[danso]

Can you provide any technical detail as to how a real-time count of every person is possible? What databases are used to track births and deaths and emigration in real time? How about income/housing/education characteristics? Are you a Turkish citizen? If so, are you able to query the government for the exact population count right now?

[rolleiflex]

The population counts are released yearly and I believe you can do what is the Turkish version of FOIA request to get the live count, though don’t quote me on the latter part.

Turkey has a central database, called TCKN, that everyone is assigned by birth or by getting an immigration visa. The births and deaths are tracked by hospitals and the Revenue Service. Income / education / housing - all of these are tracked by the central registers and licensing boards. Every Turkish citizen and resident has an online account at https://www.turkiye.gov.tr/?lang=en_US (for English version) which you can use to view taxes paid, your previous health records (MRI scans and all should be downloadable) see scripts fillable, paperwork for legal action by you or against you, census records, even mobile and landlines registered on your name, and basically pretty much everything you’d expect a state can do. All of the outputs from this site are printable PDFs and they have a barcode on them which I think the government cryptographic signature. So you can get some doc from here, print it out and bring to someone else and they’d be able to verify it by scanning the barcode.

In other words, they have total knowledge. It’s not just the number of people in the country. What’s interesting is that it doesn’t rely on self-reporting, but on ambient data providers. It’s kind of dystopian, but technically fairly impressive and so far (ominously) relatively benign. Failing all else, it’s very useful.

[danso]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I remain skeptical that an accurate detailed count can be automated (at this point in history) but I won’t claim to have any insight about contemporary life and society in Turkey.

[rolleiflex]

I think you are right to be skeptical and I don't claim to have an insight into how accurate it is. However, mind that while Turkey is culturally about 80% western and 20% non-western, it's really unpredictable where that 20% shows up. For example, the reason the census count can be reasonably accurate even in the adversity of undocumented immigrants is that Turkish police can walk up to anybody they see as suspicious on the street and ask for their TCKN / ID to do a spot check for arrest warrants — decidedly free of the need for the western concept of a 'probable cause' or anything like that, it's a member of your community asking to validate your ID. Since they have the readers attached to their mobile phones, the check takes a couple seconds.

This also, by design, makes it really hard to be undocumented in Turkey. There's a significant skin tone difference between people from the Middle East and those in Istanbul, and the police does absolutely use this to be more scrutinous if you're even just walking by them. From an US perspective this is discrimination, and it definitely is, but this is how it works — and they're pretty good at spotting non-Turkish people. As a real example in action, there was a recent directive that required refugees to keep their residences within the borders of the first municipality they registered in (many of the Syrian refugees had moved to Istanbul from where they first registered for benefits), and the police managed to significantly clamp down on unregistered immigrants fairly quickly and send them back to the cities they registered to.

In this specific case this was the right move since the resources are allocated to states (ils) based on where refugees are registered and Istanbul alone does not have nearly the capacity to house that many refugees. My point is that Turkish police does have a lot more leeway than the US police before it becomes socially unacceptable — and while this is overall not a great thing (loose oversight), it also makes them much more effective at making a census in the right ballpark.

[_-___________-_]

Turkey has at least two ... porous ... borders that I've seen in action, so I am doubtful that counting births and immigration visas can provide an accurate real-time count of every person in the country.

[rolleiflex]

Which borders?

I think the border to Syria was at one point fairly porous, for humanitarian reasons, but as of now even that is sealed shut pretty tightly. It's actually third largest border wall in the world after Great Wall of China and US - Mexico one. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria–Turkey_barrier

[onionisafruit]

How do they count undocumented immigrants? If you don’t go to school or have an “on the books” job, are you going to show up in the count?