With the national emergency declaration signed by U.S. President Donald Trump on 16 May, 2019, and the decision that followed to assign telecommunication firms, especially those that are actively working in the field of 5G, for instance Huawei, the status of “posing national security risks,” the first concrete step has been taken on the technology front of the long expected U.S.-china economic war.

The only U.S. companies among the top 10 firms that work on 5G technology, which has been described as sinister technology by Trump, and have patents and standards in this field are, Qualcomm and Intel. Chinese firms, especially Huawei, have a very significant presence in this field.

But why is possessing 5G so important?

Technologies such as drones, UAVs and UCAVs are military technologies that require an internet connection. Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are among the most talked-about projects today and will continue to be so in the near future. States that control the flow of data stemming from these new technologies will have the most important power of the new world that they will help build. On this subject, China is far ahead of the U.S. The greatest proof of this is the recent technological developments made by Chinese firms.

Recently, technology firms such as Huawei, ZTE, Xiaomi, and Oppo have not only shaken the first-place status of Apple – the largest manufacturer and seller of smartphones in the U.S. – but have also made their market advantage in East Asia exceedingly felt in Europe and the U.S. By surpassing Apple in the second quarter of 2018, Huawei now shares the status of being the world’s largest smartphone selling firm along with Samsung.

States that control the flow of data stemming from these new technologies will have the most important power of the new world that they will help build. On this subject, China is far ahead of the U.S. The greatest proof of this is the recent technological developments made by Chinese firms.

In light of this information, it can be stated that the U.S. has fallen behind in the first round of the technology war.

As a result of pressure imposed by Trump, who considers Huawei to be a threat, U.S. firms have taken a series of rapid actions against Huawei. Google has announced that its open source operating system Android will no longer be available for Huawei devices and that these devices will no longer have access to Google services such as Gmail, Google Play and YouTube.

Intel has stopped its motherboard sales. Foundations that control the administration of technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and SD Cards have also announced that they have ended their agreements with Huawei.

The IEEE society, which is the architect of many scientific standards, has announced that Huawei will no longer have access to its scientific studies as a company. This is occurring despite the fact that Huawei is one of the biggest contributors to the society. Following this, many IEEE members resigned from their positions, openly stating that they are against the involvement of politics in science.

Following the aforementioned developments, Huawei announced as an action plan that it will publish its own operating system, which is in the phase of development, in 2010. It is expected that China will retaliate by announcing a large black list that includes companies such as Apple and Google. Considering that Apple sources 30% of its profit from China, and that Google and Facebook are banned from these Chinese markets despite having been working to gain access to China for years, it will not be wrong to claim that Trump has scored a goal against his own team.

Considering that Apple sources 30% of its profit from China, and that Google and Facebook are banned from these Chinese markets despite having been working to gain access to China for years, it will not be wrong to claim that Trump has scored a goal against his own team.

The U.S. will have a hard time developing 5G technologies. On the other hand, China has incredible capabilities on the subject of telecommunication and the development of new technological products. Chinese firms are rapidly increasing their presence in European markets and are enjoying a high demand. More, Apple’s largest manufacturing plant Foxconn is in China. Due to these reasons, it is not hard to see that China possesses a significant advantage against the U.S. at this stage.

It was presumed that democratic regimes would replace authoritarian ones with the dissemination of access to information technologies. It was also strongly believed that participatory democracy will replace representative democracy with the aim of solving problems that emerged with the obstruction of democratic channels in democratic regimes. So, it was thought that authoritarian regimes would dissolve and the participation in decision-making processes in democratic regimes would be strengthened. However, the structural changes introduced by new media technologies have been misused and have eventually turned into threats against democracy. Internet and social media are among the biggest threats against states and individuals since they have billions of users around the world and millions in many countries.

Lately, many elections have been interfered through social media, cyber-attacks have been organized against various countries and bureaucratic institutions, and mis-informative contents have been formed through fake news. Some networks whose social media platforms are not legal in many countries find the opportunity to propagate far-right, racist or Islamophobic sentiments. The instances of stirring social chaos in countries through fake social media accounts and serving contents that manipulate the public against governments, elections or other groups were observed in the U.S. presidential election, Brexit referendum, and the elections in France and Germany. Moreover, system attacks have been organized in critical situations through various software and algorithms.

The structural changes introduced by new media technologies have been misused and have eventually turned into threats against democracy. 

