Infostore.org was one of Alexei Mas's projects, and by that time he already had a long history on the Ukrainian internet. In 2004, during the Orange Revolution, he commented on the network's role in events, and Infostore itself was then a citizen-journalism site. By 2006 the resource had turned into a file-sharing service accessible through UA-IX, the Ukrainian internet traffic exchange point.
The raid as described
UkrRudProm gave its account of how Interior Ministry officers entered the office in the words of Infostore employee Yulia Shelkova, published in her blog. The resource's servers were seized from the data centre of Volia-Cable CJSC. The company's office is at 6 Tverskaya, in the same building as the Zerkalo Nedeli editorial office. Gennady Osipenko, creative director of the agency Laboratory 8, wrote that the police had come to them by mistake and then apologised.
Mas himself gave the key figure. According to UkrRudProm, he said:
“The Interior Ministry spent 12 hours in our office — from 2 p.m. on Thursday until 2 a.m. on Friday”
According to him, the Interior Ministry demanded data on the site's visitors, and he considered such demands unlawful. Pornographic materials, UkrRudProm wrote, were removed both by the resource's staff and by the ministry itself. Mas said that the owner had been charged with distributing pornographic materials. However, two weeks later, in an interview, he said that no charges had been brought against Infostore. Thus the information about the charge rests solely on his initial words, which he himself later contradicted.
What lay behind the site
Mas's path on the internet began in the late 1990s. In January 1999, together with Ruslan Dmitrakovich, he launched the Ukrainian Banner Network. The project was written in Perl, took three weeks to build, and cost around $100. On 7 March 2000 Mas became director of the Ukrainian Portal (UAPortal), and in the autumn of 2001 he sat on the expert jury of the Sun Awards competition.
Infostore was one of Mas's last projects in this story. Alexander Olshansky, head of Internet Invest Group, was listed as an investor in Infostore. The same group was linked to Mail.ua, a mail and portal project in whose creation Mas took part as architect. In August 2008 Mail.ua went into closed beta, and according to an interview the investment in the project exceeded one million dollars. The raid on Infostore came at a time when the company had active projects, investors, and a public role for its founder.
What happened next
On 10 December a press conference of the Internet Association of Ukraine (InAU) was held, at which the Infostore case was discussed. Commenting on the case were InAU board member Ivan Petukhov, Mikhail Goncharuk of Dominion, and Ekaterina Levchenko, adviser to the interior minister. The prosecution was represented by Mikhail Andrienko, head of the Interior Ministry's department for combating human trafficking.
In the bureau and studio that worked with Infostore, the position was explained in an interview, and on 23 December Mas himself gave an interview under the headline “Infostore is non-commercial”. In April 2009, to mark the tenth anniversary of the Ukrainian Banner Network, the first Ukrainian Internet Professionals Forum, the future iForum, was held; its programme was put together by Mas. The forum drew 1,280 participants.
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