WikiLeaks Put Women in Turkey in Danger | Hacker News Reader

WikiLeaks Put Women in Turkey in Danger

huffingtonpost.com

57 pointsleephillips39 comments

Wikileaks statement:

"@Sulliview @TheWorldPost Please issue a correction. The story is a fabrication. WikiLeaks did not publish the databases concerned"

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/757940726198042624

Wikileaks is also smearing the author, calling her an Erdogan apologist who is working from Turkey. In fact, she is affiliated with Harvard and the University of North Carolina and is an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and certainly doesn't seem to be an Erdogan apologist. Wikileaks also blocked the author on Twitter, where they continue to defame her.

The attachments have excel files which are effectively databases since they contain the addresses and phone numbers of private citizens (i.e. not members of the Turkish govt).

To see the corrections made to the article to reflect this information, see the following link.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160726000303/https://trln7wscq...

{+This blog has been updated to reflect that WikiLeaks promoted links to the+} {+databases via its social media accounts but did not host those databases on its+} {+own site.+}

So they tweeted / or retweeted it essentially?

yes, the tweet is still live: (but the linked url is taken down so I don't see any reason not to share this tweet)

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/756147693802643456

I think the misunderstanding (if there is any) is that they share this link by calling it 'theirs'. So I suppose that would be the reason the author was referring to them.

They loved wikileaks until it went after Hilary. Of course.

This is a pointless, content-free comment. The author makes specific allegations which can easily be checked and discussed on their own merits. None of them have anything to do with Hillary Clinton.

The allegations should not even be surprising since Wikileaks does not make a habit of scrubbing or even reviewing in detail the documents they post. That's not really their role, in their minds--they see themselves as a platform or conduit, not editors.

Who are "they"?

The editorial staff at the Huffington post.

There is a lot of confusion surrounding this, which I can hopefully clarify. Wikileaks released a dump of email obtained from a hack of the Turkish ruling party (AKP), which can be found on their main page.

It turned out that the source of these documents was Phineas Fisher (@GammaGroupPR on twitter), the hacker who previously released documents on FinFisher, Hacking Team, and a few others. Due to some miscommunication with WikiLeaks, he was actually still in the AKP network when the WL release happened:

> I hacked AKP (the ruling party in Turkey) because I support the society people

> are trying to build in Rojava and Bakur [1], and they're being attacked by

> Turkey [2][3][4]. I don't see leaking as an end in itself, so I was talking with

> people in Rojava and Bakur to see how best to use the access I'd gotten. There

> was a miscommunication between some of them and someone gave a copy of the first

> file I'd downloaded (which had about half of @akparti.org.tr's email up to that

> point) to wikileaks. They quickly corrected the miscommunication and asked

> wikileaks to hold off on publishing it, but wikileaks decided to publish now

> anyway with the international attention from the recent coup attempt. To be fair

> to wikileaks, they didn't know I was still in AKP's network downloading files at

> the time they announced they were publishing [5], but they did know that the

> source who had given them the file was asking them to wait...

I am not certain whether the voter database Zeynep Tufekci described is contained in the WikiLeaks dump (e.g. as an attachment). It is definitely contained in the larger AKP dump released by Phineas Fisher.

Here's a writeup on what is contained in the full AKP dump, which confirms the claims made by the Huffington Post article. I have done some light checking against my own copy of the dump and verified that what they say seems to be correct.

https://medium.com/@crymora/when-leaking-turns-into-dumping-...

Note: I am deliberately not linking directly to the source documents, because I agree that their full and unredacted release was dangerous. You can no doubt find them if you search around, but I'd urge you to think about the possible repercussions carefully before propagating it.

This article doesn't make it clear what was actually leaked. Was it the actual private info or links to it? Was this info already publicly available? Honestly this article seems like retaliation for the earlier DNC leak and is heavy on accusations, light on facts.

Anyone who has been paying attention knows that WikiLeaks has always been careless about sharing private information that puts ordinary people at risk. The only time they've been somewhat responsible is when they partnered with newspapers who know better.

The DNC leak for example includes lots of social security numbers and credit card numbers. If they cared at all they could have done a search and replace to get most of them.

