Turkey blocks Tor network

The President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is ramping up measures to limit free speech and the media. Among his attempts is to block the Tor anonymity.

Previously, some internet cloud storage services that were blocked include Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and GitHub. Social media networks that were affected include Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and YouTube.

They were all blocked following the overnight detention of 11 Members of Parliament belonging to the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party in the mainly Kurdish southeast. The access to those services were restricted in order to stem the sharing of leaked emails belonging to the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Berat Albayrak, who is the son-in-law of President Erdoğan.

The correspondence is also believed to expose how Erdoğan used his power as a President and influence the media and prompt the publishing of select information in pro-government newspapers.

Unlike previous attempts for censorship which were triggered by specific events, the move by Erdoğan's government is to prevent people in the country from being able to view impartial news or browse the internet without being tracked.

Tor is also known as The Onion Router. Its aim is to conceal the identity of people by using encryption and randomly bouncing requests for webpages through a network of different computers acting as nodes.

With its ability to make users anonymous, the system has become popular in many nations, including Turkey, where the government is known to watch what people are doing and what they're saying online.

Turkey Blocks, which monitors internet censorship in the nation, said that its regular monitoring of Tor showed that it was being widely blocked across the country. The organisation started to investigate after hearing many people in Turkey reported having problems reaching the Tor network.