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. The emails date back to 2010, with the most recent marked July 6 2016, a week before the military coup attempt.
Advertisement
But the site’s administrators continued to post on Twitter, promising to release 300,000 internal emails from Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party on Tuesday.
Wikileaks has promised it will publish 300,000 emails and 500,000 documents related to the Turkish government.
WikiLeaks’ release of the emails also comes at a tense time for relations between the United States and Turkey, a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation member and a potential ally in a fight against the self-proclaimed Islamic State to Turkey’s south in Syria.
In a statement, WikiLeaks said it moved forward publication of the documents “in response to the government’s post-coup purges”.
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”.
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”. It added that the release of the documents would both help and harm the AKP, and urged Turkish citizens to bypass censorship by turning to the encrypted TorBrowser and peer-to-peer file-sharing program uTorrent in order to view the database.
The Turkish government blocked access to the WikiLeaks website, according to BTK, the country’s telecommunications regulator.
Founded by Julian Assange, WikiLeaks publishes leaked material, mostly from governments.
Advertisement
“We are unsure of the true origin of the attack”.
