to a single line of code, which created a window "one
pixel high, one pixel wide" — essentially invisible to the human eye — to
Bylock.net.

Kindly, could someone please explain what kind of hacking attack this is and
how it works? Did this window create a browser cookie for Bylock?

~~~
LeifCarrotson
It's not a "hacking attack", it's an element on a website:

    
    
        <iframe src=http://bylock.net width=1 height=1>
    

or

    
    
        <img src=“http://bylock.net” width=1 height=1>
    

This code, if it was a part of a page you browse, would cause your browser to
load the linked site, almost exactly like clicking on this link:
[http://bylock.net](http://bylock.net). This iframe was present in various
websites and apps.

The nefarious component of the attack is that the Turkish government surveils
all Internet traffic within its borders and thought that the website may have
helped some of its opponents commit what it believes to be treason. Its
surveillance data tells it all the sites your phone looks up, and it accused
people whose phones looked up that domain as being guilty of treason.

~~~
hi41
Thank you for your response. Why would the other apps put this line of code?
Are they hand-in-hand with Bylock?

~~~
jdormit
Check out soared's comment above. Basically, 1-pixel images like these are
used by companies to track when someone views their content. It's a very
common practice - most of your emails probably contain tracking pixels so that
whoever sent them can tell if you viewed the email. If they see a request on
their server for the URL they put in the tracking pixel, they know you've
opened the email.

In Bylock's case, it was most likely a tracking pixel embedded in
advertisements for Bylock that the other apps were displaying. The pixel
helped Bylock track how many people were viewing their ads.

~~~
hi41
Thank you, soared and jdormit!

------
meaydinli
Does anybody know of any article where somebody looked into the apk and the
code?

------
kkarhan
Another reason why tracking pixels are really bad... They also harm others
that never used the service or agreed to it's T&Cs...

------
vijaybritto
I don't see the citation of malicious single line of code in the article.
That's why I clicked it in the first place.

------
highdesertmuse
Assange keeps warning of AI manipulation by corporate states like Google and
Facebook. Perhaps we should listen.

------
codewithcheese
Can someone familiar with the situation explain how the employers know they
used Bylock before the police raid?

~~~
shultays
It says in the article

    
    
      She knew the arrest was coming. She'd already lost her job, because traces of the app known as Bylock were found on her phone.

~~~
codewithcheese
Yes but whats the process? Were traces of the app found by her employer? Are
employers searching employees phones?

~~~
gazorpazorpaway
As others have commented, it was just a matter of the ISP identifying all
clients doing DNS lookups or connecting to the Bylock domain.

The government have complete control of all ISPs and mobile network operators
in Turkey. They don't own them, but you can't give people Internet access
without joining the government censorship/logging program.

As she was a teacher she would be employed by the government, and they just
fire everyone employed in the government automatically when their names show
up on the blacklist. I suspected firing of family members and friends that are
connected to falsely accused person is done manually.

Also it doesn't really matter if the person is employed by the government or
not. No employer would dare to keep anyone that is blacklisted as the employer
would probably be accused themselves of helping a terrorist if they kept them.
Plus, obviously, most big corps in Turkey are run by Erdoğans friends and
family directly and indirectly.

------
Rjevski
FTFY: a shitty government is putting people in jail.

Even if we ignore the horrible government and bullshit reasons why they're
considering installing an encrypted chat app a "crime", they should at least
use proper evidence for the convictions, like a dump of the phone's memory
with the chat app installed on it, and not a simple DNS lookup/HTTP request to
the chat app's domain.

~~~
mseebach
The article's tacit acknowledgment of the legitimacy of arresting people for
having had the app installed at all is pretty off-colour as well.

~~~
Waterluvian
I'm not completely disagreeing with you, but I often see reporting attempt to
speak about something in the context from which it originates. An opinion
piece can come later about how unbelievable it is that they do this to begin
with.

~~~
candiodari
Many things about Turkey are incredulous. Turkey used to be a bastion of
secularism, in fact the only bastion of secularism among muslims (and it still
is, at least in terms of mindshare).

And yet turkey now has a president ... that obviously gained the better part
of his power through a false-flag attack (the "coup d'etat" that "somehow"
managed to fail to capture even a single government official or building).

And you just can't believe how bad it gets ... They're arresting everyone who
supposedly had anything (right down to IP addresses) to do with, oh, lots of
things. Gulenists, Kurds, the Press, LGBT, ...

And then people in the US reply "but that's thousands, no, tens of thousands
of people".

Yes. Yes it is [1].

