Turkey’s growing Internet filtering debate could stand a reboot to sync up with the world. A critical link is missing between the two discussions.
Most of the world, particularly the United States, is on alert to the threat of “cyber terrorism.” Just days ago, the U.S. electronic spy authority known as the National Security Agency began a “voluntary” program of filtering the data run through Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, to snare lethal viruses aimed at military infrastructure.
“We hope the… cyber pilot can be the beginning of something bigger,” U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn told a Paris security conference last week. “It could serve as a model that can be transported to other critical infrastructure sectors…” Privacy groups and civil libertarians are wary, fearing “back door” eavesdropping and expansion of filtering into private and personal lives.
In Turkey, however, we’ve skipped virtually any discussion of cyber terror, save a documentary on TV’s Channel 8 and some discussion in defense policy circles. Instead, we’ve gone straight to government filtering mandates amid cries to protect family values. The result has set the government against web denizens and Internet companies. Executives, including the chief of Google, are flocking to Ankara while the skirmish plays out with hack attacks on government websites and two major street protests so far in Istanbul and Adana.
My sympathies are with the wary in Turkey and abroad. But the absence here of concern over cyber terror may yet prove the debate we should have had.
Most international discussion turns on the mysterious and devastating “Stuxnet” virus that, vectored via those little UBS memory sticks we all use, apparently set back Iran’s nuclear program last year by disabling research centrifuges. The curious should also Google “Farewell Dossier,” a Cold War-era coup by the Americans against a trans-Siberia gas pipeline (Nabucco was to come along later as a kinder means to prevent Russian domination of European energy markets). The Soviets were stealing American pipeline software. Rather than bust them, the Americans dusted the software with a virus. “The Trojan Horse” triggered a pipeline explosion in the Siberian wilderness equivalent to a fourth the firepower of Hiroshima back in 1982.
The technology behind all of this is dizzyingly complex. But it boils down to something we hardly ever think of; little boxes the size of a cigarette pack called programmable logic controllers, or PLCs, in techspeak. PLCs are the hidden slave labor of what we often think of as “low tech” industry. They run the processes in virtually every textile factory. They start and stop the metro running between Taksim and Levent. They open and shut the sluice gates on every dam in Turkey, not to mention the valves on the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline.
Like the cough of a passenger on an airplane, a lab-made virus can spread from a memory stick or web file throughout industrial systems, essentially taking over and paralyzing the PLCs that quietly run our lives. This technology runs Turkey. The threat to it is real.
Turkey loves conspiracy scenarios. Somehow, this is one we’ve missed.
via The conspiracy theory that Turkey forgot – Hurriyet Daily News.
Leave a Reply