Criminalisation of Journalism
I've long said that we don't want the UK to follow the footsteps of Turkey when it comes to journalism, blogging etc.
Journalism in the UK is generally doing well (compared to other countries) not only because of the language advantage (many people in many countries can read English). In relative terms, the UK offers some protections to reporters and takes it seriously when threats are made to them.
This morning somebody sent along this article which we've added to Daily Links an hour or so ago. It says "Journalist Derya Okatan arrested in Turkey for allegedly possessing classified material" and to shed some light on the reasoning:
She was arrested on suspicion of obtaining classified state documents, her lawyer Ziya Ergin told CPJ. The authorities questioned Okatan about 20 PowerPoint presentations, 214 Word documents, 49 Excel documents and 10 PDF files – all material they said was classified and on her hard drive.
First of all, we'd like to extend our solidarity to Okatan. It should never be a crime to inform the public.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has already sided with Okatan, so we safely assume they researched the matter.
"Freedom of Press matters aside," an associate has noted, "there is something preposterous about claiming that information encoded on an Microsoft operating system by an Microsoft application or "cloud" service can be in any way confidential. Those formats are indicative of Microsoft services or applications and those are in turn dependent on Microsoft Windows. Technical matters aside, even the licensing belies the assertion that anything can be stored in confidence."
We'll be keeping an eye on this. The headline of last night's Daily Links was "Turkey Blocking Journalists" because it's getting worse, fast. The slippery slope is here. The regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is desperate to sedate the population as costs of living skyrocket (food and energy priced out of reach, inflation rate at about 30%). Anything to distract from Erdoğan's own failures... █