My friends. For quite a long time now, to the best of my modest abilities, I’ve been trying to put a stop to the small and large-scale swindles pulled off by bad people. Right now, that means corporate matters. Before that, it was the Committee for the Protection of Muscovites. And even earlier, various raids on police precincts, etc. All of this has gradually led to my inbox filling up with a HUGE amount of complaints, kompromat (damaging material), information, and the like. I’m very grateful to everyone who writes to me. But sometimes a situation arises where the person supplying the information / the complainant gets offended if they don’t see an instant reaction from me. Or they reproach me for being scared / all talk / only working for money / only interested in high-profile cases / hard-hearted and cynical / stupid and incompetent. So. Let me lay out my basic principles for working with information. They’re interconnected. 1. Relevance to the subject. Much as I might like otherwise, alas, I’m not the Ministry of Internal Affairs or the Investigative Committee. So I have to limit myself to working on certain companies. It’s not hard to figure out which ones—just look at the tags in my cozy little LiveJournal blog. From time to time I take on something else because the incident is unusual. Sometimes I take something on and then drop it later (sad but true) for the reasons stated above. 2. Verifiability. At least a little. At least somehow. But it has to be checked. The methods are simple: the internet, leaks from companies, conversations with experts and journalists who cover these topics. For example. I get a letter: “Alexei, we would like to inform you that during the construction of the Katsapetovo-Berendeyevka pipeline section, 1 billion rubles were stolen. Those responsible are V. Ya. Shapiro, director of Khrenstroigazneft, the client’s representative K. R. Babayan, and contractor Immanuil Ivanov. We attach an оперативная справка (an internal operational memo). We ask you to publish it immediately on the pages of your LiveJournal and pass it on to the media and UNESCO.” What do I do? I think that of course Shapiro, Babayan, and Ivanov stole the billion. Most likely they were reported by Shnipelson, Khachaturyan, and Nalivaiko, who didn’t get their share of the billion. But that’s neither here nor there for me. I simply forward this information to several people. I ask: “What do you think about this?” Plus, with my guys, I just look for leads online. The worldwide web can do a lot of tricks. Based on the results, I decide whether to pursue it further. 3. Caution. This principle follows from the previous one. I don’t have the slightest doubt that at Gazprom, Transneft, Rosneft, VTB, and other organized criminal groups companies, they do not wish me good health. I don’t know about dropping a piano on my head, but setting me up? Easily. I put up a post and write a complaint against Shapiro from Khrenstroigazneft, while the FSB already has his complaint on file accusing me of extortion and blackmail. Then it turns out that Khrenstroigazneft doesn’t build pipelines at all—it does landscaping in Kuban (a region in southern Russia). And they chose that name because it encodes the name of Mr. Shapiro’s beloved grandmother. That would be a knowingly false accusation on my part. A little money to the prosecutor, one phone call to the judge, and the next update to this blog will be in five years. So even if your information is true, if I can’t find indirect confirmation, I won’t touch it, just to be safe. 4. A sober assessment of resources. Everything I do on the anti-corruption front is not done by me alone. Three people work with me constantly, and as needed I bring in one or two lawyers. Plus, on a voluntary basis, there are those who write to me and help however they can (with internet searches, expert assessments, etc.). Obviously, we are not capable of covering all information, even if it is 100 percent accurate. So it’s entirely possible that you sent me something devastating, truthful, and verifiable, and I put it on the back burner. Unfortunately, that’s just how it is. That’s how it is, my dears. And don’t be offended with me if I don’t take up “your case,” don’t instantly put up a post at your request, don’t “cause a scandal in the media,” and don’t organize flash mobs. I simply can’t. In short: don’t shoot the pianist—he plays as best he can. And now for the most interesting part. What does Kirkorov (a famous Russian pop singer) have to do with any of this? Yesterday I read a very interesting post by the user olegmakarenko.ru, “How to Become a Thousand-Man” (i.e., a blogger with over 1,000 followers). It’s an excellent article—I say that as a thousand-man myself. I recommend it to everyone. I decided to follow some of the advice myself. In particular, the advice about “pictures.” This post was about working with information on fraud. I typed “fraud” into Google Images and posted the most relevant one from the top five. I think it should work.