This is an example of the national interest and the public interest being divergent.
There are many others.
Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan appears to have ordered Twitter be blocked in the nation after the service was used to post information alleging government corruption. Turkish users trying to load Twitter.com were taken to a page with a statement from the local telecoms regulator TIB, according to Reuters. The statement …
Not much. This, however, might be useful to a _very_ limited audience:
Blocking DNS might be more effective than you think. Wouldn't an ISP be able to sniff out DNS requests and make sure to block/redirect those not bound for their specific resolver IPs? A serious control-freak would then go on to suspect any endpoint using a lot of encrypted connections (such as perhaps using a VPN tunnel) as trying to get around that.
I worked in Turkey about six or seven years ago. Mostly in the Adana area, but went right up to the North and the border with Georgia, too. Did Erzerum and all those places. Lovely, friendly hospitable people. Beautiful, raw scenery, great weather.
Shame their government seems to have gone completely fucking bonkers.
At the moment, yeah. They're working on more insidious methods though, so you'll probably want to bring alone a VPN, just in case.
This whole struggle makes me sad though. You don't need censorship to defend your convictions, or your political leadership. Crackpot militant nationalists and intolerant fanatical believers notwithstanding, it's a plan that nobody wants, everybody hates, and that will fail long-term. Turkey is indeed a lovely place full of lovely people and you should visit just as soon as you can walk down the street without being gassed or stampeded over (full disclosure: my relatives are nearly all Turks :) ). Just have a bumbag for your wallet and don't forget to register your IMEI and get a prepaid SIM card with a good data allowance that would put the operators in Blighty to shame.
Obviously not much, if a mere 160 characters of free speech is enough to threaten it.
Or maybe he means that they have the amazing power to... tweak a few dns settings. Wow! Powerful enough to press some keys on a keyboard. How impressive.
> tweak a few dns settings
How primitive. I'm sure John Tittingdale, Clare "Bear" Shandy and the other pompous windbags of the UK's Depratment of Censorship, Moralising and Suppression will be happy to take an all-expenses-paid jolly to assist the Turkish PM with more modern and effective methods of keeping the voters from seeing things that would only upset and corrupt them. It's for their own good and all in the interests of pan-European censorship harmonisation after all.