Hamit Basgol
I am from Turkey, which means I have spent a lifetime watching the spectrum of Turkish politics and changing news without ever once feeling like I knew what was going on. I am doing a PhD in cognitive science and neuroscience at the University of Tübingen.
Session
In 2016, hackers dumped the electoral records of 50 million Turkish citizens online with a mocking note: "Bit shifting isn't encryption." The dump even included the president's own ID number.
Turkey built a digital identity system so centralized that a single breach could expose the entire population. And it did, repeatedly. Spanning from 2009 through pandemic-era health data exploitation to a teenager who found verification codes in a webpage's source code, this is a fifteen-year saga of systemic failure. Over 100 million records have been compromised across e-Devlet (the national e-government portal) and e-Nabız (the world’s largest personal health record system).
The government’s response followed a consistent pattern: deny, arrest the messenger, wait, and quietly admit the truth years later. But the real story is psychological. Turkish citizens now say: "You have my ID number? So does everyone who paid $2." This is helplessness at a population scale; the only good news is that there is nothing left to hide.