Turkey blocks web drives after email leak

Hackers claimed to have got at personal email accounts of Energy Minister Berat Albayrak

Access to online storage systems, including DropBox, GitHub and Microsoft OneDrive, was blocked in Turkey on Saturday.

The Turkish government imposed the blocks after a hacktivist group leaked emails it said it had stolen from the nation's energy minister.

The Redhack group had threatened to publish the information unless left-wing dissidents were released.

In total, more than 57,000 emails were put online by the group.

Court papers

News about the block was broken by the Turkey Blocks digital rights group, which monitors net censorship in the county.

It said that Google's Drive storage service had also initially been included in the list of sites blocked but this block had been lifted soon after.

The blocks stayed in place on the other web companies until late on Saturday as links to the email cache were removed.

Turkey Blocks said customers of the TTNet, UyduNet and Turkcell ISPs and others had all been cut off from the sites.

It is not clear how effective the block proved as many people on social media said it was possible to reach the affected sites by using a VPN.

Turkey has not explicitly confirmed that the blocks were imposed.

However, journalists widely shared copies of court documents detailing action against the Redhack members that sought to suppress distribution of the 20GB email cache.

The action is the latest in a series of efforts by the Turkish government to clamp down on social media use in the country.

In late 2015, Turkey imposed a 150,000 lira (£33,000) fine on Twitter for failing to remove what the government called "terrorist propaganda".