And you just can't believe how bad this guy is:

(about the Armenian genocide) "a muslim cannot commit genocide"

(about women) "Our religion [Islam] has defined a position for women [in
society]: motherhood. You cannot explain this to feminists because they don't
accept the concept of motherhood."

He, and his family, personally organised oil sales on behalf of islamic state,
including to the US

"We will rip out the roots of the Twitter service"

He orchestrated physical attacks against newspapers.

The worst of it is, truth be told he has flip-flopped on just about every
issue, including the ones mentioned right above here, and doesn't seem all
that coherent at all. But unscrupulous is a word that just falls short : the
guy is accused to have organised, in some cases systematic, physical attacks
against Turks in Germany, the US and elsewhere for being perceived as being
against him.

I can't imagine how threatened Turks must feel.

[1] [http://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/14/europe/turkey-failed-
coup-...](http://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/14/europe/turkey-failed-coup-arrests-
detained/index.html)

~~~
smnscu
I love how Americans immediately forgot the time when Erdogan's goons beat the
shit out of their own people with the tacit and satisfied approval of the
orange shitstain.

[http://dailycaller.com/2017/09/22/erdogans-goons-beat-up-
som...](http://dailycaller.com/2017/09/22/erdogans-goons-beat-up-some-more-
americans/)

~~~
dang
Please do not post political flamebait to Hacker News. From the site
guidelines: "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a
topic gets more divisive."

When the topic itself is already politicized, this of course is a matter of
degree. But however we draw the line, a comment like yours here is well on the
wrong side of it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
sizzle
This is a despicable use of technology. I hope the innocent have their names
cleared.

------
avictim
Hello everyone. I am one of the victims of these Bylock cases and the tracking
code or advertising links etc.

I had been trialled with 15 years heavy jail time and it was definite for me
to get sentenced at least 6 years 3 months if this particular iframe code was
not found in an old phone’s temporary files.

Actually after the iframe code was found by one of the official Computer
Forensic expert who has been employed by one of the official Bylock cases
public prosecutor, he and the public prosecutor had kept it secret from the
public and tried to burrow it. Until some hero got screenshot of this official
finding and leak it to the one of the bravest lawyer in Turkey whose name is
Ali Aktaş, we had no concrete proof of tracking codes or advertising links.

I know you cannot believe that 100,000 people are getting sentenced solely
based on reverse tracking of CGNAT logs (IP access request logs kept by ISPs).
Yes you are right. I myself also couldn’t imagine such thing would happen in
my beautiful country, hell even in banana republics I couldn’t imagine. But
one morning I wake up and anti-terror forces break into my house to arrest me
and seize all of my digital devices until an unknown time. It was truly
shocking experience and I had no idea how could this happen to me while I have
never used that stupid, amateur and lame communication android App Bylock. Yes
Bylock was very insecure APP which allowed passwords as 0, did not hash (not
even MD5 but there are some claims that the very late versions of the APP were
hashing user passwords and put some password restrictions such as min 8
characters) user passwords, kept all of the private keys in database so the
administrator could read all of the messages, did not use any cloud server,
cloud service or implemented proxy system to prevent IP tracking and so on.
All of these are written in the Turkish Intelligence (MIT) official technical
Bylock report.

I was lucky that I was not at home that time so I had opportunity research and
prepare defence. After few days research, I found out that the our brightest
brains in the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK)
decided to scan back all of the CGNAT logs and determine whoever had made any
access request to the one of the IP address which are determined to belong
Bylock server and put all of the citizens on Bylock users list who have access
to these IPs. That is how ridiculously I was put on that list.

But even the preparation of list cries out loud the erroneous procedure that
is being followed. First of all, our Information and Communication
Technologies Authority (BTK) determines CGNAT start date after 5 months of the
Bylock app release (release date is April 2014 but CGNAT scan start date is
August 2014). So during this period of time whoever used Bylock APP or made
access to IPs of Bylock server are not put on the list. Moreover, they found
out that total 250,000 individuals have made at least 1 IP access request to
the Bylock server IPs. Since 250,000 is too many to put in jail, they come up
with this “fantastic” rule. They filter the list and remove citizens from the
list whoever made only 1 day or 2 days access to the IPs. So they claim to the
media that they have removed people who actually did not use the software.
With this “so scientific” approach, the list of Bylock users reduces to
110,000 individuals from 250,000 individuals. So who has access to the IPs 1
or 2 days life continue and who has access 3 days like me, life’s turns in to
hell. Also according to the Europol, CGNAT system has up to 80% error rate
when tracking individuals. It wouldn’t be a push to assume that Turkish ISPs
also have very crappy CGNAT logging system. Proper CGNAT logging system with
proper equipment and safety brings too much cost to the ISPs with 0 economic
income.

