The murky world of Russian Internet transparency
Much has been said about the Internet’s potential for adding more transparency to goverments’ tendering processes. Proponents of e-government have always hoped that the Internet era would put an end to shady deals struck behind the tightly closed doors of ministerial offices: as the details of every tender would be published online, it would be ...
Much has been said about the Internet's potential for adding more transparency to goverments' tendering processes. Proponents of e-government have always hoped that the Internet era would put an end to shady deals struck behind the tightly closed doors of ministerial offices: as the details of every tender would be published online, it would be theoretically impossible to keep this information private.Or so they hoped.
Much has been said about the Internet’s potential for adding more transparency to goverments’ tendering processes. Proponents of e-government have always hoped that the Internet era would put an end to shady deals struck behind the tightly closed doors of ministerial offices: as the details of every tender would be published online, it would be theoretically impossible to keep this information private.Or so they hoped.
The reality didn’t live up to their expectations. First of all, the mere fact that data has been published online does not mean that it has become any easier to find. This is exactly what happened to many early projects in the field: the government’s efforts to put its own data online were so clumsy and ineffective that they encouraged many enterprising for-profit initiatives to take the same data and make it easier to browse on their own sites, a service many of them offer at a fee. However, no matter how good the search enginge’s capabilities are, it may still be impossible to find a tender if it has been deliberately mislabeled or misspelled.
This is precisely what has happened to many tenders posted at zakupki.gov.ru, the official tender aggregator of the Russian government. In Russia, announcements of new government tenders are (quite logically) written in Russian, using the Cyrrilic script. As you may have noticed, Cyrrilic and Latin scripts do have several letters in common (including such commonly used letters as "a" and "o"). So all it takes to confuse a search engine is to spell a Russian word using one of the letters from the Latin script – visually, it’s impossible to tell that it’s been spelt using a different script (it also helps that the Russian word for "contract" have both an "a" and an "o" in it)
This is enough to make such entries invisible to search engines – or, rather, to anyone search for "contract" in its proper spelling. I should point out that some advanced commercial search engines – like Russia’ Yandex- have been trained to disregard these differences, so they would treat the Latin "a" as the Cyrrilic "a"; this, however, hasn’t yet happened with most other search engines – hence the numerous opportunities explored by corrupted officials.
The trick has been discovered by Ivan Begtin, the founder of "Enot Poiskun", an indepedent search engine dedicated to tracking the tenders of the Russian government. Some of the "misspeled" tender contracts uncovered in the comments to his original blog post are in 30 million USD range. So much for the fake "Internet transparency"!
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