Skip to main content

Turkey blocks document sharing sites to stem incriminating email leak

turkey social media arrests erdogan
Recep Tayyip Erdogan/Flickr
The government of Turkey has struck again in imposing online censorship, this time by blocking or restricting Dropbox, Github, Microsoft OneDrive, and Google Drive in a bid to stem the spread of emails concerning President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his son-in-law, Berat Albayrak, who is also a government minister.

RedHack, a hacking group, leaked almost 60,000 emails, or 17GB of data, related to the government by hacking Erdogan and Albayrak’s email accounts. The anti-government hackers leaked the data, which goes back some 16 years, in order to detail how the authorities were using pro-government trolls to target opposition media or critical talk online. The hackers also demanded the release of dissidents from prison who are being held without trial.

Related Videos

Instead of meeting these demands, the Turkish government moved to ban document sharing services like Dropbox at the ISP level, to ban media coverage of the hack, and to demand Twitter suspend RedHack’s account (which it did). By blocking the likes of Dropbox, the Erdoğan administration hopes it will cut out the dissemination of this damning evidence.

The controversy had been brewing for weeks but Turkish internet users first starting noticing this latest block over the weekend and took to social media to criticize the government and draw attention to the issue.

Microsoft @Onedrive now blocked in #Turkey, joining @GoogleDrive and @Dropbox in nationwide cloud storage shutdownhttps://t.co/xObmf8D00j pic.twitter.com/Kmc8761iH9

— Turkey Blocks (@TurkeyBlocks) October 8, 2016

As of this writing, the blocks are still in place on most of the sites but restrictions on Google Drive have been relaxed. The Register reports that Google complied with a takedown request regarding the leaked emails. Many of the larger ISPs are complying with the block but some smaller local ISPs across the country have flown under the radar; their customers can still get on Dropbox.

Dropbox has not commented. Turkey Blocks, a website that catalogs internet freedom and censorship in the country, added that there is still no official documentation from the government that outlines its reason for the blocks, as is usually the case.

Turkey has a history of censoring the web when a political crisis erupts. This summer during the coup that attempted to overthrow the government, social media sites were blacked out or throttled. A similar incident occurred after a terrorist attack at an Istanbul airport in June. These censorship practices have earned the Turkish government the nickname, “bastion of Internet censorship.”

Internet guerrillas: Inside the DIY broadband revolution with NYC Mesh
nyc mesh guerrilla internet network screen shot 2022 02 20 at 5 53 39 am

Toby Bloch doesn’t look like your average internet installation technician. Instead of a uniform with a corporate logo embroidered on it, he wears worn-in jeans and a thick canvas jacket. Instead of a van, he drives a Subaru -- the back of which is stuffed to the gills with a disorganized pile of hand tools, cables, and odd electronic devices with antennas sticking out of them. And unlike most technicians, he isn’t going to earn a dime for the appointment he’s headed to in Brooklyn.

But oddly enough, that’s precisely the point. Bloch doesn’t operate like a normal internet install tech because he isn’t one. He doesn’t work for Comcast or Spectrum or Verizon or any other large internet service provider (ISP). He’s a volunteer at NYC Mesh: A guerrilla internet provider that helps residents get online without paying a monthly fee to the aforementioned telecom companies.

Read more
How Big Jet TV won the internet
A plane landing during Storm Eunice in the UK in February 2022.

As millions of people hunkered down at home on Friday during the U.K.'s worst storm in 32 years, aviation enthusiast Jerry Dyer jumped in his van and drove to London’s Heathrow Airport to livestream passenger jets coming in to land in the challenging conditions.

Within a few hours of Dyer launching his Big Jet TV livestream from the top of his vehicle at the end of Heathrow’s runway 27L, social media started to take notice, with shares and retweets pushing his audience to as high as 200,000 people during the eight-hour livestream.

Read more
Skype now supports 911 calls in the U.S.
iPhone with the Skype mobile app loading screen.

Skype has updated its mobile and desktop apps to allow emergency calling in the U.S. for the first time in its 18-year history. Calls to 911 are also possible via Skype’s web-based service, notes for the recently released Skype 8.80 showed.

Emergency calling from Skype could come in handy if you find yourself in a tricky situation without a phone but have a computer close by, or if phone lines are down but you can get online.

Read more