

Alexey Navalny's cyber-crusade against Russian corruption - boh
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/04/110404fa_fact_ioffe?currentPage=all

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xentronium
Navalny is one of the better guys, but don't mistake him for a saint. For
example, his hacked mail included proof that he published articles
discrediting commercial company on behalf of another one; the fact, which he
later denied. Too bad that there were DKIM signatures in the letters. Later it
was discovered that he was involved in some weird transactions with Kirovles,
again hacked mail, again DKIM-signed.

Again, this is one of the better guys. But he's got an own horse in this race
and a very unclear agenda. Whatever you hear about him, good or bad, you
better check twice or thrice.

Hope this comment puts things into perspective.

~~~
vitalymuranov
His "hacked" mail came from computer that was taken by police from Navalny
"for investigation" (by time coincidence). According to Navalny who commented
on that mail messages were partially changed and didn't really give anything
certain, this is why there was no real police investigation after that.

~~~
xentronium
Nope, first time he was hacked long before police took his computer.

Doesn't matter anyway, since hacked mail can't be used in court, so it is not
suitable for evidence, only for public judgement.

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kibwen
Fascinating article. Some unsettling excerpts:

"Corruption has reached such extremes that businesses involved in preparing
the Black Sea resort of Sochi for the Winter Olympics of 2014 report having to
pay kickbacks of more than fifty per cent. The Russian edition of Esquire
recently calculated that one road in Sochi cost so much that it could just as
well have been paved with, say, nine inches of foie gras or three and a half
inches of Louis Vuitton handbags."

"[A high-ranking official of Russia's ruling party, speaking on public radio]
accused Navalny of terrorism and of working to undermine the country, implying
that he was receiving financing either from the C.I.A. or from the U.S. State
Department, if not both."

"When I asked a Transneft [Russia's largest oil exporter] representative where
the charity money [$300,000,000] went, he responded, angrily, “We don’t like
to publicize such things. We don’t do charity for the P.R.” And he compared
Navalny to Goebbels."

Granted, those latter two quotes wouldn't be entirely out-of-place in the US,
either.

~~~
kibwen
Unrelated technical note: when you copy text from the New Yorker's site, it
automatically appends the following to your clipboard:

"Read more
[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/04/110404fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/04/110404fa_fact_ioffe#ixzz22VP3doXp)

...but only if you copy eight or more words. It's actually quite an
interesting approach.

~~~
rsingel
Errg, I hate Tynt - the copy/paste busting slice of JavaScript masquerading as
a company.

~~~
kibwen
Thanks for the name, I had no clue that this practice was widespread. A bit of
research says that this thing is also capable of phoning home the contents of
your selection to an analytics server, but I presume that the New Yorker
doesn't use that feature as I'm not seeing any errant net requests (and as
someone who compulsively highlights arbitrary bits of text while reading, I
wonder how useful that would be in the first place).

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p1esk
He's likely to end up in jail or dead.

~~~
smsm42
Unfortunately, it is a very real possibility. This guy is a hero. I can't
imagine how much guts it takes to fight a machine so vast, powerful and
dangerous as Russian governing syndicate.

~~~
kibwen
This quote seems relevant:

[Navalny] was similarly dismissive of the people who think that he or anyone
else is fighting a well-oiled, repressive machine. “I disagree, because the
people who work in business at a high enough level can tell you that there’s
no machine at all,” he says. “It’s all a fiction. That is, they can destroy a
single person, like Magnitsky or me or Khodorkovsky. But, if they try to do
anything systemically against a huge number of people, there’s no machine.
It’s a ragtag group of crooks unified under the portrait of Putin. There’s no
super-repressive regime. There are no mythical Cheka agents that we need to be
scared of. It’s just a bunch of crooks.”

~~~
p1esk
Unfortunately, the "group of crooks" is very large, and it starts from the
very top. Corruption on all levels is considered normal, and it has been a
norm in the society for centuries. Only extremely strong leaders (such as
Peter the Great, or Stalin) could push any real changes, which didn't last
long after they were gone.

