Friday, January 13, 2012

Academics oppose internet filter at universities

GIT - North America had previously covered Darwin and internet filters in Turkey. There, we had provided a link to the signature campaign pioneered by a group of scholars to oppose the internet filters at universities, requesting uncensored, unfiltered access to information on campuses. Here is an English-language coverage of the concerns of these academics.

Academics Oppose Internet Filter at Universities

"Upon the initiative of the Alternative Communication Association, more than a hundred academics launched a signature campaign against applying the disputed internet filtering system at universities.

Istanbul - BİA News Center
10 January 2012, Tuesday

[...]

The so-called "Secure Internet" application was enforced by the Prime Ministry Telecommunication Association (BTK) on 22 November 2011. Some universities supported the internet filtering system. When it made the news that a related decision was taken by the senate, academics started to counteract the application.

Prof Mutlu Binark of the Başkent University and Prof. Kürşat Çağıltay of the Middle East Technical University (ODTÜ) are the leading figures of the campaign. The declaration claims that it is scientifically and ethically unacceptable to support the senate in this application that narrowed freedom of expression.

[...]
"Universities should be places of critic, scientific and free opinion. It is absolutely thought-provoking and also dangerous to use these places as tools for pubic work", the campaign warned.
"The application was realized by the government as a central, arbitrary, non-transparent filtering and censoring system. The options provided do not remove the reality of censorship applied by the government. The application narrows the limits of freedom of expression and imposes a single type family/children design on our citizens", the text read.

* Signatures can be sent to the following e-mail address: kayit@alternatifbilisim.org

To read the rest of the text, please visit:

http://bianet.org/english/freedom-of-expression/135331-academics-oppose-internet-filter-at-universities