Voice recordings that law cannot deem valid and politics cannot deem invalid

Audio recordings exposing the forbidden and shameful chats of members of the high judiciary with Öcalan and the PKK have been published for days. The norms and values on which an alliance that includes members of YARSAV, the HSYK and the Court of Cassation, the BDP, Öcalan and the CHP, formed to produce a "no" vote in the referendum in order to preserve the structure in the high judiciary, is founded are coming to light. It is also becoming clear between whom the secular gains that must be protected are shared as a system of spoils.

The emergence of these broadcasts has led some people, rather than to astonishment at the gravity of the dirty relations poured out in the content of these conversations, to objections about how these recordings were leaked. It is clear that information obtained by illegal means is not and cannot be regarded as evidence. Obtaining information by intervening in people's private communications through illegal wiretaps is a crime. No one should have any doubt about this.

Especially in the Ergenekon trial process or in many parallel cases, much of the information obtained is based on wiretap recordings made by court order. It is known that prosecutors work quite meticulously on this matter, since what was not obtained by court order is in any case not regarded as evidence. Perhaps the only subject on which the same meticulousness could not be shown is the failure to filter out the irrelevant ones among the data obtained by court order. Yet according to the law, such irrelevant documents must be filtered out and only the matters for which permission was obtained must be placed in the file.

Even so, there is nothing that would justify the noise that the official or volunteer Ergenekon lawyers have made on this matter. One of the most important psychological campaigns through which Ergenekon has established its defense in the public is based on the claim that today the phones of almost everyone are being arbitrarily tapped and that no legal basis has been left for this. The defense has been built on this campaign of attack. The idea that we have become a vast country of eavesdropping in which 70 million people are being listened to, let us admit, is being instilled successfully. In the climate of fear and paranoia created by this campaign, all the developments and evidence in the Ergenekon case are instantly turned into trifles that do not even need to be taken seriously.

Yet the situation is not at all as the Ergenekon defenders try to portray.

The analysis-report titled "Monitoring of Communications in Turkey," prepared by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Aytekin Geleri for the Strategic Thinking Institute, shows that, let alone arbitrariness in phone tapping, the situation has been made extremely difficult in the last few years. With the establishment of the Telecommunications Communication Presidency, unlike before, all wiretaps have been gathered in a single hand. Whereas before, a military officer could go to any post office and have as much tapping done as he wished on whomever he wished without any court order and use the recordings as he wished, today all wiretaps must be done at the TİB headquarters and only upon seeing a court order. The TİB itself has no authority to listen to anyone on its own. It is only charged with supervising whether the wiretaps of the competent authorities comply with the laws. It has neither the authority nor the duty to archive the wiretaps made. Moreover, in the proportion of wiretap recordings carried out within the TİB and delivered to the relevant units there is, compared with the past, not an increase but a decrease. Because courts grant wiretap orders with more difficulty, and the TİB's meticulousness on this matter makes itself felt more with each passing day. Therefore it is certain that today, at least by the legal units of the state, we are being listened to less, not more.

So if this is the case, what are we going to say about the wiretap recordings that emerge every day? The answer to this is in fact very clear. These wiretaps are not being made by the state but illegally by persons and units that have access to technological means, and the value of this data as evidence in court is nil anyway. Moreover, see the irony: among the crimes most attributed to the Ergenekon sympathizers who run campaigns that we are heading toward an empire of fear through illegal wiretaps is precisely making illegal wiretaps, obtained from these listening devices, to be used to build spheres of influence over the people they wish.

It is not known how many people Levent Ersöz had arbitrarily tapped while he was head of Gendarmerie intelligence, but the number of archived recordings seized is expressed in thousands. Apart from that, illegal profiling, technical surveillance, wiretapping and blackmail records have been found on many other detained defendants, so that, while everyone has a right to speak about illegal wiretapping, it would be fitting to say that the Ergenekon defendants and their defenders have no right at all. Most recently, Mehmet Baransu revealed in the newspaper Taraf that a device bought by the General Staff to tap the PKK (the General Staff has no authority to buy such a device and listen to others) had been used to tap two thousand people other than the PKK. The real problem is these recordings, and in fact, whether in the Ergenekon case or in the 12 September referendum, all the effort is nothing other than preventing the arbitrary wiretapping of people.

As for the audio recordings of judiciary members... These recordings may have been made illegally, but, like Deniz Baykal's tape, although they have no legal validity, they are recordings whose political validity and consequences are unavoidable. When, in the end, the exposed relations outweigh the wiretapping itself morally, when the catastrophe being counted is heavier, no one turns to look at where the information came from.