Living in the land of oxymorons
Living in Turkey is like living in wonderland, but instead of being mesmerized, we are being perplexed. Only in Turkey can you learn that the government that established a Cyber Security Council to defend its secrets gave personal information about its citizens to private firms.
The newly formed council is going to work under the Transport, Maritime Affairs and Communications Ministry. The council’s main aim is to establish rules and regulations at government offices to avoid cyber security disasters. As a general strategy, the council intends to use “Made in Turkey” products as much as possible. Minister Binali Yıldırım is heading the council himself.
According to Erdem Güneş’s piece in the Hürriyet Daily News, the first order of business was to assign hackers to defend Turkey’s websites. According to Güneş, “A team of 150 cyber security experts has begun working to protect official Turkish websites and information infrastructure, and an agreement is to be signed between Turkey’s Transportation and Communication Ministry and the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey [TÜBİTAK] in the forthcoming weeks, officials from these institutions said.”
These developments clearly show that the government knows the importance of keeping information safe. They are all very positive steps, in my opinion. Turkey had being lagging behind in the field of cyber security, especially in light of the famous virus Stuxnet, which crippled Iran’s nuclear plants.
If these actions were taken in any other country, you would feel safer as you would know that since the sole purpose of having a government is about feeling more secure, the government would also try its best to protect the private information belonging to its citizens. Alas, this is Turkey.
It has been discovered that the government gave information about 17 million students to GSM companies. How can you explain that? I can’t. If anyone in the Cyber Security Council can do so, I would be more than happy to hear it.
This should have been enough for someone in the ranks of ministry to resign or at least apologize. Naturally, it won’t happen. We won’t even be hearing a statement saying that they are sorry.
Both the prime minister and the communications minister love to emphasis the year 2023, even 2071, in their speeches. They both say that we are going to be a great country. Looking at the recent developments, I see that we can have a great government, all powerful and very effective, around those years, but we won’t have a great country. We won’t have a great country until someone in this government understands that a great country is all about individuals and respecting their rights.
