Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has been banned in Turkey after publishing 300,000 emails from the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) in response to the failed military coup in the country.
WikiLeaks said it had the emails, which date from 2010 to July this year, for a while but sped up publication following the attempt to topple president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party. The website said the emails came from a source that, “is not connected, in any way, to the elements behind the attempted coup, or to a rival political party or state.”
In response the Turkish Telecommunications Communications Board said it had taken an “administrative measure” against WikiLeaks. The Independent says this is the term it usually uses when it bans access to a website or service. The WikiLeaks Twitter account posted a screenshot it claims shows access blocked from within Turkey.
The Guardian added that a “senior Turkish official said the ban was imposed on the WikiLeaks content because it constituted stolen or illegally obtained information.”
As well as being blocked in Turkey, WikiLeaks said it was hit with cyber attacks in the days before releasing the documents.
And according to a Twitter account which claims to be part of the Anonymous hacktivism group, “Wikileaks has sustained DDos attacks after announcing they will release e-mails (300,000), docs (500,000) of the Turkish government, and we suspect the Turkish government will try to censor any information Wikileaks will release,” the group said in a statement.
"We ask of the people in Turkey to take interest in the material Wikileaks is about to release and to not dismiss it because a leader tells them. We advocate the use of anti-censorship tools as Tor, I2P or VPN,” the statement added.
This echoes a call from WikiLeaks for people in Turkey to bypass the restrictions. “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."
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