So how are the prosecutions are made in Bylock cases? It is very simple. If
you are on the list, you are 100% guilty and you get to sentenced jail time no
matter what from the guiltiness of being one of the member of Gulenist armed
terrorist organization. No one has been granted acquittal so far whose name is
on the list. Yes solely based on CGNAT logs with 3 lines you get to sentenced.
Only those names get erased from the list or determined that someone else
actually used that GSM phone number or used that wifi are granted to
acquittal. There is no way that you can prove you didn’t use Bylock at all or
you didn’t use it for crime purposes.

The list even contains so many citizens who could not technically register
Bylock software. Bylock was an application similar to WhatsApp. It did
periodic polling to the server to get new messages or voice calls. Tuncay
Beşikçi determined it to be approximately every 15 seconds from some of the
real user CGNAT logs. Also it is determined to be at least 6 IP requests are
necessary to complete registration to the application. While these are
technical facts, there are about 20,000 people on the list whose total CGNAT
logs are lower than 20. Can you imagine the bullshitness that is happening?
There is no way to use such software with total 20 IP access logs but these
people who is still left on the list is getting at least 6 years 3-month jail
time. My CGNAT was lower than 10 and there was only maximum 2 IP access
request in the 5 minutes period (we can assume someone would complete
registration in 5 minutes). So the only evidence that is used against me was
actually technically 100% proving that I did not register the Bylock APP ever!
But what happened in the court? The judge didn’t give acquittal to me until my
name was removed from the list. There are also many other victims who are
already condemned to 6 years jail time with less than 10 lines of CGNAT logs
and with only evidence as CGNAT logs.

So how did Bylock become this kind of tool of mass arrests? With total and
constant poisoning of media. According to the media and so for the Court of
Cassation in Turkey, Bylock was following kind of software 1: It had reference
and activation feature from the canter of Terrorist organization from
Pennsylvania. 2: No one could make IP access requests to the Bylock server
except those who had successfully registered to the application and whose
registration was approved by the central command center of Terrorist
organization It makes sense to arrest from CGNAT logs if the software was like
this right? But both pre-acceptance are 100% wrong. Bylock was freely
available software on Google Market and anyone who wanted it could download it
from Google Market until 3 April 2016. Check out AppBrain Bylock page for more
information. Also it didn’t have any kind of reference or activation system
for registration or usage. Its usage system was very similar to Skype or
Discord. What kind of system it was is properly documented in technical report
of Turkish Intelligence (MIT). Moreover, no one can prevent who makes IP
access request to any IP. Even your access to the particular IP is blocked by
that IP’s owner, you request would fail but still it would be logged in CGNAT
and CGNAT doesn’t log whether you have successfully connected to the IP, or
duration of the connection or how many bytes you have transferred. At least
all of these are not stored in Turkish ISPs CGNAT logs. In a Turkish ISP’s
CGNAT there are only these data. Access request start date, access request
destination IP, access request destination port, access request private port
and private IP.

Also since you do not know the atmosphere in Turkey, you cannot correctly
evaluate this article. I am sure that Tuncay Beşikçi also knows this was
simply tracking code or advertising links etc. But if you tell that Bylock was
advertised or used tracking codes like other Apps etc, no one would believe
you and hell they would blame you and perhaps arrest you. So announcing that
all these tracking codes advertising links were a clever plot of FETÖ
(gulenist terrorist organization) was only way to rescue some of the people
who had never used Bylock app.

This is the summary of the Bylock cases which still goes on. I am guessing
that at least 60,000 people were put in jail at least 1 day due to Bylock
since the beginning. There are still about 40,000 on the list waiting to be
ambushed by Terror Forces until they learn they are on the Bylock list. I
believe many of them even don’t know they are on the list since they didn’t
use Bylock. Moreover, even though I have had full acquittal, all of my digital
devices are still held seized.

Finally, I am very shocked that Bylock cases has almost 0 coverage in
developed countries. They are totally blind to these cases.

------
reallymental
Everybody hears the echos of this behavior throughout history. I wonder if
Erdogan thinks he'll be the one who escapes the universal fate of tyrants.

As Turkey becomes increasingly alienated from the EU, Putin looks to gain
another monster.

~~~
tim333
I'm not sure what the universal fate of tyrants is supposed to be. A lot of
them seem to hang in there fairly comfortably till they die of old age.

~~~
ryandrake
Minus a couple of outliers, I think history has taught us that the fate of
tyrants and oppressors is a long, healthy, and comfortable life of luxury and
immense wealth. As a bonus, that fate often includes admiration and support
from at least 50.1% of the oppressed population.

------
kyberias
What a horrible country.

