New measures for phone wiretappings

Before talking about the new regulations about Turkey’s Telecommunication Authority (TİB), which are on the government’s agenda, let me mention different cases of abuses that we have witnessed as a society since the TİB was established in 2005.

1)    Private lives and business lives have been made public although they had nothing to do with the crime that was being investigated or prevented.

2)    The telephones of people that had no relation to the crime being investigated or prevented were tapped; their communications were monitored.

3) Whether related or not related to the crime, telephone wiretappings were taken outside police centers and prosecutors and were published online, reaching people related or unrelated to the crimes.

4) There were efforts to mislead the courts by tapping phones using false names.

5) There is equipment in the hands of the police that enables them to wiretap without a court order.

6) The records show that there was unlimited access to information that included the traffic of telephone conversations and information about locations.

These are the cases of abuse that come to mind. How can we then prevent other forms of abuses in the future while trying to stop the current abuses?

1)    The TÄ°B must be dissolved. The capacity of the storage on its computers must be terminated; some kind of a higher board of judges of the Supreme Court of Appeals that will check court orders for telephone wiretappings must be established.

2)    The registration of the tapped telephone conversation should be done in places that belong to the police or gendarmerie with the consent of the telephone operator.

3)    The locations where...