This work analyzes digital censorship in Turkey, a country incorporating features of both Middle Eastern and E.U. regulation into its ICT policy framework, and often categorized as a hybrid space between Eastern and Western approaches towards information freedom. Utilizing theories of digital media and networks, as well as two years of ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that Internet Studies research on web censorship must include a thorough study of circumvention. In this multi-sited project, I investigate why state authorities and private corporations engaging in circumvention are portrayed as the driving forces behind Turkish information society, yet students, teachers, minorities, cybercafe owners, IT distributors and journalists are criminalized as hackers, pirates and terrorists. Using "proxy" as an analytical tool, I contend that: 1) If considered in isolation, representations of cyber-censorship as national and Internet-based obfuscate the ways that cyber-censorship is also transnational and multi-medial; 2) Circumvention is ubiquitous in Turkish information society, although many forms are hidden or portrayed as anomalous by the mainstream press; 3) Human and technological intermediaries conflict and collaborate in order to implement or impede ICT policies; and 4) The borders distinguishing discourses of authorized use from criminal use of digital technology interrelate with the control over resource flow across political, economic and media networks.

I use the multiple connotations of vekil, the Turkish word for "proxy"---political representative, economic guarantor and routing technology---to broaden the concept of circumvention to include human, institutional and technological relationships. The vekil-proxy's status as an autonomous intermediary that reroutes clients to their desired resources affords it an opportunity to abuse its power. Each of the chapters explores a different case of the subversive, dangerous or empowering repercussions of unchecked proxy autonomy. Thus emerges "proxy cultures," an analytic with which I decouple circumvention from criminality and demonstrate how state authorities, corporations and the mainstream media each engage in forms of circumvention which are hidden by discourses on information society, technological literacy, cultural tradition and national security. The conclusion establishes the concept of threshold as a lens with which to more accurately understand the complex relationships between circumvention and censorship in Turkey's information society.