It is noteworthy that global technology companies such as Facebook and Twitter abstain from engaging in cooperation on the subjects related to the sovereignty and security of states and eases interventions in countries through social networks. In the case of Turkey, the country has confronted a slew of problems with several networks, including YouTube, Facebook and Wikipedia. One of the leading problems in Turkey’s case is the removal of misinforming contents on subjects related to Turkey’s national security and prestige and imposition of access block unless such contents are removed.

History of access block in Turkey

The debates on blocking access kicked off in Turkey in 2007, when Law No 5651 was enacted and YouTube was blocked across the nation for the first time due to some videos containing insults against Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In March 2007, the upload of several videos that contained insults against Atatürk on YouTube spurred some heated debates on the issue. The case was submitted to the Turkish judiciary, and the court ruled to block access to YouTube at the end of the judicial proceedings, as a result of which the site was blocked in Turkey for 2.5 years. The videos were finally removed when a copyright agency bought the broadcasting rights of the videos, and thus the 2.5 years of no access ended. In following periods, access block decisions regarding YouTube and other social networks led to new discussions, while many criticisms stressing that such instances had a negative impact on Turkey’s press freedom index were issued.

The causes of the subsequent access block decisions include insults to Atatürk and other statesmen, violations on the subjects concerning national security, and broadcasts of images that violated the right to privacy. To give a recent example, following the killing of prosecutor Mehmet Selim Kiraz by a terror attack organized at the Istanbul Courthouse on 31 March, 2015, access to Twitter and Facebook was blocked in order to prevent the circulation of images that might support terror. The fact that global social networks do not pay attention to the procedures implemented by government bodies for the elimination of terror demonstrates that it is very easy to spread terror propaganda on social media. In April this year, the racist perpetrator who organized a terror attack against Muslims in New Zealand broadcasted the attack live on Facebook, which shockingly manifested to the world public how far social networks can be used in terror activities.

The latest example of access block: Wikipedia

The requirement of ensuring public security, the protection of personal rights and preventing the circulation of baseless claims attempting to smear a country’s dignity in the international arena are among the primary reasons for blocking access. The latest example in this regard is the blocking of access to Wikipedia in Turkey. Some depict Turkey as a country where freedoms are restricted due to this case. Such an impression has been created by those who are not informed about all the aspects of the issue.

Wikipedia has not taken any step to address the legal issue although the court made it clear that Turkey will lift the ban if the contents in question are removed.

Blocking access to Wikipedia as of 2017 is related to the publication of some baseless contents arguing that Turkey supports the Syrian civil war and is on the same front with DAESH. As Turkey’s appeal for the removal of those contents was refused, the court ruled to block access to the website. The reasoned decision of the court reads that the entire website was blocked for the prevention of propagating terror, abetting violence and crimes, threatening public order and national security, and for the protection of people’s right to life and safety of life and property.

The access block to the website has been ongoing as from 2017. The main cause of the current situation is the fact that Wikipedia has not taken any step to address the issue although the court made it clear that Turkey will lift the ban if the contents in question are removed.

The formal and informal aspects of fighting social networks  

It has been observed that the extremely optimistic approaches to virtual platforms that were prevalent during the early years of these technologies with the hopes of expanding freedoms evolved into fears and concerns. Along with unauthorized uses of personal data, unmonitored virtual platforms that create serious problems in terms of fomenting radicalization and terror are likely to bring even graver problems in the future.

EU countries in particular are implementing legislative regulations that involve imposing sanctions in cases of terror and radicalization, election manipulations and fake news as they pose problems in terms of sovereignty. To give an example, Germany has enacted a law that rules removing fake news, hate speech and illegal contents from social media platforms.

According to the law, social media sites that do not remove explicitly illegal content will be fined up to 50 million euros. According to the law, the site will have a 24-hour time limit to remove the illegal material and penal sanctions will be imposed on the material that are not removed within 24 hours. The law proposal presented in France for preventing the spread of misinformation is accepted as the first initiative officially banning fake contents in Western Europe. The law draft that aims to prevent the spread of fabricated news via the internet (Lutte Contre la Manipulation de L’information) was adopted by the French Parliament. The law states that the spread of fabricated news might be submitted to jurisdiction and various sanctions such as deleting the news, suspending the account of the user and banning access to the website might be employed.

EU officials underline that the legislations in this field remains insufficient and strict measures must be taken in this regard, which portrays the gravity of the situation. As can be seen in the table below, several states and supra-state bodies implement sanctions on social networks and take deterrent measures when they consider their sovereignty or security under threat.

