Turkey tightens controls on Internet speech

A Turkish court had just banned Blogger, the popular blog-hosting site owned by Google, because of illegal material found on a few sites on its servers. It was just the latest among hundreds of sites banned by Turkey's courts and government this year, raising concerns about censorship in a country with an already troubling record on freedom of speech. A law passed by the Turkish parliament last May, intended to prevent access to primarily pornographic Web content, has given the state broad powers. The newly created Telecommunications Directorate, a government office that monitors the Internet, is allowed to shut down sites without a court order. The agency has been behind 612 bans this year. Critics of the Internet laws have been dismayed by the state's heavy-handed approach, which allows for entire sites to be blocked because of a small number of offending items.