{
  "id": "2000-october-money-talks-in-russia",
  "slug": "2000-october-money-talks-in-russia",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2000-october-money-talks-in-russia.html",
  "year": 2000,
  "month": "October",
  "monthNum": 10,
  "headline": "Money talks in Russia",
  "kicker": "INTERNATIONAL CAR",
  "author_name": "Natalya Shulyakovskaya",
  "author_title": "",
  "affiliation": "The Orange County Register",
  "summary": "A journalist explores Russia's surprisingly accessible data markets, discovering that personal information can be purchased for relatively small amounts of money, starting with an anecdote about a 1998 train ticket purchase that revealed how easily personal data is collected and potentially sold.",
  "keywords": [
    "databases",
    "privacy",
    "Russia"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Investigative Methods",
    "Data & Databases"
  ],
  "technologies": [],
  "full_text": "Five hundred dollars speaks volumes: $1,500 can do miracles. And you might not want to know what $5,000 worth of Russian databases is ready to tell you. (Well, I didn't have enough cash to properly test it.)\n\nRussia is a wonderland for a CAR junkie.\n\nMy ears first perked up when I bought a train ticket from St. Petersburg to Moscow in early 1998. A hefty woman selling tickets at the train station demanded my ID and dutifully typed my name and passport number into her computer. When a printer spewed out my yellow ticket, my name was on it.\n\nLater, I asked a friend who runs IT services for a new Moscow magnate if there was a way to get a copy of a database listing all train tickets. He said: \"Sure, I have",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6",
    "extracted_at": "2026-07-05",
    "verified": true
  },
  "similar": [
    {
      "slug": "2000-december-data-and-privacy",
      "score": 0.193
    },
    {
      "slug": "2000-may-following-the-money",
      "score": 0.142
    },
    {
      "slug": "2000-june-data-update",
      "score": 0.09
    },
    {
      "slug": "2002-september-october-building-a-database-for-tracking-state-money",
      "score": 0.088
    },
    {
      "slug": "1992-october-the-national-library-on-money-and-politics-searches-databases-for-you",
      "score": 0.086
    }
  ],
  "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2000-october-money-talks-in-russia.html",
  "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2000-october-money-talks-in-russia.json"
}