ANKARA (Middle East Eye) – Privacy campaigners have expressed outrage following revelations that Turkey’s state telecoms agency has been collecting hourly data from virtually all internet users in the country for more than a year.
Based on a document seen by the Turkish media outlet Medyascope, the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) ordered internet service providers (ISPs) in Turkey to hand over internet data, as a “legal and preventative measure”.
Information on WhatsApp communications, emails, website usage and time spent on them, phone calls and location data have all been shared on an hourly basis with BTK, according to the report.
It added that while the actual content of emails and WhatsApp messages would not be available to the BTK, it was possible to determine sender and receiver.
The document, which was signed by BTK vice chairman Fethi Azakli and is dated from December 2020, was apparently addressed to Turkish ISPs.
“There is a need to obtain more detailed information in the legal and preventive scope regarding the activities that take place in the internet environment, which is gaining more and more place in our daily lives,” read the document.
It also threatens penalties against ISPs if they fail to provide data to the BTK.
Sources within a number of ISPs told Medyascope, on condition of anonymity, that their companies began transferring data to the BTK in 2021.
Although Turkey passed a data protection law in 2016 that nominally prohibited the processing or storing of personal data without consent from the subject, it allowed for exceptions, including on the grounds of national security.
In a series of tweets in June, Onursal Adiguzel, an MP for the opposition Republican People’s Party, had raised concerns about the BTK’s collection of internet users’ data, comparing it to the revelations from American whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 about mass surveillance programs run by the U.S. National Security Agency.
“Something similar to this has been carried out in Turkey by the BTK for a while,” he wrote.
“The president of BTK requests the log records and subscriber pattern structure from 313 internet provider companies with a ‘confidential’ letter.”