I am breaking my silence. I am still committed to finishing my dissertation before the end of this academic year, so I don’t expect to post many more blog posts before June. However, the recent corruption allegations have prompted me to take a break from my dissertation.

On 3 February 2014, Jeffrey Lewis, Melissa Hanham and Amber Lee published an article detailing how they used open source information to locate the primary facilities for North Korea’s ballistic missile transporter-erector-launchers (TELs) assembly. The availability  of open source information now allows for analysts to identify North Korean missile facilities, Iranian nuclear sites, Turkish nuclear weapon storage facilities, and to track the construction of villas in a remote bay on Turkey’s Aegean coast.

Hakan Fidan, the director of Turkey’s intelligence agency, wrote his PhD dissertation on the subject. He also happens to be one of the Prime Minister’s closest advisors. Thus, like in the case of Ahmet…