Turkey’s internet watchdog the Telecommunications Communications Board has blocked access to WikiLeaks in the country, after the whistleblowing organisation released nearly 300,000 secret emails from the incumbent Justice & Development Party (AKP), reported Peter Yeung in Independent. The Board said that it had taken an “administrative measure” against the website – a term it commonly uses when blocking access to sites.
It said in the release: “It should be noted that emails associated with the domain are mostly used for dealing with the world, as opposed to the most sensitive internal matters. WikiLeaks has moved forward its publication schedule in response to the government’s post-coup purges. Insisting it is neither pro- nor anti-government, WikiLeaks said its goal was to serve “the truth”.”
WikiLeaks said the release of 300,000 emails, with several thousand attached files, is just the first in the series and encompasses 762 mailboxes from “A” to “I”.
One of the emails reportedly contains a database of the phone numbers of AKP deputies.
A few hours after the release, WikiLeaks tweeted a screenshot showing the database to be blocked in Turkey, claiming that Ankara “ordered [the release] to be blocked nationwide”.
Asking for public support WikiLeaks said: “We ask that Turks are ready with censorship bypassing systems such as TorBrowser and uTorrent. And that everyone else is ready to help them bypass censorship and push our links through the censorship to come.”
The Anonymous hacktivist group released a statement of support for the latest Wikileaks exposure of AKP files, saying that it “suspect[ed]” the Turkish government to be behind the latest Wikileaks Ddos attacks.
At least 50,000 people have been rounded up, sacked or suspended from their jobs following last week’s attempted coup.
Sourced from Independent, Featured image courtesy: AP
