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While the government policy is ultimately what causes people to be jailed, you don’t think it’s important to focus on how technology uniquely exacerbates the problem by making it scalable?

This is one of the few tech headlines that mention number of LOC that is basically and technically accurate. It does seem that a single — and trivial — line of code has led to the tragicomical punishment of thousands of innocent citizens:

       <iframe src=http://bylock.net width=1 height=1>

Yes this government has been for many years unjustly suppressing its own citizens — but the story here is how the targeted group used a very simple hack to frustrate the government’s idiotic tactics. To just summarize this story as “Turkish government wrongly jailing citizens” doesn’t do justice to the absurd details and process involved.

In the same vein they could just be jailing actual (or hypothetical) Bylock users' friends and friends of friends (and relatives and relatives of relatives).

This is both similarly idiotic, doesn't depends on technology at all and have been done through history.

Sure -- and in fact, that's what the government appeared to successfully do in 2015-16, initially [0]. The OP's revelation is that at some point, the government's dragnet became ridiculously loose. So whether you believe the government is justified in cracking down on the purported treasonous group, it appears they've become so overzealous and incompetent that they (the gov't) have been easily tricked by their targets.

It's important to note how trivial this "hack". Maybe some shortsighted people will simply think this is a lesson of government incompetence. But other people -- including some gov't supporters quoted in the article -- may realize that this is a symptom of a government that has gone too far.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/03/turkey-co...

> But other people -- including some gov't supporters quoted in the article -- may realize that this is a symptom of a government that has gone too far.

On the fifth day of imprisonment, our native companion, Eagle Sharp-Eyed, noticed that our jail lacks fourth wall.

I mean, searching the country for (a hundred thousand) "gulenists" suggests not only going too far, but actual schizophrenia. Going so far that you end up returning from the opposite side.

Who didn't get the memo at this point?

> the targeted group used a very simple hack to frustrate the government’s idiotic tactics

It's just a tracking pixel - what gives me pause here is that the government either doesn't know or doesn't care that "any IPs that every talked to our list of bad IPs" is a really inaccurate way to conclude that people are criminals - this should be obvious to anyone who claims knowledge in digital forensics. So the story is that "technology" can be used to magically create evidence against someone, as long as the court is ignorant about the quality of the evidence. This is very scary.

The fact that this is even being presented as a "trap" seems sketchy to me, and seems like an after the fact excuse. Of course we should catch bad people, but not at the expense of due process.

This all seems surprisingly similar to the argument about punishing "bots" based on technological features that are not known to be 100% accurate. Less trivial to those affected, to be sure, but similar enough that I wonder if the same thought processes and dynamics are at work on both sides.

> the government either doesn't know or doesn't care

Read on how governments use random arrests to instill fear and terror to control its populace. Do you really want to give them the benefit of the doubt just because you consider those thoughts to be abominations, whereas some high ranked officials to be their way of doing things?

Interesting. I personally find that journalism all too often neglects the negative aspects of technologies, being far to eager to play up companies' own hype about the revolutionary impact of their technology or software without taking a second to examine the risks or shortcomings. See: social networking, cryptocurrency, autonomous vehicles, online advertising, hyperloop, online education, tablets/laptops/PCs in schools...

The fact is that powerful technologies are usually quite easy to misuse intentionally or not. Often/usually just in a wasteful way--the tech isn't ready, or it's a waste of time and money, or it gets people to take ridiculous gambles and lose all their money. But sometimes the misuse is actually extremely dangerous. Huge unintended consequences are possible, and we are kidding ourselves to ignore it or to say "Don't blame the technology, only people can misuse technology." Well, people are imperfect, and it's irresponsible to pretend that the massively powerful tools we now have do not come with massive risks as well.

> In the end it is people who are to blame

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." -- Frank Herbert, 1965

Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JokBoS7FQAA

> Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops - but not on our lies. The Machine proceeds - but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die."

E.M.Forster, The Machine Stops. 1909

This post is 100% reflection. The press is merely trying to give all of us working in the CS fields the ethical observations we've all but ignored over the past decade, as this profession has grown.

I’d argue it should be more pointed towards the government using flimsy evidence to arrest people. It dances around that point without taking a hard stance that what the Turkish government is doing is essentially a human rights violation. It’s not the single line of code putting people in jail, it’s the government. While that line of code is significant, it’s not the only thing.

