A brief list of things I cannot do on the Internet in Turkey

"Access to this site has been prevented by court order"

1. Watch videos of sneezing pandas and cats playing the piano. A Turkish court banned access to YouTube in March 2007.
2. Download Ubuntu Linux for my laptop. A Turkish court blockaded the Pirate Bay and other torrent trackers in September 2007.
3. Visit the crappy website I made in middle school. A Turkish court censored Geocities in February.
4. Read the writing of one of my favorite thinkers, Richard Dawkins. A Turkish court blocked his website last month.
5. Keep up with my friends Dan, Anne Marie, Ke, Angela, Janet, Will, Paul, Jess, and Kasia. A Turkish court banned their blogs today.^[1]

The Turkish government has censored over a thousand websites since May 2007, when the parliament passed Law No. 5651, which banned sites containing criminal content, violating Turkish law, or “infringing on the personal rights” of Turkish citizens. It also gave the state Telecommunications Board power to directly ban sites it deems obscene and offensive, and censor others with a judge’s approval.

Since the law went into effect, the board has received 24,598 ban proposals from the public, automatically censored 861 sites, and blocked 251 more by court order. Tayfun Acarer, president of the Telecommunications Board, explained the ban to daily newspaper Today’s Zaman earlier this month: “The duty of the state is to protect its citizens and warn them against harmful Internet content.”

Still looking to Europe as they drift further and further away.

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[Back] There might have been one more entry here, were it not for an amusing typo on the part of the censors. The website “imbd.com” has been blocked since last April, which prevents access to a parked linkfarm rather than the Internet Movie Database.