A National Camera Network, Quietly Completed
Turkey's state defense contractor ASELSAN has confirmed that its ODAKAN camera network — part of a City Security Management System branded KGYS — is now operating across all 81 provinces, with more than 450,000 AI-enabled units in the field, per reporting confirmed June 24–25, 2026 (TRT Haber; Sabah Kocaeli). Of that total, over 150,000 are ODAKAN's body-worn version, carried by police and gendarmerie, each capable of live facial detection, "blacklist" (kara liste) matching against wanted-persons databases, and real-time transmission to command centers for immediate intervention. The system is bundled with companion modules — KAYIN for video analytics and recording, KAHİN for video analysis, GEKO for vehicle and plate recognition — turning individual patrol officers into networked biometric sensors reporting to a central hub.
This is not a pilot. It is a completed national rollout, executed without a single statute written to govern it.
Steelmanning the Rollout
The case for facial-recognition body cameras is not frivolous. Real-time identification of wanted suspects can shorten the gap between an officer's encounter and a lawful arrest, cutting both flight risk and misidentification. Body-worn video generally has a strong evidence base for accountability, since footage cuts both ways in force disputes. Turkey's gendarmerie also covers a large, dispersed rural policing area, and networked cameras are a defensible way to extend reach without proportionally growing headcount. A system that strictly matched faces against a narrow, judicially-vetted wanted list, subject to public audit, would sit comfortably within the boundaries most developed democracies have set for law-enforcement biometric tools.
That "if" is the entire problem.
The Law That Was Never Written
Turkey's general-purpose privacy statute, the Personal Data Protection Law No. 6698 (KVKK, enacted March 24, 2016), predates this rollout by a decade (official text, KVKK). It classifies biometric data as a "special category" under Article 6, nominally requiring explicit consent or a narrow statutory basis before processing. But Article 28(1)(ç) exempts data processed "within the scope of preventive, protective and intelligence activities carried out by public institutions... to maintain national defence, national security, public security, public order or economic security" from most of the law's obligations, and Article 28(2) lets notification duties and data-subject rights be curtailed further for crime prevention and investigation, so long as it stays "proportionate" — a standard the statute never defines and that KVKK has never applied to a police facial-recognition deployment.
KVKK is not inactive on biometric data generally: it has published a formal guideline on biometric data processing, and as recently as late 2025 restricted employers from relying on employee consent alone to justify routine biometric attendance tracking, recognizing that consent is coercive under a power imbalance (KVKK biometric data guideline). The regulator is willing to draw lines around biometric data at work. It has issued no equivalent rule, guidance, or public review of ODAKAN, KGYS, or the KİM mobile facial-search app that security officials have run against the national biometric database since 2022 — a tool whose disclosed daily search volume roughly tripled, from about 400 to over 1,000, within its first year of public demonstration (Biometric Update).
Blacklists Without Rules
The absence of a dedicated framework isn't a hypothetical harm. Reporting tied to the March 2025 arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and the protests that followed documents police using facial recognition to identify demonstrators, with tenders for thousands more cameras issued in the arrest's immediate aftermath, and prosecutors charging protesters for presence alone rather than any violent conduct (Nordic Monitor; New Lines Magazine). None of that required new legal authority, because no statute currently defines what "blacklist" means, who can be added to it, how long a face-match is retained, or whether identifying a peaceful assembly counts as a permitted use at all. Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya has been candid about the ambition, saying the goal is a country where "there won't be a place without cameras."
"There won't be a place without cameras in the streets of Istanbul." — Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya, cited in New Lines Magazine
Turkey isn't unique in letting deployment outrun law — Paraguay is currently in litigation over facial-recognition secrecy, and public pressure forced Meta to strip facial-recognition code from a smart-glasses app just last month. But scale sharpens the stakes: no comparable case matches 450,000 networked, face-detecting cameras spanning an entire country.
What Proportionate Would Look Like
None of this argues for banning facial recognition in policing — a blanket prohibition would discard genuine value in finding actual wanted suspects and missing persons, and would likely just push the same infrastructure further from public view. It argues for Turkey's parliament to do what KVKK's Article 28 exemption currently lets it avoid: pass a dedicated statute defining permitted uses, capping retention of biometric matches, requiring independent audit of blacklist criteria, and excluding protest and political-assembly monitoring from the security exemption entirely. A tool this powerful, deployed this completely, deserves a law written for it — not one that predates it by ten years and was never meant to reach it.