“Workshop on Act 5651: Interior and Exterior Site Access Bans” event, which was organized by the collaboration of turk-internet.com and Ankara Bar Association and the contributions of Turk Telekom, was held in Abant on 18-19 June 2008 with the participation of several judges, prosecutors, advocates, officials from Ministry of Law, Ministry of Transport, General Police Directorship, Military judges and Telecommunication Contact Directorship. Also Informatics Associations of Turkey (IAT), Informatics Security Association and Associate Prof. Mustafa Akgül have participated in the event as the non-governmental organizations.
Government officials related with the subject has widely participated in the event, however same attention was not paid by the citizens and the non-governmental organizations who had protested the access bans to Youtube and other sites with creating e-mail lists and sending mails to forum and similar electronic environments [2]. They are either choosing to let the others come up with a solution or behaving like fake protesters seem easier to them.
Indeed, our society is commonly acting like these protesters. In spite of creating solutions or searching for answers, we generally just complain by e-mails and send these to everyone we know. Therefore we become the wise guy. But the problems are remaining unsolved.
Whatever, let’s talk about the Workshop event.
Recently there have been some one-sided presentations regarding the 5651 Interior and Exterior Site Access Bans during some panels and conferences. However, as we could not reach a solution or discuss the issue inside out with these one sided presentations and audience questions, we decided to organize a Workshop format this time.
After the representations, we have carried out a search séance and found out 70 topics that were considered as the problems and solution proposals at the first day. A small consultation group examined the problems and organized 5 workshop groups.
These workshop groups were titled as Technical, Investigation, Act 5651 and Telecommunication Contact Directorship, Awareness Raising and Content, and Authorization-Specialization groups.
Participants have volunteered to join to groups and groups tried to create some solution proposals by discussing the topics related with their titles.
Some interesting topics were:[1]
- Is Act 5651 impeding the free speech right? Is it related to the impeding the crime duty of Government?
- Is the national battle against international crimes adequate? Should the cyber crime convention be signed?
- Some information is private. International firms are giving that private information to their governmental bodies but not giving to Turkish governmental bodies. They claim that they can not unleash their client information during an investigation process. So which information is private and which is not?
- Since the banned sites by the juridical decisions can not be accessed, it cannot be determined if they removed the related content or not.
- The basic rights problem caused by the ex officio decisions made according to Article 87 of Telecommunication Contact Directorship.
- How will Warning-Banning system work is still not organized. (With SMS, e-mail, notary notification or what?)
- How can address bans –not site bans- be solved?
As a matter of fact, two days were not enough time to determine, discuss and get through these 70 topic. A final study note reaching 9 pages was created, but studies on preparing a conclusion report from this note is still ongoing.
My personnel opinion is that government agents are willing to work on this issue. Attendance was 100 % from the beginning to the end of the event. Moreover we understood that government agencies are also questioning themselves at some points. And the most important benefit of the event was that ever body agreed on these issues must be discussed.
I can define this Workshop, which has attracted a lot of press attention as the Youtube news, as a starting point. I think this Workshop should be organized once again to work together on the issues which could not be considered or could not be solved at the first meeting. Just protesting the censors cannot take us anywhere. We should try to understand the reasons and the contexts of the site ban decisions and create solutions in accordance with the culture of our country.
I am going to continue to write my expressions about the Workshop on Monday.
[1] We will release all the 70 topics determined during the Workshop on Tuesday.
[2] Some officials from the public relations firm and law office working with Youtube has also attended the Workshop. But they insisted that they were not representing Youtube at the Workshop and came for themselves. By the way, as you can see from various press news, the Judge and the prosecutors who decided and claimed the latest access ban to Youtube have also attended the Workshop.
Kaynak : 