It has been 7 years since a first memoir published on Signals Intelligence activity in Turkey. Yet, none of the debates were aimed at legislation, its coverage by the law, its international examples on handling such issues through law... Since 2002, even AKP had its many radical changes in its equip which means different administrations and still, collection and protection of data is the most vague issue. I learned myself computer programming when I was 10 years old and I can figure out the seriousness of the issue, as Hanefi Avcı is a difficult personage to comprehend and claiming his regret of unprofessional handling of datas while his office, a basic computer programmer has enough knowledge there are opportunities to collect data by algorithms of computer programming but also processing and even analysing is also possible. Yet I have also seen the necessity to quote from the book I mentioned and tried to show their mindset, ignorance and maybe a desperate fragment of Turkey's history in the hands of some insane, erratic, idiot and irresponsible people.
Wikileaks was an overrated issue, I have to add, as it was important for everyone to understand how foreign missions of the United States of America works or how journalists work in Turkey, to understand our lacking notions for our dialogue and transparency but this was also never the case for the press, and they told some other stories...
Journalists don't even know difference between the European Council and the European Union, wouldn't most of them know where Strasbourg is as well, and why it has historical importance for the German-French relations... Or Britain's place in the European history... Which will be interesting for the Historians.
"Whatever may be in store for man in the future, it is certain that for the time being his sphere of activity is, as regards his bodily presence, restricted to the outside shell of one of the smaller planets of the solar system - a system which after all is probably by no means the largest in the vast universe of space. He may soar in his imagination, and by the intellect with which he is endowed, be able to investigate, with more or less certainty, domains far removed from the restricted are to which he is confined; but as regards his actual presence, he cannot leave for more than an insignificant number of feet, the outside crust of which has formed in the past, and must still form, the theatre upon which his activities are displayed.
The connection between man and his immediate terrestrial surroundings is therefore very intimate, and the configuration of the surface features of the earth would thus naturally soon attract his attention. It is only reasonable to suppose that, even in the most remote ages of the history of the human race, attempts were made, however crude they may have been, to depict these in some rough manner; and possibly, to begin with, the representation of hills, rivers and plains (...)"
Words of E. A. Reves in his lecture on Map-Making delivered at the Royal Geographical Society in 1910.
*
Terrorism and security concerns left no way out for us in Turkey and I think in most of the other countries as well. No curiosity, no excitement. I admire such people of the 19th century but we have such different circumstances...
Collected terminology from the report of the Venice Commission
CDL-DEM(2007)001-eDraft Report on the Democratic Oversight of the Security Services
http://www.venice.coe.int/webforms/documents/?pdf=CDL-DEM(2007)001-e
Report on the Democratic Oversight of the Security Services adopted by the Venice Commission at its 71st Plenary Session (Venice, 1-2 June 2007) and updated by the Venice Commission at its 102nd Plenary Session (Venice, 20-21 March 2015)
http://www.venice.coe.int/webforms/documents/?pdf=CDL-AD(2015)010-e
Rapport sur le contrôle démocratique des Services de Sécurité, adopté par la Commission de Venise lors de sa 71ème Session plénière (Venise, 1er-2 juin 2007) mis à jour par la Commission de Venise lors de sa 102e Session Plénière (Venice, 20-21 mars 2015)
http://www.venice.coe.int/webforms/documents/?pdf=CDL-AD(2015)010-f
- Covert Human Intelligence
- Competence for maintaining signals intelligence system and systems of oversight
- SIGINT / Signals Intelligence
- Judicial Authority
- Surveillance in consent (See: Report by Bingham Centre / The Investigatory Powers Review by the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation)
- Metadata
- Systems of Oversight
- Bulk Content / Meta data'dan içerik seçicilerle elde edilmiş analiz olarak değerlendirilmesi mümkün olan bilgiler.
- Content Selectors / İçerik seçici
- Targetted Surveillance (Bugging)
- Strategic Surveillance : İçerik seçicilerle yürütülen kitle gözetimine varma ihtimali olan operasyon tipi.
- Loss in institutional memory, integrity and professionalism
- Thershold for accessing data / Hukuk ve kurumsal kültür içerisinde elde edilen verilerin erişimi için belirlenmiş hukuki ve kurumsal düzenlemeler.
- Border between strategic surveillance and mass surveillance and the Bulk Data
- Over-collection of Intelligence
- Taskers and the Government control
- Dialogue with oversight
Yet my name Sadi is from an Iranian poet, traveller which was given to my grandfather by his Belarussian mother daughter of a landowner family and had good education, yet which makes me suspicious of such content selection and algorithms issues...
