The search of Infostore's premises lasted 12 hours, and on 4 and 5 December, Ministry of Internal Affairs officers took the equipment away. For the market, this was not the first signal that the Ukrainian internet was beginning to fall within the purview of law enforcement agencies. But Infostore became the first major case where the issue was not the disputed content of a single forum, but an entire service with hundreds of thousands of visits and data-centre-level infrastructure.
The service itself began as a citizen-journalism news site. In December 2004, when the internet was discussed in connection with the Orange Revolution, Mas spoke of it in precisely that capacity. By April 2006, Infostore was already a file-sharing service accessible via UA-IX, the Ukrainian internet traffic exchange point. Mas was listed as its creator, and in the association he was among those who had spent decades building the local market.
Mas's biography matters in this story because he was one of the first. In January 1999, together with Ruslan Dmitrakovich, he launched the Ukrainian Banner Network (UBN): the code took three weeks to write in Perl, and costs amounted to about $100. From 7 March 2000, Mas headed the Ukrainian Portal (UAPortal), and in 2001 he sat on the expert jury of the Sun Awards. In August 2008, Mail.ua entered closed testing: Mas was its architect, and the project, according to reports from the same period, was backed by the Internet Invest group with more than $1 million in investment.
Ministry of Internal Affairs position: a request that went unanswered
Mykhailo Andriyenko, head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs department for combating human trafficking, considers the seizure lawful. According to him, on 24 July a request concerning users with specific logins was handed to Infostore's management, but no response followed. From this, according to the ministry's version, follows the conclusion that Ukrainska Pravda paraphrased as: "they themselves are interested in distributing such material online." This is the prosecution's position, and at the time of the press conference it remained precisely that, without a court ruling.
Mas objects. According to him, the data was handed over immediately, and the police even found those behind the logins. Moreover, in the summer he was asked not to delete these people's pages so as not to alert the suspects. The two versions differ fundamentally: the ministry says there was no response to the request, Mas says there was, and that the agency itself worked with these users.
"An attempt to intimidate the industry"
Ivan Petukhov, a member of the Internet Association of Ukraine board, called what was happening an attempt to intimidate the industry. In his logic, the internet still remains outside state control, and any high-profile seizure becomes a signal for the entire market. The association also includes Alexander Olshansky, head of Internet Invest Group, who had previously invested in Infostore and was a co-organiser of future industry events.
The case was also commented on outside the association: Mykhailo Honcharuk of Dominion and Kateryna Levchenko, adviser to the Minister of Internal Affairs. For the market, something else mattered more: the question of where a service owner's responsibility for user files ends had no clear answer in Ukraine by December 2008. The law left the question open, and law enforcement resolved it at their own discretion.
What was seized and what remains
The seizure affected the entire technical foundation of the project: eighteen servers, two storage systems and a switch. The hard drives were removed from the equipment, and the data stored on them ended up in the hands of the investigation. Mas admitted that restoring the service in its previous form would hardly be possible, thereby confirming that Infostore, as users had known it in 2006 and 2008, had ceased to exist in its original form.
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