Special to WorldTribune.com

ANKARA — Turkey’s police force has reported widespread eavesdropping
as part of a counter-insurgency campaign.

Police said eavesdropping was used in more than 1,000 cases since 2010
in a drive to stop attacks by Al Qaida and Kurdish insurgency groups. In a
report to parliament, police said electronic and other surveillance
prevented 284 attacks and led to the arrest of 138 would-be bombers as well
as thousands of criminals.

“This campaign has been seven years in development,” Gendarmerie Col. Fuat Guney said.

In a briefing to parliament’s Eavesdropping Oversight Committee, Guney acknowledged widespread wiretapping of phones in Turkey. He said police arrested 17 Al Qaida members as well as seized firearms through thousands of surveillance operations.

In all, police and security forces obtained court orders for more than 1,000 cases of wiretapping and 2,300 additional surveillance operations. Guney said wiretapping foiled the assassination of Prime Minister Recep Erdogan in March 2012. The suspects were identified as members of the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front, which in February 2013 attacked the U.S. embassy in Ankara.

The report said police arrested 6,500 suspects in what stemmed from
surveillance operations. He said about 1,100 weapons as well as 26 tons of
illegal drugs were also seized over the last three years.

Turkish authorities have also adopted skills in identifying and tracing
surveillance by hostile elements. Parliamentarians raised the prospect that
criminals and insurgents could acquire electronic surveillance equipment in
stores throughout the country.

At one point, parliamentarian Hasip Kaplan telephoned a dealer, and on
loudspeaker arranged for the purchase of wiretapping equipment. Until the
phone call, police officials insisted that such equipment could not be
acquired legally in Turkey.

“If you buy this device, you can easily wiretap,” an unidentified dealer
told Kaplan during the parliamentary hearing. “We have a lot of devices that
would meet your needs.”

  Col. Fuat Guney, Eavesdropping Oversight Committee, Hasip Kaplan, Recep Erdogan, Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party Front, Turkish police claim wiretapping prevented hundreds of terror attacks