-"Allocating a signals intelligence task to the external intelligence agency"
-"A specialist signals intelligence agency"
"Oversight and Press and Journalism"
"Utilizing systems of signals intelligence:"
-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (and violation of export control conditions generally)
Circumvention of UN/EU sanctions
Major money laundering
"Government control and tasking"
Taskers - depends on the nature of intelligence
- "The first safeguard (applicable only to states which allow the use of signals intelligence should be enumerated, and thus provision should be made for the destruction of data which might incidentally be gathered on other offences."
- "The exception of transferring data to law enforcement should be narrowly defined and subject to oversight"
UK
A Question of Trust – Report of the Investigatory Powers Review (June 2015)
https://terrorismlegislationreviewer.independent.gov.uk/a-question-of-trust-report-of-the-investigatory-powers-review/
The Terrorism Acts in 2015 (December 2016)
https://terrorismlegislationreviewer.independent.gov.uk/annual-report-official-teaser/
https://terrorismlegislationreviewer.independent.gov.uk/bulk-powers-review-report/
Collected terminology from the Bingham Centre's Submission:
"The Investigatory Powers Review by the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation"
- -judicial authorisation
- -access communications data
- -intrusive surveillance
- -covert human intelligence source
- -encryption notice
- -retention notice
- -interception of communications
- -power to demand encryption keys
- -investigatory powers
- -judicial authorisation for interception
- -emergency self-authorisation by police subject to judicial confirmation within 24 or 48 hours
"Appointment of a special advocate to represent the interests of the subjects of surveillance in appropriate cases"
Germany
Parliamentary Intelligence Oversight Panel (Parlamentarisches Kontrollgremium, PKGr)
G 10-Commission
“This policy brief aims at providing such a contribution and particularly examines the practice and the institutional framework of the G 10-Commission. This hitherto rather unknown panel of the Bundestag is quasi-judicial in nature. Its function is to authorise the intrusion of intelligence services into the privacy of correspondence, post and telecommunication and it takes on a crucial role for the protection of fun- damental rights in cases of state surveillance. The G 10-Commission is the sole body in the German oversight system that is quali ed to assess whether intrusions of the intelligence services into telecommunication privacy are necessary and lawful. Un- like the Parliamentary Intelligence Oversight Body (PKGr), the G 10-Commission may demand that measures considered unlawful be stopped immediately. It can thus en- sure an e ective protection of fundamental rights. “
Data Protection Commissioner (Bundesbeauftragte für Datenschutz und die Informationsfreiheit, BfDI)
Turkey
Comparison can be made, at least as an evaluation for the history, with one of the first published memoir on Signals Intelligence Activity in Turkey, book by a retired Turkish Police Forces Officer Hanefi Avcı, published in 2010 (Angora Publications). This book was, since it was first released, subject to political contentions but never a legal or legitimacy quest or concerns which, regardlessly to this, ever since sustained its position in the political debate in Turkey. Hanefi Avcı apparently tried to do his best, but his competence for his activities causes suspicion. This book may at least serve for re-evaluation of institutions affiliated to such missions seeing as his openly written experiences, his professional mindset, dilemmas, difficulties, pride and prejudices and battles.Covert Human Intelligence pg. 106
"Competence for systems of Signals Intelligence" pg. 107, 121, 124, 130, 418
Translation:
“And also it was necessary to give encouragement and confidence to the staff, I had to be their leader on some issues, and tell them what to do, and also they had to know what you were doing”
pg 107
“The intelligence staff should have to “get the whole issue” by only one explanation, an only say, a slogan. But our system, let alone one word, couldn’t notice the lies of an all the way liar. The reason for this was actually the lack of knowledge of the working staff of the security system, most of them wasn’t competent for this work, they had got no clear knowledge to figure out where the ideological events would go…”
pg 121
“As a result recent events was showing how useless, how immature was our security systems. But we still continue to say how proud we are of our security systems and deluding both ourselves and the public”
Pg 124
“First of all they (terrorist organisations) have an extraordinary talent for expression. They can explain events very clear and openly, they could depict anything right that you could imagine without looking at it. This is very important to give clues for the education of the members of the organisations.
