“Twitter, mwitter kökünü kazıyacağız,” (We’ll eradicate Twitter) said Recep Tayyip Ergdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey, on Thursday. A few hours later, any user attempting to access the social media website, Twitter, from inside Turkey was redirected to another page, which listed three court rulings as a reason for the shutdown. Within a few hours, without so much as a warning, Turkey’s five million Twitter users lost all web contact with their data.
However, the first bans implemented by the government were weak. Initially only Domain Name System (DNS — the Internet service that converts a name of a website into its numerical Internet address) redirections were deployed. That means, if someone typed “twitter.com” in his or her browser, it would not yield the Twitter website. Then, as users circumvented this by using public DNS servers (most famously supplied by Google), the government banned Twitter’s Internet Protocol address. The point is the government will eradicate Twitter if it wants to.
The root question that needs to be answered is this: How will you feel if all your personal information, your pictures, your location information, IP addresses, et cetera, were all in the hands of an entity you cannot communicate with? Twitter’s privacy policy gives the user enough privileges to have control over its data. But for that, the user should be able to reach Twitter.
Every time you do a Google search, your search query goes over secured encrypted connections to reach the Google server. Google made this encryption its default choice the moment this technology was standardized. A few days back, Google updated its servers residing in its humongous data centers to transfer encrypted data. This means if anyone tries to sniff this data while Google transfers it across continents, it will look like gibberish. This was Google’s way of pulling up its defenses against surveillance.
The war against surveillance is real, and it has started. The more one learns about how to save, back-up, encrypt, decentralize, data the better off one is in the face of surveillance and Internet control.
Every app you install on a smartphone invariably collects some amount of data in order to provide you a better service. That data might be stored locally on your phone or it may be communicated with an external server. A disclosure of such data collection is a user’s prerogative and an application’s responsibility.
Reading within thin fine prints of the privacy policy has never been more important than it is now. Understanding to what extent your data will be held or sold will help you decide the extent of personal information to share whether to share locations or not.
Facebook uses anonymized data for advertisements. WhatsApp, on the other hand, had a “no ads” motto. Telegram, a WhatsApp competitor, which gained five million users during WhatsApp’s downtime, provides a fully encrypted connection to its servers.
Even as Twitter’s IP addresses were blocked, users resorted to Tower Onion Routing. TOR is a network security technology that garbles the IP addresses to mask the original sources and destinations. Access to Twitter via TOR is possible inside Turkey.
This only proves security technologies are a resource. Understanding and deploying them is a matter of efficient utilization.
Send your thoughts to Naman at technician-viewpoint@ncsu.edu.
