Third letter from imprisoned Necati Özkan points to 'how citizenship rights are usurped': Espionage in name only, non-existent in reality

In his third letter from prison, Özkan addressed the 'espionage' investigation conducted against him and reacted to the perception operation created through the prepared indictment.

Here is the third letter written by Ekrem İmamoğlu’s former advisor Necati Özkan from Kandıra Prison:

In this letter, I will explain to you how the “espionage” investigation being conducted against me and the prepared indictment usurp my fundamental citizenship rights, and how they attempt to pass judgment without conscience by distorting the law and the truth.

ESPIONAGE IS BEING INVENTED FROM A JOB INTERVIEW!

When I was arrested on the grounds of “political espionage” at the request of the Chief Public Prosecutor's Office, I requested that my lawyers obtain an expert opinion from reputable experts in order to understand the technological concepts and the so-called criminal digital acts mentioned in the investigation documents. The expert opinion* exposes the fiction being attempted with this case in all its nakedness and renders the indictment fundamentally void.

The indictment aims to extract election manipulation and espionage from a single meeting I had before election day with a businessman who came to meet me 12 days before the June 23, 2019, Istanbul repeat elections, and whose primary goal was to sell services to the IMM after the election. It does this by using certain informatics and technology concepts that are foreign to the public and to me personally, in order to create the impression that there are illegal, mysterious, and dark dealings involved. It invents espionage out of things that have no basis or truth.

1. ESPIONAGE IN NAME ONLY, NON-EXISTENT IN REALITY!

First of all, Article 328/1 of the Turkish Penal Code states: “Any person who obtains information that must remain confidential due to its nature with respect to the security or domestic or foreign political interests of the State, for the purpose of political or military espionage, shall be sentenced to imprisonment from 15 to 20 years.”

However, there is no allegation or evidence in the file regarding what information could be the subject of an espionage act, where and how it was obtained, or in whose favor it was used.

The indictment does not mention any clear data breach other than the email addresses and password information belonging to a total of 20 IMM employees. The prosecution claims that I and Ekrem İmamoğlu shared IMM data with Hüseyin Gün to win the elections, but it ignores the fact that we were not in a position to access that data, and furthermore, it ignores court and Ministry of Interior decisions stating that an operation such as copying IMM data was never performed.

*You can read the expert opinion at this link.

2. THE INDICTMENT WANTS TO CREATE A PERCEPTION WITH THE WORDS OSINT AND DARKWEB!

The indictment confuses the public by using the language of black propaganda produced by the known media since the first day of the investigation. It tries to portray the concepts of OSINT and Darkweb as if they were evidence of espionage or a criminal act.

However, the expert opinion reveals that the word OSINT is “the activity of collecting and analyzing information from sources open to everyone in accordance with the law,” and that it cannot be associated with illegal acts such as unauthorized access, bypassing technical barriers, or entering a secret system.

Likewise, it states that the presence of leaked data on the Darkweb and the examination of this data from open sources cannot be considered an illegal activity on its own, and that according to the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, OSINT and Darkweb examinations are accepted as a legitimate analysis method. In addition to these, it is clearly stated that the leak in question has no connection to me.

3. IMM-DOMAIN EMAILS WERE LEAKED IN 2008 AND 2016!

The indictment claims, without showing a single piece of evidence, that a large number of email addresses and passwords, primarily those belonging to municipal employees with the ibb.gov.tr extension, were transferred by me to the digital underground environment of the internet world (the Darkweb).

However, the expert opinion proves that all those emails and passwords were compiled by two Polish and Ukrainian hackers in 2008 and 2016 and uploaded to the Darkweb on January 7, 2019; that both hackers were arrested; that the emails and passwords in question were not obtained from the IMM website, but from other sites where IMM employees were individually members; furthermore, it proves that the captured emails were compiled from more than 12,000 websites, including 57 state institutions such as the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (TBMM), the Ministry of Justice, the General Directorate of Security (EGM), the Ministry of National Education (MEB), and TÜBİTAK, and that there is data containing the information of exactly 772,904,991 users.

4. MANIPULATION IS ALSO IN NAME ONLY, NON-EXISTENT IN REALITY!

The indictment claims that through the very short and limited communication I had with Hüseyin Gün, whom I met 12 days before the June 23, 2019, local elections, “we manipulated the 2019 local elections in particular... and that the aim was to have a say in our country's politics, especially in Istanbul, by ensuring Ekrem İmamoğlu won the election,” and that this is how the espionage activity took place. It makes inferences almost with the assumption that “if Ekrem İmamoğlu won the June 23 elections, there must have been manipulation.” It ignores the great reaction shown by voters from all walks of life to the unfair cancellation of the first election; it ignores the fact that many studies showed, almost a month before the election, that Ekrem İmamoğlu would win the second election by a much larger margin. However, the expert opinion reveals that a digital manipulation that would affect the election results was technologically and logistically impossible at that time:

- “Technically, such a digital army would require software, time, and infrastructure capable of managing thousands of accounts and devices from a single center”;

- “As of 2019, artificial intelligence-supported bot technologies had not yet become widespread”;

- This technical and scientific opinion, which determines that “it is impossible to hide the traces of such networks if they existed,” proves once again that the manipulation claim is a complete fallacy.

In any case, while one of the parties competing in an election campaign cannot perform manipulation even though it holds all the powers of the state and possesses the full power and resources of telecommunications authorities, Anadolu Agency, TRT, and the establishment media...

Claiming that the other side could perform manipulation with an amateur social media analysis supposedly provided by an amateur businessman and only twenty email addresses of former IMM employees is a stance far from logical consistency.

A TEXT THAT AIMS TO CREATE CRIME AND CRIMINALS, WHICH CANNOT BE EXPLAINED BY LAW

In summary, the “espionage” case is a very bad fiction, prepared from beginning to end by turning the truth upside down, and attempted to be cooked up with the testimony of a person who slandered under conditions of effective remorse.

Moreover, I am being asked to be punished for the same so-called act in both the main IMM case and the espionage case. The spirit of the law is being betrayed; for political purposes, they are trying to get several hides from a single sheep that does not exist.

This indictment, written to create crime and criminals and which cannot be explained by law, has no validity in the collective conscience in the face of this simple truth: Managing an election campaign professionally and winning an election is not a crime.