Adventures of the Dread Pirate Emmeline May

Following a post about MedicAlert, and my vague ponderings about whether it's worth having one for a penicillin allergy, I clicked on the 'job opportunities' link and OMGWTFBBQ I was directed to a site apparently written by Turkish 'Cyber Soldiers'. How exciting!

The English translation isn't terribly good, so it's hard to work out exactly what happened, but it looks like every March 18th they hack various websites to honour all the soldiers who died in a particular conflict, called in Turkey 'Çanakkale Savaşları', aka the Battle of Gallipoli, which had a huge impact on the history of Turkey, from what I've read.

This is the link for the MedicAlert jobs page - http://www.medicalert.org.uk/jobs.asp, which then automatically diverts to this URL - http://site.mynet.com/hewew245/canakkale.htm
and here are screencaps of the hacked pages: 1, 2 and 3.

At first I failed to see exactly how hacking random websites was a good way to honour lives of soldiers, or as an act of remembrance, and then I realised that I'd spent a good 10 minutes reading up about the Battle of Gallipoli and finding information about it on the web as I knew very little about it. So I guess it does work, in a way.

I particularly like the inscription on a monument to those that died at Gallipoli:

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives… you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets where they lie side by side here in this country of ours… You the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. Having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.
—Mustafa Kemal

But as gaius_octavian said, "Wow, hacking a medical charity, their mothers must be very proud".

I can see their logic, hack a site, people will come to your site and read what you're trying to tell people, maybe learn something. But I can't help feeling their task would be better accomplished hacking more relevant sites, and making the page you end up at a little more informative, and a little less threatening. But then, I'm not a hacker, what do I know?