THE LOGIC OF SECRECY: DIGITAL SURVEILLANCE IN TURKEY AND RUSSIA

Abstract

Turkey and Russia have been developing comparable approaches to digital surveillance. The advent of Internet Communication Technologies (ICTs) and social media platforms have enabled significantly increased systematic state surveillance. From the state's perspective, data-centric digital surveillance is required for two reasons. First, the extent and depth at which terrorist organizations and criminal groups use these platforms for recruitment, logistics, and planning. Second, this trend is driven by a variant of "security dilemma" in which one state's intelligence advantage in digital space renders other states relatively less secure, generating a never-ending momentum of digital surveillance capability investment. Turkish and Russian surveillance regimes have grown as two particularly problematic cases in the wider surveillance literature.