Goldmine of black market in Russian data
By Charles Clover in Moscow
Published: November 24 2009 17:59 | Last updated: November 24 2009 17:59
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| Moscow’s Gorbushka Market, where CDs containing anything from arrest records and addresses to bank details, tax data and flight records are on sale |
Gorbushka Market, just outside central Moscow, does a thriving trade in any electronics good you could want: mobile phones, plasma television sets, the latest DVDs, and, if you ask to see them, software peddlers will show potential clients a list of “databases”.
These consist of CDs with names such as “Ministry of Interior – Federal Road Safety Service”, “Tax Service” and “Federal Anti-Narcotics Service” and cost about $100 apiece. Each contains confidential information gathered by Russian law enforcement or government agencies: anything from arrest records, personal addresses, passport numbers, phone records or address books to bank account details, known associates, tax data and flight records are on offer.
In some malls these are sold openly, but in Gorbushka, after a recent police sweep, sellers are more discreet; one merchant gives shoppers a list of available titles and offers to burn the discs for Rbs3,000 ($104, €70, £63) on the spot. He said there was no moral dilemma about selling personal information. “There is a market and we fill it. It’s not a question mark for me,” he said.
The confidential information is a goldmine for criminals, spies and journalists – but most of all for the the police and bureaucrats that sell the information to computer hackers, who mass produce the CDs and sell them openly through vendors in electronics markets or online.
The size of the black market for information is estimated in the tens of millions of dollars and shows a unique side of the Russian state apparatus – one that has painstakingly tried to maintain a monopoly on information but nonetheless is so corrupt that it cannot. Journalists, while nominally the lowest in the pecking order of the semi-authoritarian state, actually have access to more information about the authorities than in perhaps any other country.
“American journalists must be envious of how open we are in Russia,” joked Sergei Kanev, an investigative reporter at Novaya Gazeta, an opposition newspaper, who has written articles about the information trade and occasionally uses the databases in his reporting. He says the main users of the information black market are criminals. He has covered cases of blackmail where extortionists used records of reported rapes or prostitution convictions to blackmail women.
Booting up a database of narcotics offenders, Mr Kanev says: “Look here, you have photos, addresses, phone numbers, what kind of drugs they use. It’s very common for con artists to take this database, call up a family member and tell them their son or daughter has been arrested for drugs. They pretend to be policemen and for 10,000 roubles they offer to let the kid go. The parents know their kid is a user, they think its true, and so they pay up. It’s all a trick”.
But the corruption of the state occasionally works to the advantage of those who are working to change it – giving citizens the resources to spy on corrupt authorities, in an odd reversal of roles for a semi-authoritarian state such as Russia.
For example, reporters investigating the murder of Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006 used a database of flight records known as “Sirena” as the basis to link an officer in the Federal Security Service, who is suspected of being an accomplice, to a hired killer who is serving a 12-year sentence for attempted murder in a separate case and is a relative of two other suspects.
The database allegedly shows the FSB officer, Pavel Ryaguzov, flying to Ingushetia with the convicted hit man, Lom Ali Gaitukayev, and his own boss, an FSB colonel.
The men sat together, and registered for the flight at the same time, suggesting they were travelling together. While the information does not prove anything, it does show an uncomfortably close relationship between the FSB and organised crime. The details of the trip were also backed up by an eyewitness account.
Mr Kanev broke this story in February. Mr Ryaguzov was acquitted in a related case by a jury that month, but the acquittal was overturned by the supreme court. A new trial is expected soon.
The black market trade in information is illegal but tolerated in Russia – as long as it stays under the surface. Selling in discreet stalls in shopping malls is tacitly accepted. But one recent effort to set up an online black market database failed – in 2008 the website radarix.com was operational for less than a week – registered to a Panamanian national and hosted on a US server – before being shut down.
Many large corporations maintain their own security departments, all of which use information databases. However, most of the big players have direct relationships to state officials and do not rely on commercial or black market providers of such information, said Sergei Minaev, general director of Special Information Systems, one of Russia’s largest legitimate providers of information for commercial purposes.
Mr Minaev and others question the value of much of the information available on the black market. Mr Minaev said that despite appearances, many of the databases were out of date. “Most of it is junk. All these databases you buy on the street are old, and three out of 10 items are wrong.” Others have raised the possibility that some of the information is deliberately falsified
He said that the passage of tough laws in 2002 didn’t wipe out the trade, but simply sent it underground. “The authorities destroyed the black market without creating a white one,” he said. “They created no alternative for people who legitimately need information. They made everything illegal. That is why it’s possible to buy anything.”
Elena Lukyanova a law professor at Moscow State University, said that some legislation in Russia, such as a 2004 law requiring political parties to disclose membership lists, violated constitutional protections on information disclosure and privacy
“This was done to control the opposition,” she said. “If there are violations of the constitution like this, at the level of legislation, we should not be surprised that laws get violated and these black market databases are out there.”
She said the problem was endemic corruption.
And while it is possible to find many secrets using Russia’s information black market, there is still evidently a tight grip on the most sensitive information of all – foreign bank accounts of top officials, their ownership of assets and those of their relatives. Those are not to be found at the Gorbushka market.
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