It is the app Ankara says provided the messaging hub for many of the suspected plotters who took part in last year’s failed coup.
Thousands of people have been arrested simply on charges of downloading it, including a top UN judge and the chairman of Amnesty International in Turkey. An NBA star is also charged with being a user.
Yet until the aftermath of the botched July 15 bid to oust Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last year, even top experts had not heard of the shadowy encrypted messaging application.
Photo: Reuters
Now its mere name has become a whispered symbol of involvement in the coup bid — ByLock.
Turkey says the app was especially created for supporters of Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen to create a network for organizing his sympathizers across the nation.
Almost every day police officers detain suspects or authorities issue arrest warrants for suspected users, but some of those caught up in the investigation have either denied use of the app or having any link to the Gulen movement.
Ankara accuses Gulen, who has lived in self-imposed exile in the US since 1999, of ordering the failed coup that left 249 people dead, not including the plotters.
He denies the charges.
The Turkish National Intelligence Organization began decrypting messages sent on the app in May 2015, officials said.
This provided the authorities with the names of more than 100,000 within the preacher’s network, according to the Turkish Information and Communication Technologies Authority.
It is not known whether the coup was planned on ByLock, but officials have said a large number of people identified via ByLock were directly involved in the coup attempt.
Turkish authorities said Amnesty International Turkey chairman Taner Kilic, who was detained last month, had the encrypted messaging app on his phone in August 2014, but Amnesty has angrily denied the charges against him of being a member of a terrorist organization, saying they are “baseless.”
Aydin Sefa Akay, a judge attached to the UN Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, was handed a jail sentence last month over his use of ByLock, which the authorities deemed to be proof of his links to Gulen.
Akay, who is free pending an appeal, denies any link to Gulen.
Another alleged ByLock user is US-based Enes Kanter, a center for the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team, who has previously expressed his support for Gulen and is an outspoken critic of Erdogan.
The app’s patent holder is an American citizen of Turkish origin, who spoke to the Hurriyet daily in October last and gave his name as David Keynes.
Keynes told Hurriyet he had studied at Gulen-linked schools after moving to the US for his master’s degree in 2001 and that he stayed in the same homes as Gulenists.
However, Keynes denied he is a member of the movement, only saying he knew Gulenists.
He said “90 percent of the app’s Turkish users are Gulenists.”
“It became a medium for the Gulenists to communicate,” Keynes added.
The patent-holder said an individual nicknamed “Fox” was the app’s designer and had links to the movement. Keynes lived with “Fox” in Portland between 2003 and 2004.
However, Turkish Science, Industry and Technology Minister Faruk Ozlu said in September last year that the app had been developed by former employees — and Gulenists — at the Turkish Scientific and Technological Research Council.
To get the app, users have to download a file, cybersecurity expert Alper Basaran said.
Initially it had been available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play in September 2014 and March 2015 respectively. Its server was in Lithuania.
“If you search on the Internet, you can find the file,” Basaran said.
Once a user has downloaded ByLock — unlike WhatsApp where users need an individual’s mobile number to make contact — people can only communicate with each other if they know the other person’s user ID.
Once the Gulenists realized the ByLock app had been compromised, they switched to an app called Eagle after January last year, Electronic Frontier Foundation director of cybersecurity Eva Galperin said.
“[ByLock] was not a secure messaging application. The Turkish government was reportedly spying on communications by Gulenists carried out over ByLock,” she said.
When Eagle was compromised, they simply switched to WhatsApp.
Officials have said the movement’s members are now using an app called Cryptnote.
As the sun sets on another scorching Yangon day, the hot and bothered descend on the Myanmar city’s parks, the coolest place to spend an evening during yet another power blackout. A wave of exceptionally hot weather has blasted Southeast Asia this week, sending the mercury to 45°C and prompting thousands of schools to suspend in-person classes. Even before the chaos and conflict unleashed by the military’s 2021 coup, Myanmar’s creaky and outdated electricity grid struggled to keep fans whirling and air conditioners humming during the hot season. Now, infrastructure attacks and dwindling offshore gas reserves mean those who cannot afford expensive diesel
Does Argentine President Javier Milei communicate with a ghost dog whose death he refuses to accept? Forced to respond to questions about his mental health, the president’s office has lashed out at “disrespectful” speculation. Twice this week, presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni was asked about Milei’s English Mastiff, Conan, said to have died seven years ago. Milei, 53, had Conan cloned, and today is believed to own four copies he refers to as “four-legged children.” Or is it five? In an interview with CNN this month, Milei referred to his five dogs, whose faces and names he had engraved on the presidential baton. Conan,
French singer Kendji Girac, who was seriously injured by a gunshot this week, wanted to “fake” his suicide to scare his partner who was threatening to leave him, prosecutors said on Thursday. The 27-year-old former winner of France’s version of The Voice was found wounded after police were called to a traveler camp in Biscarrosse on France’s southwestern coast. Girac told first responders he had accidentally shot himself while tinkering with a Colt .45 automatic pistol he had bought at a junk shop, a source said. On Thursday, regional prosecutor Olivier Janson said, citing the singer, that he wanted to “fake” his suicide
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other