They are natural allies in the fight to make government secrets available to the public. But on Thursday, Snowden publicly criticized Wikileaks’s indiscriminate approach to releasing data. Wikileaks’s response was quick and below-the-belt, accusing Snowden of shilling for Hillary Clinton’s favor in the hope of receiving a pardon.
@Snowden Opportunism won't earn you a pardon from Clinton & curation is not censorship of ruling party cash flows https://t.co/4FeygfPynk
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 28, 2016
The public feud is striking, considering their record of collaboration, including Wikileaks’s assistance in helping Snowden find a place to live in exile. And Snowden, for what it’s worth, is no fan of Clinton.
No matter your party, the decline of political culture apparent in the words "Clinton versus Trump" is the tragedy of our times.
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) July 27, 2016
A clue to the discord lies beyond the U.S. election, in Turkey. Wikileaks’s much-hyped “Erdrogan emails,” released after the failed Turkish coup, appear to be a bust. Instead of government communications, the trove of 300,000 emails included links to databases containing the personal information of citizens, including more than 20 million female voters’ addresses and phone numbers.
In online skirmishes over the Turkey emails, Wikileaks again demonstrated that it is unable to accept criticism of its methods without accusing the other party of ulterior motives, even if that person, in this case Turkish-born sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, is a prominent critic of Erdrogan and his government.
@zeynep Correct your baseless story and stop running flak for Erodogan or we will file a formal complaint with HuffintonPost & others.
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 25, 2016