From: The Pitt News
Gideon Bradshaw / Senior Staff Writer
Nicolas Christin said the Turkish government’s attempt last week to block Twitter inside its borders is having an unexpected consequence.
Though Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan intended for the the move to silence allegations of state corruption, Christin said more than 10,000 Turks have started using a program that hides their physical locations, making the ban effectively useless.
“Prime Minister Erdogan has done more education for information security than all of us combined,” Christin joked.
Christin, a Carnegie Mellon University researcher who studies computer security, spoke Tuesday evening on CMU’s campus. Keith Mularski, an FBI agent who leads a unit based in Pittsburgh that handles cyber investigations, and Andrew Conte, an investigative reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review who has covered cybersecurity, joined Christin in the discussion, which Jim Cuddy, the Tribune-Review’s managing editor, moderated.
For panelists, the backfiring of the Turkish government’s attempts to block citizens’ access to Twitter was just one aspect of what Conte called “our cool but creepy future,” in which private companies, governments and criminals can access Internet users’ private information for legal and illegal purposes.
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