time to be out of town, but maybe right now the rest of the world is safer than staying home.
Intriguing to Ivanov—for the last three years the United States has denied Konychev entry. We hear the Kremlin at its highest levels intervened with the U.S. authorities more than once on Konychev’s behalf. No dice—repeated visa applications, made through the U.S. Department of State, were returned to Moscow DOA—dead on arrival, as they say in America, “dead” there having a different meaning than here in Ibansk. Alleged involvement in organized crime is the reason given by the U.S. Department of Justice. (For his part, Ivanov, of course, remains shocked—SHOCKED!—at the idea of organized crime in Ibansk.)
So what’s changed?
The Department of Homeland Security appears to have taken up his case. Konychev’s recent visits have been under special dispensation from DHS—and against the wishes of the State Department. Why DHS wants Konychev in America is a mystery—unless the oligarch had made some kind of a deal.
But, Ivanov asks, what kind of deal could Konychev offer the U.S. government agency charged with protecting American soil?
A question sufficiently stimulating to engage Ivanov’s efforts. Don’t stray far.
I searched the Ibansk database for mentions of Konychev, Alexander Lishin, and the BEC. It returned more than two hundred posts. Some contained just a mention, in others, Ivanov ran on at his histrionic and long-winded best. I sent the full lot to the printer while I finished my takeout, rinsed the dishes, and opened another Pilsner Urquell. Then I settled in on the sofa with the beer, a thick stack of printed pages, and a notepad. Two hours and another Pilsner later I had as good a picture of the BEC as one was likely to get.
Konychev and Lishin were the founding partners. Konychev had already made one fortune in TV and radio. He was one of the first to appreciate the Web’s potential for criminal enterprise and, more significantly, that criminals would need places—holes in the cyberspace wall, if you will—to run their scams from. Lishin, according to Ivanov, was the technical genius, the man who connected servers spread all over Eastern Europe, and more important, told them what to do when ordered.
The genius of the BEC is that, technically, it does nothing illegal itself. It simply provides services—Web hosting, data storage—to those who need them. Spammers need memory and processing power to send all those billions of e-mails advertising everything from cheap drugs to bigger body parts. Phishers need the same capabilities from which to con unsuspecting recipients— Danger! Your account is about to be closed! —into giving up their user names, passwords, and Social Security numbers. Higher-tech crooks have similar requirements—putting together zombie networks to launch distributed denial of service attacks, the basis for their blackmail schemes, aimed at shutting down companies’ or countries’ Web presences by swamping them with bogus inquiries. Ditto pornographers.
The thing about computers, they don’t care what they do. Memory is memory, it can store whatever it’s ordered to store. A CPU is a CPU, it can run any app it’s given. Having set up the technical infrastructure, the incremental cost to the BEC of expanding into other lines was virtually nil. Konychev built the client contacts, Lishin built out the network and the software. All kinds of Internet scum were only too happy to avail themselves of BEC facilities. The BEC blew through the dot-com crash in 2000, and when the global economy sunk like the Titanic in 2008, the BEC kept swimming in a rising sea of cash. The business just kept growing.
That inevitably attracted the Kremlin’s attention. In most Western countries—those governed by the rule of law, for instance—the government would have invested money and manpower trying to shut such a network down and prosecute those behind it. In Russia, where rule of
Intriguing to Ivanov—for the last three years the United States has denied Konychev entry. We hear the Kremlin at its highest levels intervened with the U.S. authorities more than once on Konychev’s behalf. No dice—repeated visa applications, made through the U.S. Department of State, were returned to Moscow DOA—dead on arrival, as they say in America, “dead” there having a different meaning than here in Ibansk. Alleged involvement in organized crime is the reason given by the U.S. Department of Justice. (For his part, Ivanov, of course, remains shocked—SHOCKED!—at the idea of organized crime in Ibansk.)
So what’s changed?
The Department of Homeland Security appears to have taken up his case. Konychev’s recent visits have been under special dispensation from DHS—and against the wishes of the State Department. Why DHS wants Konychev in America is a mystery—unless the oligarch had made some kind of a deal.
But, Ivanov asks, what kind of deal could Konychev offer the U.S. government agency charged with protecting American soil?
A question sufficiently stimulating to engage Ivanov’s efforts. Don’t stray far.
I searched the Ibansk database for mentions of Konychev, Alexander Lishin, and the BEC. It returned more than two hundred posts. Some contained just a mention, in others, Ivanov ran on at his histrionic and long-winded best. I sent the full lot to the printer while I finished my takeout, rinsed the dishes, and opened another Pilsner Urquell. Then I settled in on the sofa with the beer, a thick stack of printed pages, and a notepad. Two hours and another Pilsner later I had as good a picture of the BEC as one was likely to get.
Konychev and Lishin were the founding partners. Konychev had already made one fortune in TV and radio. He was one of the first to appreciate the Web’s potential for criminal enterprise and, more significantly, that criminals would need places—holes in the cyberspace wall, if you will—to run their scams from. Lishin, according to Ivanov, was the technical genius, the man who connected servers spread all over Eastern Europe, and more important, told them what to do when ordered.
The genius of the BEC is that, technically, it does nothing illegal itself. It simply provides services—Web hosting, data storage—to those who need them. Spammers need memory and processing power to send all those billions of e-mails advertising everything from cheap drugs to bigger body parts. Phishers need the same capabilities from which to con unsuspecting recipients— Danger! Your account is about to be closed! —into giving up their user names, passwords, and Social Security numbers. Higher-tech crooks have similar requirements—putting together zombie networks to launch distributed denial of service attacks, the basis for their blackmail schemes, aimed at shutting down companies’ or countries’ Web presences by swamping them with bogus inquiries. Ditto pornographers.
The thing about computers, they don’t care what they do. Memory is memory, it can store whatever it’s ordered to store. A CPU is a CPU, it can run any app it’s given. Having set up the technical infrastructure, the incremental cost to the BEC of expanding into other lines was virtually nil. Konychev built the client contacts, Lishin built out the network and the software. All kinds of Internet scum were only too happy to avail themselves of BEC facilities. The BEC blew through the dot-com crash in 2000, and when the global economy sunk like the Titanic in 2008, the BEC kept swimming in a rising sea of cash. The business just kept growing.
That inevitably attracted the Kremlin’s attention. In most Western countries—those governed by the rule of law, for instance—the government would have invested money and manpower trying to shut such a network down and prosecute those behind it. In Russia, where rule of
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