Google Public DNS intercepted by Turkish ISPs

I know we all have freedom of speech, but unfortunately it’s not free, especially in the countries govern by the governments where they are ready to kill our voice anyhow, even by censoring the social media.

The same happened few days before, when Twitter, the biggest Social Media platform, was banned by the Turkey government after an audio clip was leaked on YouTube and Twitter about the massive corruption of Turkey Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan instructing his son to dispose of large amounts of cash in the midst of a police investigation.

The Prime minister of the country, Erdoğan has full control on the old media, the television and the printing press, but he failed to stop the Ten Million Turkish citizen on twitter from sharing the audio all over the social media site, when Twitter itself reportedly refused to delete the incriminating audio of him.

But it doesn't work very well, since the users have all way out. Millions of Turkey users began using Google’s DNS service to bypass censorship that briefly helped Turks stay connected to Twitter. But, Turkey Government wanted to close all the possible loopholes that had allowed users to circumvent the ban and finally the authorities also blocked the Google DNS service.

On Saturday, Google claims that Internet Service Providers (including TTNet and SuperOnline) in Turkey have set up servers that are masquerading as Google’s DNS service, in order to block services such as YouTube and Twitter which are banned by the government across the country.

Google carried out their own research and cites them as “credible reports”. “We have received several credible reports and confirmed with our own research that Google’s Domain Name System (DNS) service has been intercepted by most Turkish ISPs,” Carstensen wrote in a blog post.

Google’s Public DNS resolution service lets people use the DNS servers (8.8.8.8 & 8.8.4.4) of the Google search engine as an alternative to their DNS provider, very often an ISP. This service offers people in the area of both performance and security benefits over many IPS DNS services.

“Google operates DNS servers because we believe that you should be able to quickly and securely make your way to whatever host you’re looking for, be it YouTube, Twitter, or any other,” Carstensen wrote. He then added, “But imagine if someone had changed out your phone book with another one, which looks pretty much the same as before, except that the listings for a few people showed the wrong phone number.”

This is exactly what Turkish ISPs have done. On Saturday, the government accused YouTube for a recording posted on it of a government official discussing possible military action in Syria. Turkish government ordered YouTube shut down, less than a week it had blocked Twitter.

Now, it can be imagine that by intercepting Google DNS, one can direct the users to any fraudulent site and can also apparently infect the users.

This was not the first time, when a government has been censoring the voice of their people. In 2011, the regime of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt attempted to turn off the internet in a fruitless bid to stop the building revolution against him.

In February 2011, in the wake of the uprisings against Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, his son Muhammad, who was in charge of telecommunications at the time, cut off the internet. Also Syria’s one-party Baath dictatorship banned Facebook and some other social media in 2007.

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