What have you done for the technology industry today?

Yesterday the first thing I read was a Facebook entry saying “This week he [Elon Musk] sold $14 billion of orders for a revolutionary new car and successfully landed a rocket on a floating drone ship. What did you do?” 

Since then I have been trying to justify my existence but have not been able to find a good enough reason why I should exist in the same world with a man like that. 

It must feel great to know that history books will be talking about you in a very positive manner. What I really like about Mr. Musk is that he did not use any slave labor at any point of his career, unlike Steve Jobs.  If Jobs is Thomas Edison then Musk is Nikola Tesla. 

While the technology news was filled with Mr. Musk globally, locally we were talking about very different issues. The leak of 50 million Turkish citizen’s private information was still the main issue. The government suggested the leak was caused by the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) branch in the Aegean province of İzmir. The officials said they had to give all the information about voters to all the parties who would take part in the past elections. So according the government’s story, the voters’ (50 million people) private information was given to the CHP, along with other parties, but some people in the CHP’s İzmir branch leaked it. 

The government says they have proof. 

If it is so, as a technology journalist and a citizen whose private information is on the Internet, I want justice. I want the government to act responsibly and establish a case against those who are responsible, if they really have the proof that they claim to have. 

If the government won’t act on it, I will assume they are lying to get away from the issue and blaming their opponent for nothing. 

The second biggest issue is about Machinery and Chemical Industry Institution (MKE) factory manager Mustafa Tanrıverdi, who tried to sell information about MP-5 and MPT-76 rifles to a Turkish businessman who owns a gun factory in the U.S.  MKE has been the main supplier of Turkish Armed Forces, under various names, since its establishment and gained its current legal status as a stage organization in 1950. MKE, with its 12 modern factories and 7000 experienced personnel, keeps its range of production in four main groups: Ammunition, rockets, weapons, explosives/powders and pyrotechnic products. 

Actually the MP-5 is not really as local as the news claim. The Heckler & Koch MP5 (from German:

Maschinenpistole 5, meaning machine pistol 5) is a 9mm submachine gun of German design, developed in the 1960s by a team of engineers from the German small arms manufacturer Heckler & Koch GmbH (H&K) of Oberndorf am Neckar. There are over 100 variants of the MP5, including a semi-automatic version. The MP5 is one of the most widely used submachine guns in the world, having been adopted by 40 nations and numerous military, law enforcement, intelligence and security organizations. It is widely used by SWAT teams in North America.

So we are talking about a variant of the gun. But nonetheless, a national gun factory’s general manager should have known better to sell information about any type of military technology. I will keep you updated with the result of this case. 

I really would like to report about good news such as the one I wrote about at the beginning of this article. For me to do that, you all have to work hard and be honest. So ask yourselves: What have I done for the technology industry today that Ersu Ablak could write about in his column next week?