Turkey's President's EMail Hacked

For John, BLUF:  While the South China Sea is a problem, Turkey is more of a problem right now, until this settles out.  Oh, and the Baltic States.  Someone suggested this last half year of President Obama's Presidency could be a dangerous time.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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WIKILEAKS DUMPS ‘ERDOGAN EMAILS’ AFTER TURKEY’S FAILED COUP

The author of this Wired article is Mr Andy Greensburg and the publication date is 19 July.

The good news is that something like this couldn't happen here.

Here is the lede plus one:

OVER THE WEEKEND, the Internet may have saved the regime of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as protestors organized online to fight a military coup, and Erdogan himself addressed the nation via Apple’s Facetime video-calling app.  Today, however, Erdogan may remember that he doesn’t particularly like the Internet, after all—as hundreds of thousands of his ruling party’s private correspondences allegedly spill onto the web.

On Tuesday, WikiLeaks published what it’s calling the Erdoğan Emails, a searchable collection of 294,548 emails it says are leaked from the AKP, Turkey’s ruling political party, and the organization president Erdoğan led before he was elected president.  Turkish citizens and the world community are still struggling to understand the context of Turkey’s coup and the crackdown that’s followed, all of which could make this alleged Erdoğan leak more significant than the secret-spilling group’s average data dump.  However, at the time of writing, it’s not at all clear yet what exactly the Turkish-language megaleak contains, or if the emails are what Wikileaks claims they are.

The coup in Turkey is troubling at several levels, including that members of the military thought they needed to invoke the old theory that the military was the defender of the constitution.  But also because the situation had gotten to this point.  President Erdoğan is known for having said, when Mayor of Istanbul, that Democracy was like a street car.  When you get to your stop you get off.  And given that the European Union has stiff-armed Turkey from the beginning, one imagines that nothing in that area will improve.  And then what direction will Turkey go from here?  The rest of us in the West (Turkey is, in fact, a Western nation) may find Turkey drifting away, perhaps reducing its support against Daesh and against the Syrian Government, and maybe even leave NATO.  If it continues down a Salafist path, will it begin to side with those who have a more rigid view of how society should operate?  Quite possible.

There are a lot of questions out there.

Regards  —  Cliff