Much ado about Ataturk
Turkey is getting a dressing-down today from free press organization Reporters Without Borders, as the country's blockage of YouTube enters year two.
Google's video-sharing site has been banned a number of times in Turkey since early 2007, in most cases because of videos deemed insulting to the country's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who died over eight decades ago.
Turkey's fourth and most recent YouTube banning was hammered down on 5 May 2008.
The Register:
Does Turkey's government imagine that Ataturk set up a secular democracy so that the government could suppress free speech over a stupid, childish insult traded between football fans?
As usual, the net filter was proposed on the back of moral panic thus:
Turkish law lets prosecutors seek a court-ordered shutdown of any website deemed liable to incite suicide, paedophilia, drug usage, obscenity, prostitution, or attacking the memory of the republic's founding father.
Critics note the law opens the door to many abuses — such as letting a couple soccer fans effectively shut down an entire country's access to the world's most popular video-sharing website.
Sound familiar? Drop the "republic's founding father" and this statement could have come straight from Senator Conroy's mouth.
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