Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it

"According to the daily, MİT has completed most of its works regarding ByLock and determined all the users in the server."

"The Department of Anti-Smuggling and Organized Crime transferred the list to its own database, with police in provinces able to check the list with a password given to them. Only one or two officials in the provinces are able to check the names in the list by entering the suspected person’s Turkish identity number or phone number.

In the checks done in the provinces, authorities are initially attempting to find who used the phones with ByLock. If the person who bought the phone line and the one who used it is different, then legal proceedings are conducted against the latter."

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkeys-intel-agency-sends-...

"Beşikçi said it was due to a single line of code, which created a window "one pixel high, one pixel wide" — essentially invisible to the human eye — to Bylock.net. Hypothetically, people could be accused of accessing the site without having knowingly viewed it."

Sounds like the app touched base with a unique server. Then it's a simple lookup of users at the ISP level.

Then inform government agencies / employers if their employees are on the list.

To me both articles imply the trace evidence on the phone is that it accessed something at some point in time rather than forensics on the phone.

[edit] I can't find any trace of the "bylock.net" in the Bylock apk source code. Someone else might want to look but something is missing. It'd be nice to know the exact line, if it's obscured that'd make it interesting.

As others have commented, it was just a matter of the ISP identifying all clients doing DNS lookups or connecting to the Bylock domain.

The government have complete control of all ISPs and mobile network operators in Turkey. They don't own them, but you can't give people Internet access without joining the government censorship/logging program.

As she was a teacher she would be employed by the government, and they just fire everyone employed in the government automatically when their names show up on the blacklist. I suspected firing of family members and friends that are connected to falsely accused person is done manually.

Also it doesn't really matter if the person is employed by the government or not. No employer would dare to keep anyone that is blacklisted as the employer would probably be accused themselves of helping a terrorist if they kept them. Plus, obviously, most big corps in Turkey are run by Erdoğans friends and family directly and indirectly.

When were you a teen?

I remember having the exact same thoughts when I was a teen. I think it was in 1990 I was at college in the UK and I remember reading a Usenet thread about some student riots going on in Portugal. The media coverage at the time was completely off from what I was hearing from the students 'online'. I remember really believing that the internet really would liberate us all with unfettered access to truth and communication and so on.

Fast forward a few years to 1995 and one Christmas (I was in the US then) I decided to take a look at the 'web' and the liberation it had brought so far. I called it my deep dive into the dark underbelly of the Internet.

And what I found on that night over my dial-up connection stays with me to this day: facism, racism, gore, bestiality, hatred, child porn.

Yes, the Internet liberates us. It allows us to freely be the humans we are, on a larger scale. Unfortunately, humanity has a rather large dark side to it.

So this story doesn't surprise me in the least - but I still hold out hope that we may one day do better.

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:

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.