> The DNC leak for example includes lots of social security numbers and credit card numbers.

Someone should teach people that you don't put SSN, CC, and other information in emails.

Also, best not to put in emails things that you'd later not like made public (like getting angry at people and writing things you'd regret).

I believe people got fired for what they said in the Sony hacks.

Yes, there is plenty of blame to go around. This doesn't let Wikileaks off the hook.

I would rather they didn't manipulate or censor their leaks. I'm sure I'm not alone in that.

Would you mind sharing your SSN, credit card numbers, address, and date of birth?

We don't yet know if that information will be useful to the world, because we didn't really look at it, but we'd like to have it out in the public record - for completion's sake. I'm sure it'll be valuable to someone.

I realize that you may not be involved in any impropriety, but you may have at one point e-mailed someone who is, or someone who works for someone who is.

No more secrets, right?

You should blame the people who made the leaks necessary, not the people doing the leak. Again, manipulating the data in anyway undermines their legitimacy.

I'm not sure it ever was "necessary" for Wikileaks to indiscriminately release large collections of emails sent to the Turkish government, especially if the HuffPo report is correct and it pertains largely to ordinary citizens' messages.

"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is even less true of releasing citizens' sensitive information to the entire world (including factions in a country where people are being killed over their political actions) than it is of allowing governments to collect and share it.

Just because some of the things revealed by Wikileaks are very much in the public interest doesn't make it an entirely benign actor.

If the data exists it may get leaked. It's up to people to protect themselves through encryption and not messaging bad actors. If someone makes malicious actions post-leak then they should be dealt with. Information wants to be free. There's no fighting it.

How exactly do you plan to police Wikileaks? Twitter shaming? Thankfully they've proven to be immune to that.

What makes a leak "necessary"?

For better or worse, this group believes that practically anything secret should be leaked.

A leak is necessary when it demonstrates the government or the leaders are lying. There's zero democracy when the citizens aren't told what's going on.

But this is not the only information that wikileaks is leaking, so they seem to ascribe to another definition.

Not really, no.

Everything Wikileaks has leaked has been something that shouldn't have been secret.

In some cases we wish it would have stayed secret, but that's our fault (collectively) for breaking our own laws. For instance, had we properly investigated the behavior of our troops in Iraq there wouldn't have been a need to blow the whistle on the situation.

Supposing that the leak is necessary, what makes it necessary to release PII?

I'm sure you've communicated with people who have done things, or work for people who have done things that are necessary to be leaked. Please explain why this means that your PII should be released.

Who defines 'necessity'?

The purpose of the leak is to reveal information the public should see, which is useful in analysis of the org. Seeing xxx-xx-xxxx vs an innocent persons SSN doesn't change the leak.

The article is incoherent because it originally accused Wikileaks of publishing the documents but was then corrected to state that Wikileaks only linked to documents published by third parties.

"WikiLeaks should take down its links to all personal information as soon as possible." Do they now how the Internet works?

> a special database of almost all adult women in Turkey.

Now I'm wondering who put this together and why.

Yeah, this was my first thought. Things that aren't addressed in the article: why did this database exist and was it even legal for the government to collect and store this information?

Is this what they are referring to? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11420139

Sounds like an accidental oversight, but one I'll gladly accept for the preservation of free-distribution of information; a force that's essential to democracy.

Much in the same way that a well-meaning country have police officers that shoot innocent people, or engage in bad wars, but that misstep doesn't invalidate the whole.

"Bloody and brutal coup"... oh the hiperbole.

The brutality seems to have been mostly by Erdogan supporters; though this is probably not what the article was trying to convey...

The casualty numbers are out there.. no need for "seems"

Anti-coup casualties: 161 civilians and police officers

Pro-coup casualties: 104 military

I'm no fan of Erdogan's "reforms" after the coup, but there's no need to alter the narrative in favour of a preferred agenda.

"People of Turkey, go be human shields for my illegal reign by standing in front of the tanks."

Erdogan was willing to let any number of people be killed to prop up his illegal reign. The soldiers in the coup were humanitarians who were unwilling to kill indiscriminately.

By the time Erdogan is done purging the country his body count will be three orders of magnitude higher.

Where do these numbers come from?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com