Turkey Will Store Its Citizens' Browsing History for Two Years—To Protect Their Privacy

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s long-standing plan to sweep away dissent reached a new milestone yesterday, when the Parliament passed a so-called “internet law,” and jauntily nudged Turkish democracy along the path to a police state.

The new law, approved in a legislature dominated by Erdoğan’s moderate Islamist AK Party, will allow the government-appointed telecom authority to block any URL without waiting for a court ruling, if it decides that said website violated someone’s privacy.

In an ironic turn, the same law will also tear apart that very privacy it claims to keep safe, since it will force internet service providers to record and store data of Turkish web users’ surfing history for two years, and to hand them to the authorities on demand.

Erdoğan has run the country for more than a decade now, but in the last few months in particular his relationship with the web—and with democracy—has become increasingly tense. In May 2013, a small sit-in opposing the replacement of a park in Istanbul with a shopping mall managed to wield social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to structure itself into a nationwide protest against the premier’s growing authoritarianism. In response, Erdoğan ordered a violent crackdown and memorably labeled social media “the worst menace to society.”

Then, last January, Turkey implemented a ban on the video sharing platform Vimeo , where most of the videos about last summer’s protests—and about how Turkish police ruthlessly crushed them—had been uploaded. (A similar ban had already been imposed on Youtube between 2007 and 2010, apparently because it contained videos “insulting Turkishness,” namely some clips by Greek video-makers mocking Ataturk, the modern founder of Turkey).

The measure approved yesterday is the latest chapter in Erdoğan’s battle against the disgruntled web surfers who protested in Istanbul last year. The authorities will be able to access every troublemaker’s web history and personal details, which, in a country that held about 40 journalists in jail by a count last December, and where people have been arrested just for tweeting “misleading and libelous information,” is undeniably bad news.

But it’s not only that. The law has been rushed trough the Parliament while Erdogan’s cabinet is being shaken by a colossal corruption scandal, involving four of its ministers, top party figures, and even Erdogan’s son, Bilal. Some leaks and incriminating videos have appeared on the web, and it’s likely more of them will come out.

Yaman Akdeniz, a law professor at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, suggested to the Financial Times that the “privacy” that Erdoğan’s party is fencing off with this law is probably that of other party members involved in the plot. Now, if they were exposed on the web, the government would have the authority to immediately block the website where the allegations appeared.