> sudo insmod travel_journal.ko
[root password for peter]: *************
I'm writing this prologue from my mom's house in Phillips, Maine, and, night owl that I am, I should have gone to bed a few hours ago. I've got a travel itinerary that spans one day and 5,000 miles. I'm flying from Boston to Istanbul and the Summer Term at Boğaziçi University, where I'll take two courses in Operating Systems and International Trade. Like every college kid, I'm self-absorbed enough to keep a travel journal and upload it to the interwebz for all to see, but what do I hope to get out of this trip?
It would be cliché to say that I want to experience a different culture or broaden my horizons or blah blah Bob Lablaw Law Blog. I didn't come to Turkey for any of those reasons anyway. Those of you who know me well enough know that I'm trying to combine my interests in politics and computer science and somehow pursue a career related to internet censorship in the CIS. While Turkey was never a Soviet republic, it shares a common Turkic heritage with all but three of the former Soviet countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and it does censor parts of the internet. Youtube has been blocked since 2008 because a couple kids in Greece decided to make some videos poking fun at Atatürk. Also, just last year the Information Technologies and Communication Board (BTK) announced that it would develop a national search engine that, unlike other search engines, would not be “deaf to [Turkic and Muslim] country's sensitivities”. Furthermore, the same article describes a national email system, the “Anaposta”, where, according to the chair of the BTK, “Every child will have an e-mail address written on his/her identity card since birth. So, will have a mobile network that can be used thanks to id number match and foreign networks [sic], such as Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail, will not be used anymore”.(1) With the understanding that I'm not here to preach the gospel of free speech, can I learn anything more about how Turkey censors and monitors the internet?
More serious goals aside, I might try to find one of the infamous “remakesploitation” movies from the late Yeşilçam era. Brad “The Cinema Snob” Jones did a video review of Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam, aka Turkish Star Wars, a few months ago and, as I recall, said on a live Ustream that he was thinking of doing a “Turkish month” of said reviews. Being a huge Cinema Snob fan, I emailed him to see if there are any Turkish films he's been trying to find. Expect some updates on how this works out.
And now for some rest...
Footnotes:
(1) I didn't see or hear anything related to these projects in my seven weeks in Turkey. In any case, I think it helps to mention these projects to help illustrate what I knew about Turkey and internet censorship before I came to Istanbul.
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