Stating that such paranoid accusations are false, Acarer said: “For one thing, TİB does not monitor many conversations. What’s more, they have 80 people on their staff. It is impossible to listen to the conversations of 72 million with such a small group of people. And it is not TİB which monitors conversations. It’s the police department, the gendarmerie or the National Intelligence Agency [MİT].”
He also said there have been recent attempts to make completely legal wiretapping orders look as though they are illegal. He said it was impossible for an illegal interception to be accepted as evidence in court. “Everyone should be happy, since TİB was founded and the legislation on legal interceptions has gone into force. I am very comfortable. If they need to monitor my conversations, that means I am such a person whose conversations should be monitored.”
Reiterating that TİB does not monitor phone conversations, Acarer explained: “Wiretapping is done by the MİT, the police or the gendarmerie. They first file a request with a prosecutor, who in turn relays this to a court. If the judge issues a warrant, the decision is relayed to TİB. If the TİB decides that the judge’s warrant is in line with legislation, it will allow wiretapping. In this case, the institution that requested to wiretap a certain phone line gets the permission and does this by its own devices. TİB’s responsibility here is to inspect whether the judge’s warrant is in line with current legislation or not.”
Telecommunications Minister Binali Yıldırım had also stated that it is impossible to track the phone conversations of 72 million people, in the face of such allegations. “For one thing, in Turkey, there are more than 185 million phone conversations taking place every day. This amounts to more than 4 million hours. To be able to monitor 4 million hours, 2 million employees should work eight hours a day, including Saturday and Sunday. In other words, we would have to assign all public servants to this job. … The claim that the entire population’s phone conversations are being monitored is impossible in reality.”
