From Komsomolskaya Pravda:
The scandal erupted on October 1, when a group of users registered three sites – rusleaks.com, rusleaks.net and rusleaks.org – which give free access to Russians’ personal information, including passport data, mobile phone numbers and traffic police records.
The project’s authors claim corruption can be defeated “only in conditions of close public control, which entails disclosing confidential information. This will enable the public to investigate and expose corruption independently, especially in their locality.”
They also write that the exposure of private information will not damage honest people. “Our project will not please some people, who will likely invoke the right to privacy. But their true reason will be fear of exposure; honest people have no reason to keep their private information secret,” they write.
Read more on RIA Novosti. It’s not clear to me that any hacking or illegal acquisition was involved, although creating a publicly searchable database based on scraping other databases (if that’s what they’ve done) may be violative.
A Google translation of reporting by Yulia Smirnova on Forbes.ru yields:
On Thursday came the site Rusleaks.com, which posted a publicly available database of 185 Russian individuals and companies. The site offers a database search by the Interior Ministry, the FSB, the tax authorities, traffic police and the FAS. When searching for individuals in some cases, given a fairly large amount of data – addresses and phone numbers, passport number, taxpayer identification number, information about the place of work or failure to credit in the credits purchased by rail and air fares. Among the information about legal entities – information about the founders, share capital and contributions to tax services. The site includes postings of bank base from 1998 to 2004, where can I find information about transfers, current accounts of bank customers and the amount of transfers, as well as the basis of invalid passports in 2007, the customs and tax returns and a list of people who are wanted . On the site there is information from public sources – “VKontakte” and “Yellow Pages”.
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