Update: This dump turned out to primarily consist of public mailing list traffic; Wikileaks promotions of the dump included links to spreadsheets containing thousands of Turkish women’s sensitive personal information, and the organization has largely ducked responsibility for its mistakes, attacking those who point out its mistakes.
Wikileaks have just published the Erdoğan Emails, which is claimed to represent years’ worth of email from the APK, the Turkish ruling party, with messages dating from 2010 to as recent as July 6.
Wikileaks says it has “verified the material and the source, who is not connected, in any way, to the elements behind the attempted coup, or to a rival political party or state.” When it announced the leak, it sustained a 24-hour intense DDoS attack, which it attributed to elements who wanted to suppress the publication of the APK emails.
Having now recovered, Wikileaks have published the material, ahead of its own schedule, in response to the abortive Turkish coup and the ensuing purges of thousands of military servicepeople, judges, and academics, who have been subjected to mass arrest.
The Turkish-language material may shed light on conspiracy theories about the conveniently cack-handed coup, which allowed President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — who has a long history of corruption and antidemocratic suppression of opposition politicians — to consolidate power.
According to Wikileaks, the data dump includes years of emails, some as recent as July 6, that may shed some light on those conspiracy theories. But whether Turkish citizens will actually be able to read WikiLeaks’ revelations is a separate question. The country’s government has a habit of throttling access to key websites during moments of political crisis, and blocked YouTube, Twitter and Facebook in the first hours of the attempted coup, before relenting to allow protestors to access the sites.
As of Tuesday afternoon, WikiLeaks wasn’t blocked or throttled in Turkey, the Turkish censorship monitoring group Turkey Blocks tells WIRED. But WikiLeaks has said in its Twitter feed that it’s been under sustained cyberattacks—likely floods of junk web traffic known as distributed denial of service attacks—since Monday, seemingly an effort to take the site offline or prevent its release. In fact, by early Tuesday evening the Erdoğan Emails were suddenly behind a password login, which Wikileaks tells WIRED was the result of a DDoS attack.
WikiLeaks Dumps ‘Erdogan Emails’ After Turkey’s Failed Coup [Andy Greenberg/Wired]