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://dailycaller.com/2017/09/22/erdogans-goons-beat-up-som...
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.
And he recently got the Turkish constitution changed in his favor, openly citing Adolf Hitler's Germany as an example of an effective presidential government.
I recommend doing some reading to understand the situation in Turkey
> ... is a CBC News correspondent based in Istanbul.
One problem at a time.
IMHO, a better one:
Your friend (used loosely in this case) is doing criminal acts. Would you tell him to stop doing criminal acts while you treat him?
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Sometimes journalist take this "ALLWAYS two sides to every story" and "each side is equal" crap too far.
See the success of Wolf's book on Trump.
1. Turkey's government is brutally suppressing opposition
2. The means Turkey is using to identify its opposition is flawed.
You don't have to talk 1. to talk 2.
Case in point is that you can legally talk 2. in Turkey but if you talk 1. you get fucked. If you try to fight 2. you help a bunch of people if you try to fight both 1. and 2. at the same time the chance of you solving 2. is diminished because Turkey's government will be suspicious that it is propaganda against them because you included 1.
Thus: one problem at a time.
Also remember that your attitude leads to shit like Iraq. Its perfectly "legitimate" for a government to be autocratic. Russia is a government, Iran is a government, China is a government. They wield the power, is that not legitimate? You seem to be suggesting that only "legitimate" governments are democracies and that sort of attitude leads us back to Iraq where we go on a liberation war and heroically give people a democracy that they didn't fight for themselves. Reality is messy and complicated and "nice" ideas like making everyone have the good government are well intentioned but naive.
I will celebrate the day Turkey gets its democracy back but it has to do that itself and its not the problem of anyone who isn't Turkish as their "help" may well hinder.
Turkey's situation, as described by the OP, is so interesting because it describes the scenario you envision -- in which a government really did go for a sweeping "take no prisoners" approach, in the dumbest way possible using Internet access data.
But FBI sweeps of child porn suspects seem to be very targeted -- e.g. tracing IPs of people who participate in known illegal sites or honeypots: https://www.wired.com/2014/08/operation-torpedo/
Having visited bad sites/URLs/IPs/searches may be used as circumstantial evidence. But Turkey seems to have used the pinging of an IP as the primary way of both finding suspects and the primary evidence for jailing people. I can't think of many similar situations like that in U.S. law. In fact, with child porn, you see courts making the distinction between seeing child porn (i.e. inadverdently) and intentionally seeking it out:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/blogs/sideshow/viewing-child-porn...
https://www.olemiss.edu/depts/ncjrl/pdf/cp%20But%20Your%20Ho...
Still, it's too bad they couldn't put a lampshade on it - "we at the CBC are not in a position to comment on the merits and flaws of this policy". But even that could draw ire, I guess.
The problem here was that the Turkish authorities were "a bit too liberal" on what constitute of using the App in question, that is, they mistakenly assumed that making HTTP request to the App's server is a good indicator of being a user.
Unfortunately this is the way that the Turkish government operates since many years, they first lock you in and you fight back for years until you prove your innocence. What's even worse is that you can't really get good compensation for it, you just suck it up and move on.
We have huge issues from generations of politics over substance. It's only obvious that things are getting worse when you look at statistics because nobody has unbiased understanding of the entire system.
To call it 'worst' is a value judgment and not an objective statement, any more than saying the abortion or divorce rate is better or worse.
I think it’s reasonable to say that the highest incarceration rate is the worst rate, regardless of the reasons. Whether it’s due to an excessively harsh system, high rates of damaging criminality, whatever it is, they’re all bad whatever they are. Surely the ideal number of wrongly convicted people, and the ideal number of legitimately convicted people, and the ideal number of criminals that have escaped justice are all as low as possible?
Similarly for abortion and divorce. Even people who believe abortion should be an option would prefer there to be no need for it. Every one of them is a tragedy no matter which side of the debate you’re on. Same for Divorce.
In the case of the number of legitimately convicted people, you seem to think zero is the ideal. In a sense, I think we can probably all agree. But what we really want is the number of people committing crimes to be zero. If it is not zero, then surely the ideal number of people legitimately convicted is equal to the number of people who have committed crimes. If it is not, then we are saying we want people who have committed crimes to walk free. So in this sense, "worst" is, in fact, a judgment.
But "everyone" agreeing doesn't even mean something isn't a judgment. There is no objective "worst". And in the case of divorce, you're wrong. Divorce has been hugely beneficial for women's equality, and my own personal divorce was definitely not a tragedy.
Why does that matter here?
The very laws which a large % of them broke (drug laws) are not based on objective statements.
Common misconception, but that's not actually the case - best numbers show about 15% of prisoners are in with drug charges.
[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/releasing-drug-offender...
That's incorrect. The source says ~16% had, as their most serious offence, a drug charge.
So in reality more than 16% are serving time for drug crimes. It seems a bit disingenuous that the statistic is posed like that, especially when considering the cyclical nature of incarceration,"3 strikes" laws, and the cascading violence caused by drug laws.
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.