How hacktivist group RedHack subverted the Turkish government's notorious censorship tactics in order to release a government email archive
The Turkish government blocked Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and even Github to stop leaked emails of Energy Minister, Berat Albayrak …
Context & Ripple Effects
Turkey has spent 2015 building a censorship record: it blocked Twitter, YouTube and Facebook over a hostage photo in April, threatened to block Twitter outright unless it removed a newspaper account circulating leaked documents in January, and cut off Reddit under its controversial censorship law in November. Each round targeted a specific service or account.
The RedHack release of Energy Minister Berat Albayrak's emails marks an escalation: rather than blocking one social network, Ankara blocked Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and GitHub simultaneously — treating general-purpose cloud storage and code hosting as leak vectors and taking down infrastructure millions of Turks rely on to suppress one document set.
First-order effects
- Turkish users of Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and GitHub lose access overnight — developers, students and businesses that depend on those platforms for work are collateral damage in a fight over one minister's inbox.
- The Albayrak archive keeps circulating anyway: RedHack deliberately routed the leak through channels the government had to take whole services offline to chase, trading censorship reach for maximum disruption.
Second-order effects
- The four platforms now face the choice Turkey forced earlier on Twitter — comply with takedown demands or be blocked wholesale — and GitHub's role as core developer infrastructure makes a blanket ban costly enough that Ankara's own tech sector becomes a lobbying constituency against its government.
- Each wholesale block raises the price of the next one: after the earlier threat to block Twitter over leaked documents, moving to multi-platform cloud shutdowns signals that leak response now defaults to infrastructure-level action rather than per-account requests.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, censorship migrates from content moderation to network architecture — states treating any platform that can host a leaked file as a chokepoint, which pushes leaks toward distributed or peer-to-peer distribution that is harder to block at all.
- Turkey's posture is two-sided by design: the same state running defensive blocks runs offensive operations abroad, as its DNS-hijacking campaign against EU and Middle East governments shows — normalization of infrastructure-level control domestically and offensively reinforces each other.
The trend: State censorship is escalating from blocking individual services and accounts to shutting down shared cloud infrastructure wholesale whenever a leak touches it.