In an effort to keep people away from sites like Twitter and YouTube, Turkey took measures

Mar 31, 2014 07:08 GMT  ·  By

People died in Turkey this past weekend as the local elections were taking place and the government was busy blocking off access to social media so that the violent clashes would not make it online.

The war on the Internet started off a couple of weeks ago when the country’s prime minister promised to eradicate Twitter. Not long after that, access to the popular microblogging platform was cut off in the country.

People found ways around the blockade by using VPN tools or changing the DNS to Google’s public solution. In an effort to help everyone, people in Istanbul started spraying graffiti signs with instructions on how to do just that, but the government was onto them and soon they weren’t able to use this solution anymore.

After Twitter, YouTube was quick to follow on the same list of banned sites, angering millions of people.

This past weekend, however, things went a little further by intercepting Google’s Domain Name System (DNS).

“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 (Internet Service Providers),” writes Google Software Engineer Steven Carstensen.

Google compares the situation with someone replacing your trusty phone book with another one.

“A DNS server tells your computer the address of a server it’s looking for, in the same way that you might look up a phone number in a phone book. 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 writes.

Under the circumstances, Google says that the “phone book” was swapped with another one that looked pretty much the same, except for a few listings. “Turkish ISPs have set up servers that masquerade as Google’s DNS service,” the blog post ends.

Although the Turkish authorities said that Twitter and YouTube were blocked because they refused to take down various links or videos, the truth is a bit different.

In the past several weeks, as the elections drew nearer, compromising videos and other information regarding top members of the ruling party ended up online. This, of course, would have damaged the party’s chances at the elections, something that they did not want to happen.

Now that the elections are over and the governing party most likely won most votes in many areas, chances are that they would unblock the two sites on their own. An Ankara court has already ordered the government to lift the ban.