Chapter 19 provides an overview of Turkish law on the collection of digital evidence stored in and outside Turkey. It explains that while cybercrime offence definitions under Turkish law are generally in line with the Cybercrime Convention, Turkey has largely not transposed the criminal procedure and international cooperation sections of the Convention into its domestic law. It delves into the legal framework for collection of digital evidence in Turkey, including investigative measures, mandatory or voluntary cooperation of internet service providers, and administrative search and seizure methods. It analyses the judicial cooperation between Turkish LEAs and their foreign counterparts, and notes the challenges Turkish authorities face in obtaining e-evidence stored in foreign jurisdictions through mutual legal assistance requests. Noting efforts to overcome such challenges, in part through expanding the powers of the Information and Communication Technologies Authority, the chapter calls for a reform of Turkish criminal procedure and international cooperation law with the relevance of Turkey’s human rights obligations and e-evidence in mind.

This chapter is both a retrospective, and also even a requiem, for the “unregulation” argument in Internet law, and a prospective on the next twenty-five years of computer (or cyber) law. The Internet is not a lawless, special unregulated zone; it never was. Now that broadband Internet is ubiquitous, mobile, and relatively reliable in urban and suburban areas, it is being regulated as all mass media before it. While American policymakers advocated a largely deregulatory approach to the internet over the past twenty-five years, the United Kingdom and Europe have emphasized the hybrid of governmental and private market oversight known as coregulation. This approach to making regulation more adaptive addresses key dilemmas that fast-moving, slippery technologies pose for the traditional regulator’s toolkit.

Philip Jessup correctly observed sixty years ago that multinational corporate activity created new challenges for nation-states and their territorially based rules for jurisdiction, choice of law, and judgment recognitions. Those challenges are exponentially more difficult in the 21st century because electronic data—everything from e-mails and text messages to Facebook and Instagram posts to Twitter pronouncements to drone warfare data to search algorithms to financial transactions to cloud data storage—travel around the globe with little relationship to physical territory. In addition, all of this data is often in the custody and control of data intermediaries. Three important consequences flow from this ubiquitous technology-enabled, data-driven global societal activity. First, the territorial location of data becomes increasingly arbitrary and substantively unimportant. Second, territorially based courts (or law enforcement authorities generally) will often be unable to easily enforce their decisions because those decisions require cooperation from relevant actors in far-flung communities. Third, governmental and judicial authorities are increasingly turning to multinational corporate data intermediaries to carry out and enforce their orders because only those companies have sufficient global reach to make legal rulings effective.