Bypassing Censorship: A Proven Tool against the Recent Internet Censorship in Turkey

Users of mobile devices are experiencing great difficulties to circumvent Internet censorship technologies that violate human rights. Mobile users do not have full control of their own systems, and in many cases, they cannot even change the configuration imposed by their 3G/4G providers. Such limitations allow the provider acting under the government authority to enforce specific Internet filtering mechanisms, and to prevent access to censored material. In this paper, we survey the events related to the Internet censorship happened in Turkey during the first months of 2014 and we introduce DNSet, an Android app that has been used by Turkish citizens to successfully circumvent the Internet censorship. In particular, DNSet allows mobile users to easily change the DNS server imposed by their 3G/4G providers, without the mobile users have administrative rights on the device (i.e. Without rooting the device). We report on data and information that has been anonymously collected through the DNSet application. Furthermore, we raise up the suspicion that a few censorship activities in Turkey began at least a month before the official ban on Twitter.