The internet is like an iceberg. Although people can only see one face, it has a larger second face under the sea. The face that people see is referred to as the Common Web, Surface Web, and Bergie Web. Common Web is for the daily usage of Internet. Surface Web is the search engine. Bergie Web is the website you can access through traditional ways. However, this is not the end of the Internet.

What is Deep Web?

Deep Web is information, web pages, files, videos, pictures, and more, which cannot be accessed from search engines. First of all, what are search engines? How do they work? Why can’t some data be accessed by them?

Search engines are online services that allow you to search for websites, images, and other files inside their database. Some examples are Google, Bing, Naver, Yaani, and Yahoo.

Google’s indexing system begins with a process called “crawling.” A web crawler is a program that scans a page to give you links. Once it finds the links, it opens them and scans pages they lead to. During the whole process, they store every page in their database, which you search through when you use a search engine.

There is a problem with this technique, and the problem is that there are some web pages that are not linked to others. Therefore, they cannot be found via web crawlers – which means that they are not accessible through search engines. These pages are what is referred to as the Deep Web. Only 10% of the network that we call the “Internet” is visible to the general public. Hidden below the virtual waterline lies a tangled and secretive network known as the Deep Web. Unindexed by search engines, and accessible only with special browsers such as “The Onion Router (Tor),” the Deep Web is made up of peer-to-peer connections that allow users to share files directly (and secretly).

It is in no way as simple as it seems, since the Deep Web, unlike the Surface Web, doesn’t only consist of pages and files, but of databases as well. These databases are virtual places in a way, where every piece of information of the Internet is stored. The Deep Web includes confidential information such as passwords, access keys, government archives, and much more. The Deep Web has no boundaries or restrictions and does not limit illegal activities.

There are some popular and rather disturbing sites on the Dark Web, which are onion sites, meaning that they are inside the TOR network. Dark Web has a lot of illegal websites. Technically, the Deep Web is harder to access than the Dark Web due to the fact that it requires hacking skills in order to leak databases, while the Dark Web only requires special software that can be easily installed on a personal computer. So, who are the managers of the Deep Web & Dark Web sites? They are the hacktivists or the hackers.

What is a hacktivist?

A hacktivist is a combination of Hack and Activist, and hacktivism is an act of hacking a website or computer network in an effort to convey a social or political message. The person that carries out the act of hacktivism is known as “Hacktivist.” These people are different from conventional hackers. Hackers aim to access confidential information and private data, whereas the hacktivists hack websites in order to share their political ideas and to find more people who share their mentality. Acts of hacktivism may include website defacement, denial-of-service attacks (DDoS), redirects, website parodies, information theft, virtual sabotage, and virtual sit-ins.

A few examples of hacktivists

Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. He was a co-founder of the social news site Reddit. He believed that the information is power. So, it should be free, but like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. He wrote for the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto.

In 2011, Swartz was arrested connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet, and setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT.

Over the next year and a half, the government added multiple counts to the original charges, eventually offering him a plea deal. However, asserting his innocence, Swartz refused this. Swartz was left feeling more and more trapped, fearful of the federal charges and their implications.

By January 2013, Swartz was in depression, and his demeanor was making those around him nervous. On the night of January 11, fears of his friends were realized when they found Swartz dead in an apartment in Brooklyn.

Anonymous

Anonymous is a hacktivist group, which was established in 2003. Their symbol is a smiling man mask. Their slogan is “We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not Forgive. We do not Forget. Expect Us.” They have members from all around the world who do not know each other. For this reason, the number of members is unknown. The group’s reactions to political events usually show up in their attacks on the websites of state organizations. They do not have fixed political goals. Their aim is the “Freedom of Internet.” For this reason, Wikileaks documents propaganda is made on the streets by Anonymous. They usually use DDoS weapons in their attacks. The group protested Israel’s Gaza operations in 2012 and leaked the Israeli government’s websites. They called this cyber-attack “OpIsrael.”

Ayyildiz Team

Turkey also has a hacktivist group, which is called Ayyildiz. The group aims to prevent cyber-attacks, and does not hesitate to provide information about themselves as their actions are not illegal. The Ayyildiz team previously hacked the Pentagon’s website and shut the system down for 8 hours. When the attack is compared with the DDoS attack, the Communication Presidency (TIB) made an attack on the counter-attack by blocking it.

*Written by Kevser Taslik.