I'll agree with you there that the Turkish Government deserves the majority of the blame. Even if the application wasn't as compromised, the Erdogan government would just go back to conventional means to prosecute, be it parallel construction, making up evidence, and so forth.

>> In the end it is people who are to blame for the problem described in this article. And it all centers around lack of understanding how these technologies work.

Well, of course it's people. Technology doesn't use itself! It's always people who use it to screw each other over.

In this case it's not even ignorance that's the first in line to take the blame. Güllenists seemingly created this app specifically to hide themselves in a crowed of people who were not their partisans. They knew very well the kind of treatment that those people could expect, but they went ahead anyway.

So, fine, it's not "the technology"- it's the people who used the technology. The technology itself is not innocent though: a tracking pixel is specifically made to be unobtrusive. Technology that allows this sort of unobtrusive surveillance is not neutral, nor is it an accident if someone "uses" it for nefarious purposes.

Not to reply to your point, but I found an interesting discussion when reading up on your use of the idiom "for the worst": https://writingexplained.org/worse-or-worst-difference

Well, 'to sway (something) for the worst' is an idiom I've never heard, I get what they mean but I don't think it's grammatical, 'for the worse' would sound slightly better but still not good.

Agreed. But not surprised. Journalists have been doing this for decades with other things like guns.

Growing trend?

I might get flack for it- but we did get by without this technology level before- and we might do so again.

Also im against this view of the people beeing some puppets easily swayed, they might ralley behind people yelling for a downfall - because technology actually changed theire lives for the worse en mass?

"Guns don't kill people, people do"

"Code doesn't cause people to be arrested, people do"

True in both cases, but also true in both cases that guns/code are used as enablers of the evil deeds.

Firearms are designed to kill or disable another party. Software has no use case besides what a developer gives it. That's a pretty significant difference in design!

There are plenty of firearms whose only purpose is to put tiny holes in paper at varying distances.

Do you mean non-gunpowder based "firearms"? My understanding was something even as small as a .22 is significantly deadly

Ballistics matter more than caliber

Assuming center of mass you've really gotta pepper someone with .22lr before they're as good as dead. .223 (aka 5.56 NATO) is still .22 but a lot more effective at putting holes in people.

At sufficient range a blast of 12ga birdshot won't even kill an old lawyer. At short range the question would be what lawyer?

You are making a huge confusion if you thing .223 is still .22; the mass of the bullet is bigger, the energy is way bigger (disclosure: I am a shooting range instructor when I am not an IT guy)

But it's still a .22 caliber though. That caliber by itself isn't a very good indicator of ballistics is exactly the point.

Are you going to tell me that .30-06 isn't a "30 cal" because it's way hotter than .30 carbine?

I think parent means that not all guns were designed explicitly for killing. Target shooting is popular enough that there are guns designed explicitly for it.

22LR is deadly to small rodents or a cat, not allowed for hunting of anything larger (and I am not suggesting anyone hunts cats, it is just to give an example of size).

OMG I can't believe you're downvoted for saying that, more than the person you were responding to! Americans you are nuts. Last political-related comment I ever make on here, if I can help it. Sick of seeing and getting downvotes for stating the bleeding obvious.

You can generalize from firearms and target shooting up to something that applies to software and surveillance dragnets. Sure, you might just want to target your ads more accurately but the same software can be turned right around and (ab)used as a surveillance dragnet.

Selling better ads and tracking consumers is just target shooting with some abstraction. You can still ruin lives with the technology if it's used irresponsibly. Any similarity or comparison with the firearms industry is not popular in the software industry for reasons having to do with the beliefs most people in the software industry subscribe to.

The parent comment was denying that software can be used for nefarious purposes because software only does what the developer builds it to do. That is probably why he was down-voted.

Resorting to calling an entire country names, because their beliefs differ from yours in a way you don't understand is "nuts". Not commenting, in that case, may indeed be prudent.

You could think of a gun as just a malicious piece of mechanical engineering. You could think of the software in the article as a malicious piece of software engineering.

My point still stands.

They can be both misused.

This a fruit-to-oranges comparison. You can't compare "Software" to "Guns" they're not that same level. You could maybe compare software to metallurgy.

You can make specific programs that have evil intent (virus, worms, ransomware) or are dangerous but have positive reasons to exist. You can also form metal into guns and knives too.