Activism or Sensationalism – Erdogan Emails
It’s a pretty turbulent in Turkey at the moment, with many people genuinely worrying about it’s future as a democratic republic. The failed military coup has ignited all sectors of the country and President Erdogan has seized the opportunity to round up his enemies and imprison them.
So it’s obviously a pretty dramatic time for WikiLeaks to release what’s it’s calling the Erdogan Emails which it says is leaked from the AKP, the ruling party in Turkey. There are approximately 300,000 which are being released in stages, you can find them on the WikiLeaks website in a searchable database.
The response has been predictable, the WikiLeaks site has been blocked in Turkey and the activists around the world have shouted and tweeted about the censorship of the Turkish Government. Although people in Turkey are well versed in the use of Open DNS, VPNs and proxies so this has very little effect.
They are of course right, but it doesn’t take much for the Turkish authorities to start banning stuff, in fact it doesn’t mean anything in itself. Which in this case seems to be the problem, this leak doesn’t seem to actually contain much more than personal information of ordinary Turkish women. I have had a decent look and found nothing but apparently others have been combing through this stuff for days without finding anything vaguely relevant to power (and/or the abuse of it).
There is however a lot of personal private information of ordinary Turkish voters such as the home addresses, phone numbers or women in most of the Turkish voters list. Also identifying information such as the Turkish Citizen ID whether they’re in the AKP and similar – in truth it’s the sort of information of much more use to Identity thieves and stalkers than freedom fighters.
There is no doubt that this information could be used to cause significant damage to innocent individuals, so was WikiLeaks right to publish this?
It’s easy to argue the case that WikiLeaks isn’t responsible for deciding what is or isn’t released. Plus the resources needed to individually check and verify the data fully is probably beyond the organisation. However surely there should be some cursory checks before releasing the personal details of so many innocent Turkish women. It really is difficult to get passed the mundane and personal feel to these emails, much of it just simple correspondence from Turkish citizens.
The reality is that the information was probably already available before WikiLeaks released it, including all the people likely to try and exploit this information. The opposite argument suggests that once information is already released then it’s best for as many people possible to be aware, the victims are better forewarned than ignorant.
Overall though I think an organisation like WikiLeaks should be careful that the information released is in the public interest, perhaps we might find something in the coming months in these emails too.