When I listen to them (SIGINT) I could get very important clues on their education. Their conversations with the ones who were taken hostage, or sometimes they isolate themselves into their home and read books for 2-3 months and then they’d tell each other and discuss on what they’ve read recently so that they could improve their interpretation skills.”
pg 130
“In the recent years in Turkey we see such a plan is followed. If you rule the MIT(National Intelligence Agency) you could only collect data, maybe you could use those by manipulating but you wouldn’t do anything further. If your desire is to maintain an “actionnel” demonstration, MIT wouldn’t be enough for you. Along with this KOM, (and some other intelligence institutions under the Police*) and along with judiciary with extra powers……..”
pg 418
Note: Hanefi Avcı's education is already another important issue to discuss however when he discovers of being literate and his excitement for this was actually another issue, I think. Yet, the translations I tried to do loyal to his mentality so that one code more easy figure out what happened once in Turkey
Over-collection of data:
“From 1988 to 1995 I have given permission and decision to “listen” (surveiller) of thousands of telephone but in one or two exceptions I don’t remember we have taken or asked for judicial authority.”
pg 348
(also reports by the National Intelligence Agency for the parliament)
"Judicial authority" pg. 219, 397, 555, 278, 404, 417, 465
(although the author doesn't employ and have acquaintance with the legal framework of his profession, related passages can be found by searching "dinleme kararı".
“From 1988 to 1995 I have given permission and decision to “listen” (surveiller) of thousands of telephone but in one or two exceptions I don’t remember we have taken or asked for judicial authority.”
pg 348
"Surveillance in consent" pg 375-376
For this issue Bingham Centre has important publications.
"Content selectors" - although Hanefi Avcı maintained a content selector functionality in Signals Intelligence by the help of an another person, his relation with adversaries can also be analysed which is anyway, shall be related to the algorithms (although this term is never used in his book) used for content selectors, strategic surveillance.
“And soldiers were very much excited by the datas brought to them and were ordering to take appropriate measures. They were not thinking of “taking these under a certain filtering” and presuming that all of it was true.”
pg 114
“While their trial, they claimed that (In one of their intercepted communications) the PVC word was not the plastic material they thought but pronunciation of the Bulgarian word for Almond in a different dialect, and PVC was its initials, so that their trial was dismissed. They were doing illegal trafficking but were escaped from the hands of the law, and I couldn’t accept it…”
pg 317
“Terror was perceived as a security problem in Turkey. It was always evaluated by a military logic, and by the view of security forces, and problems were to be solved by militarist politics. Civil governments, never saw this problem as part of their responsibility. They tried solve it by state of emergency and military organisations. (…) But the terror problem had to be approached by another social problems and had to be solved by scientific methods.”
pg 320-321
Note: Still the competence for his literacy of his profession is remarkable. Never seen any use of the term "algorithms" in the whole book.
Whole of the book.
"Strategic surveillance" - his encounters with the Police IT Officer Irfan
"Loss in institutional memory, integrity, professionalism"
pg 326, 348
"Threshold for accessing data" pg 445, 465
Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and violation of export control conditions generally)
Circumvention of UN/EU sanctions
Major money laundering
"Government control and tasking"
taskers - depends on the nature of intelligence
Note: His book may be evaluated as a secondary source for tasking issue.
"The first safeguard (applicable only to states which allow the use of signals intelligence should be enumerated, and thus provision should be made for the destruction of data which might incidentally be gathered on other offences."
pg. 326, 348, 417
"The exception of transferring data to law enforcement should be narrowly defined and subject to oversight." - related keywords "savcılıktan sızdı*", "savcılığa ver*"
The power to contact chain
-procedural controls
-strong oversight
"Dialogue with oversight body" pg. 326
"In our country, for years, there had been Psychological Operation Units under both Military, National Intelligence Agency and even under the Police Forces with different names. These units’ real function was to organise the institutions through executing coded psychological action operations. (…) Such events to indoctrinate the civil citizens won’t be ended soon seemingly (…) They only think discretion is the important notion."
pg 326
Note: Although the author criticises and confronts maybe professinally with other institutions this should aswell provide us how things were once running in Turkey, we don't still I think an oversight body or system but yet profile of such bureaucrats also leaves us in suspicion as possible contention and clash among institutions or the approach to benefit such contention and clashes...
"As regards searches of content data, there are particular privacy implications when a decision is being considered to use a selector which is attributable to a natural person (eg. his or her name, nickname, email address, physical address etc.) Strengthened justification requirements and procedural safeguards should apply, such as the involvement of a privacy advocate. The safeguard is also relevant as regards subsequent decisions to transfer intelligence obtained by strategic surveillance to internal security agencies, to law enforcement or to foreign services."
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Also from the Venice Commission report for the terminology:
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