Hello everyone from Chichen Itza.
(Made by hand. Phone, button, Instagram) I’m checking out the sights here, chatting with the locals, and constantly trying to work into conversation the phrase painfully familiar to every Russian: "Johnny, la gente está muy loca," whatever that’s supposed to mean. Judging by the context, it can mean anything from "Johnny, why the hell are gas prices rising so fast?" to "Bring me a burrito and two tequilas, please." Anyway, I was distracted from the Maya heritage by a flood of emails: "In LiveJournal promo, they’re publishing paid anti-RosPil articles every day — do something about it!" And what exactly can you do about it? Oil prices are high, there’s plenty of money in the budget, so they can hire as many crooks posting for pay as they like. You can’t keep up with them, and there’s no need to: what’s happening is exactly what Akunin and I talked about: Most likely, the repression plan will consist of two traditional things: 1) attempts to legally restrict the spread of information on the internet through “anti-extremism” legislation and the like; 2) allocating new suitcases full of money to create a “pro-Kremlin internet” with its own opinion leaders, roles that will be filled by media service characters we’ve known for a long time. Neither the first nor the second will work, but both will irritate everyone terribly and swell the ranks of the protesters. So there’s no need to worry. Everything is going according to plan. What matters much more is that all these publications prompted a response from olegmakarenko.ru, one of the overseers of the RosPil online wallet (a reminder: the overseers are Fritz, plushev, dolboeb (he recently wrote about RosPil here), and drugoi). Here is his long and fairly critical post on the subject. As you may remember, we started raising money for RosPil on February 2, 2011. For the project’s anniversary we’ll prepare all sorts of detailed reports, but for now I’ll briefly comment on olegmakarenko.ru and his entirely valid remarks. It was absolutely the right idea to invite someone well-known but with opposite ideological views to serve as an overseer. FritzMorgen certainly can’t be suspected of loyalty to me: every other post he praises Putin and writes that he has "become disillusioned with anti-corruption campaigners." Which is great. There should be someone among the overseers who is extra picky and critically minded. After reading Fritz’s post, I was pleased to note that RosPil remains one of the most transparent and understandable projects financially — among both state-run and civic initiatives. Just compare RosPil with any NGO, never mind the civil service. Thanks to the Party of Crooks and Thieves and its idiotic NGO laws, the system for funding and organizing nonprofit projects is so complicated and inefficient that many people — us included — are forced to use tools never intended for this purpose in the first place. Yandex.Money, for example. It’s an excellent internet payments tool, but you have to understand that it wasn’t designed for public fundraising and oversight. The Yandex.Money system allows members of the oversight group to view all transactions (all transfers with dates and amounts) as a list of all incoming payments (30 transactions per page, currently just under 595 pages in total).
For clarity, all transfers can also be exported to CSV. Unfortunately, the Yandex.Money system has a limit on how much transfer data can be exported at once: no more than 1,000 transactions at a time, though for any time period. At the same time, the technical ability to export all payments to CSV does exist, and any member of the oversight group can use it. 5. There really are stalled payments — so-called protected transfers:
Several hundred rubles remain stuck for months, and we can’t receive them — a code sent by the sender is required, and there isn’t one. In other words, the donor simply used the wrong transfer method. We need to post a special notice about this on the RosPil website. We will. 6. Anonymous payments: from the very beginning, when we announced fundraising to support the project, we said that funds could be transferred by anyone who wanted to, without restrictions. The Yandex.Money system allows anonymous payments. For many people, the easiest way to send us 500 rubles (about $16 at the time) is to walk up to a metal mobile-payment kiosk and deposit money into our wallet. Naturally, no ID is required. The payment will be anonymous. Our average payment is about 400 rubles (about $13 at the time). There are tens of thousands of payments; trying to identify every donor is impossible, and there’s no point in it anyway. 7. The second password. Yes, the Yandex.Money system is set up so that truly detailed information requires a second password generated by a special token. Only I have the token, because it’s what allows money to be withdrawn. We’d be happy to give more information to those who have the first password, but the system doesn’t allow it. I can say that there isn’t all that much visible there anyway. You can see, for example, an account number if it’s a bank transfer, but not the person’s name. And even if it were visible, we still couldn’t publish it — it’s personal data. Fritz blacked it out in his post, and we’d have to black it out too. Especially since we all remember the ugly story when the FSB requested data on RosPil donors from Yandex, and that data later ended up with the Nashi movement (a pro-Kremlin youth group). We’ll think about what else can be done here (and consult with the Yandex.Money people). 8. Expenses. Nothing has changed here. Back in May of last year, when we started spending the money we had raised, I described the expense structure. As you can see from the reporting table on the project website, all expenses can be divided into 3 groups: 1. wages + taxes (60,000 + 9,000 rubles, with 9,000 being the 13% personal income tax) 2. contributions to the extra-budgetary funds of the Russian Federation 3. the Yandex.Money system fee. Technically, here’s how it works: the money in the Yandex wallet is formally mine, I transfer it to my account at Alfa-Bank (the lowest fee when working with Yandex.Money; the maximum size of a single transfer is 300,000 rubles), and then I pay salaries and contributions. Each employee pays their own personal income tax and files their own tax return. The idea of posting scans of statements from my bank account is a good one; we’ll do it. 9. The future. Soon we’ll announce improvements to the donation collection system. The accounting will be outsourced and independent from us. We’ll expand the oversight group. It would be good to include some loyal Putin supporter or a regular systemic critic. It’s just not easy to find such a person: besides being a loyal Putin supporter, they also have to be a non-anonymous, decent person, so there’s no suspicion that for $300 they’d steal donors’ personal data or change the password and create a headache for us. If you have candidates, suggest them. 10. Responding to criticism. A distinctive feature of the RosPil project is that we raise money for it from you. We remember that. Our principle is that, unlike government agencies, we are obliged to answer every question we receive. Let me remind you that the project has a coordinator — Konstantin Kalmykov — and answering questions is part of his job. If you want, ask him on Twitter, or on LiveJournal. All our lawyers are known too; we have no anonymous people. You have the right to see who you are paying salaries to. All RosPil staff are required to be present on social media, and they can be asked questions too (though the lawyers will answer only to the extent that it does not negatively affect their main work). Obviously, there’s no point in responding to trolling like "you said you saved 40 billion, but it got spent anyway!!11" RosPil is not fighting the state or the budget process; it provides a socially useful service by identifying signs of corruption in public procurement, publicizing facts of corruption, and using lawful means to bring crooks to justice. In every case RosPil has worked on, someone could be fired and, in most cases, jailed. Why they aren’t fired or jailed is a political question, one that should be answered by the Crooks and Thieves in power in the Kremlin and the White House (the Russian government building in Moscow). We’ve been asking for fifteen years — so far, silence.