Whatever else you might say about WikiLeaks, its hard to think of an institution that squanders goodwill more efficiently. Even the people most sympathetic to its aims and ideals have had a hard time defending it recently. Just over the last couple of weeks, whoever ran its Twitter account posted tweets that are either anti-Semitic or deeply weird (the fact that WikiLeaks founder and head Julian Assange ranted about Jewish reporters to a British journalist in 2011 certainly makes it harder to view the posts in a charitable light). Then it was revealed that some of the Democratic National Committee documents it leaked last week  timed intentionally to do maximum damage to Hillary Clintons presidential chances, according to Assange  contained personal information, including credit card and Social Security numbers, of DNC donors.

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When she checked into what journalists in Turkey were saying about the leak on Twitter, and looked into the emails herself, she found that indeed, WikiLeaks hadnt actually released a trove of government emails. Rather, it had released what appears to be big chunks of archives from various far-from-top-secret online discussion groups. One such Google Group, called All Together for Turkey (Turkiye-icin-el-ele@googlegroups.com), has 77,000 members and is dedicated to general political discussion, she said. Elsewhere in the document dumps are thousands of mentions of other, similar-sounding Google and Yahoo groups  there are many emails containing the address eTurkiyeyizBiz@googlegroups.com, for example, which Tufekci said translates roughly to We are Turkey, and which looks like a forum dedicated to sharing news stories. Overall, Tufekci said, she and other activists have now been poring over the archives for a week and theres no sign anyone has found emails that werent taken from online discussion groups (though she was quick to add that she cant rule out there are more meaningful emails buried somewhere in the huge stash).

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