NASA MSFC Employee Tries To Make Serkan Golge's Past Disappear
Keith’s note: You all may be familiar with Serkan Golge, a NASA JSC employee who has been imprisoned in Turkey for bogus reasons for a long time. A NASAWatch reader noticed that someone at NASA is using the agency’s Internet access to make changes to Golge’s Wikipedia page – apparently in an effort to diminish his role at NASA. Golge was a full-time contractor with an office next to the MCC. But if you look at the edits it would seem that someone who wanted to minimize his role changed his page to say “working on projects.” instead. There were two edits originating from 156.68.64.53 on 4 September 2018. Have a look at the before and after edits here. And another one here.
The NASA IP address where these edits originated is 156.68.64.53
IP Address – 156.68.64.53
City – Redstone Arsenal
State/Region – Alabama
Country Code – United States
Postal Code – 35812
ISP – National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Time Zone -05:00
NASA’s CIO Office is mostly useless. Let’s see if they look into this. They should. I sent an email to NASA HQ and MSFC CIO offices and NASA HQ PAO. Lets see if they respond.
– One Of Your NASA Coworkers Is Still In a Turkish Jail Cell, earlier post
– NASA Employee Imprisoned By Turkey For No Reason, earlier post
Thanks for pointing that out. Wikipedia only works because people can notice this sort of thing and correct it. I have to say the original text, “works for [[NASA]] as a senior research scientist” wasn’t right, but the anonymous edit (of September 4th) also wasn’t right. I’m comfortable with today’s edit to “worked as a full-time [[NASA]] contractor on NASA’s proposed [[manned mission to Mars]] with an office next to the [[Christopher_C._Kraft_Jr._Mission_Control_Center| Mission Control Center]].” Unfortunately, the inline citations are poorly arranged, so I can’t tell if there is any reference supporting things like the location of his office.
Thanks for doing this, Keith. I salute you.
Sad that he is still imprisoned without much help from State department. Are we sure he is still even alive? Thanks for keeping shining a spotlight on this tragedy.
Yes, and his release appears to be next on their agenda, along with other Americans they are holding in their jails.
https://www.usnews.com/news…
After Pastor’s Release, U.S. Presses Turkey on Ex-NASA Scientist, Other Detainees
Oct. 17, 2018, at 7:59 a.m.
“WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday urged Turkey to release a Turkish-U.S. citizen and former NASA scientist, among other detainees, days after Ankara turned over U.S. evangelical pastor Andrew Brunson.”
But I had assumed he was still a NASA scientist. Perhaps someone would be able to clarify that.
I’m having trouble with the details of his employment myself. It looks like he works for the University of Houston, on a full-time contract from NASA. And as an on-site contractor at that. The new stories about him being a NASA scientist are not at all surprising. The distinction between a NASA employee and a full-time contractor with an office at JSC is a relatively subtle one (at least for people on the outside…) As far as his current status is concerned, I _hope_ he’s still on the books but I haven’t seen anything about it. He has been in a foreign prison for over two years, so technically, he hasn’t been working on NASA contracts. But, under the circumstances, I’d expect the University of Houston to put him on indefinite leave and have someone else covering his NASA-contracted work. But that’s not a detail I’d expect the press to focus on.
The Turkish government outed the Saudi’s for killing a journalist. What they’re doing to people who are even suspected of objecting to or associating with anyone objecting to Erdogan’s dictatorial behavior isn’t much different. The government of Turkey should be ashamed of themselves. Erdogan needs to look in the mirror and ask himself if he wants to be like what the Saudi leadership showed themselves to be with the murder of Mr. Khashoggi. Serkan Golge is one of many who need to be released.
The IP address at NASA is probably the IP address of the local NASA Internet Web Proxy that all their http traffic passes through. Someone at NASA would need to check the web proxy logs and determine which PC workstation IP address actually initiated the web session with wikipedia.
Yes, but it is more or less trivial to have two internet connections, one for work and one from things you post as on your own and as a private citizen. A NASA employee can do a hack job on a Wikipedia article without getting NASA involved, but only if he uses a personal account and internet access he is personally paying for. If he uses NASA resources and does it on government time, that either means NASA supports it or that he is misusing government funds. NASA should be able to prevent that sort of misuse of funds.
Unless NASA installs filters on their internet web proxy server, they can’t block the access. If they did filter it, then all users at NASA Redstone would lose access to Wikipedia. It’s an all or nothing thing. Many users in large organizations aren’t aware their access to the internet is being monitored. The congressional staffer changing Wikipedia was caught the same way. That said, in the era of smartphones you can just sit at you desk and use your smartphone with cellular data to access the internet. Off course your carrier is logging your access to Internet web sites too. And Wikipedia will log that the access cane from the cellular carriers network. That’s when the FBI and court orders for carrier logging records show up.
Amateurs!
If you mean leaving fingerprints on the Wikipedia edit, I agree. I actually admire good con games and gafts but when they are incompetently done, they are just second rate fraud.