This is an era of big leaks, so that is a bonanza for journalists… . This is also an era of easy and cheap communication. It would not have been possible for us to do this investigation 5 or 10 years ago. And because this is the era of big data, there has never been a better moment to bring hundreds of reporters together to get their collective eyes on things.
Although this may appear intuitive, news organisations are competitive in nature, and such collaboration requires high-level buy-in. Taking into account the journalistic and technological foundations laid in the lead-up to the Panama Papers, this chapter will explore the recent history of data journalism and the emergence of massive data leaks and show how journalism and journalists have adapted to exploit these invaluable sources of information.
As technology expands the size of the playing field, the players too have expanded their abilities to deal with an unprecedented amount of information from various sensitive sources. Whistleblower platform WikiLeaks is a prime example. Launched in 2006 by enigmatic Australian hacker-activist Julian Assange, WikiLeaks drew heavily on the legacy of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers for inspiration, pitching itself as an “anonymous global avenue for disseminating documents the public should see” (WikiLeaks 2007).
WikiLeaks has since tested numerous publishing models, including high-profile partnerships with major media outlets (Leigh and Harding 2011, p. 61). Since its inception, the site has existed somewhere in a grey zone between legitimate journalistic enterprise and a home for radical transparency activists. But its role in popularising technology as a key tool for both transmitting and publishing leaks is undeniable.
“It’s public data. It belongs in the public domain. Information should be free,” he wrote in a chat session with a confidant. “If it’s out in the open, it should be a public good, rather than some slimy intel collector.”
(Zetter and Poulsen 2010)
WikiLeaks had caught Manning’s attention when it published a leak of what was probably National Security Agency data. After making contact and verifying Assange’s online identity, Manning used encryption and secure connections to transfer her collection of secret files (Leigh and Harding 2011, pp. 31,75).
Over the course of 2010, in collaboration with major news outlets, including The Guardian, the New York Times, and Der Spiegel, WikiLeaks would go on to publish three major releases of this information. This included a video, editorially titled “Collateral Murder”, which showed U.S. forces killing 12 people, including two Reuters journalists, in Baghdad. It also contained a tranche of top-secret military logs related to the U.S. war in Afghanistan and a cache of confidential diplomatic cables, amounting to hundreds of thousands of documents.
Apart from the effect of the content, the very act of leaking brought about a new era, one in which even the most precious of state secrets could be divulged en masse for transmission and publication to the world, sometimes after careful vetting and reporting by journalists, sometimes not. Regardless of the arguments over ownership, technology enabled the collection of this data and also enabled its dissemination.
It was in this new paradigm of massive data leaks and ever-advancing technology that a whistleblower, known only as John Doe, gained access to a new cache of information from a Panama-based law firm called Mossack Fonseca.
Offshore Leaks
After years of reporting on a massive fraud scheme that was swindling Australian investors and using tax havens to hide the proceeds, in 2011, an Irish-Australian journalist, Gerard Ryle, received a hard drive by post.
On the drive was 260 gigabytes of data – about 2.5 million files – of secret financial information from two offshore financial service providers. It was the first large-scale leak from an insider in a shadowy industry that helps clients hide money in tax havens such as the British Virgin Islands, Singapore and the Cook Islands. Rather than keep the information to himself, Ryle took the data with him to a new job: director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) based in Washington, D.C.
ICIJ was formed in 1997 as the international arm of an American non-profit investigative media outlet, the Center for Public Integrity. The consortium was made up of invited journalists considered among the best investigative reporters from countries around the world. The idea behind the organisation was simple: through this trusted network of members, reporters would help each other chase leads across borders and collaborate on global investigations.
Through ICIJ’s network, Ryle was able to have the data processed and shared with 86 journalists in 46 countries who worked together for 12 months to produce an unprecedented global investigation, published in April 2013, that quickly became known as Offshore Leaks. Offshore Leaks would be the first in a series of ground-breaking ICIJ exposés that revealed how the rich and powerful were able to buy into a secretive parallel economy – a world where financial rules could be bent, taxes dodged and shady business deals hidden from scrutiny.
In 2014, ICIJ’s international team of collaborators published an investigation based on another trove of leaked documents, this time from the offices of Price Waterhouse Coopers’ Luxembourg office, exposing a system that allowed multinational companies to slash their tax bills dramatically by routing money through the tiny European country. Five years after this investigation was published, Luxembourg Leaks, or LuxLeaks, is still referenced regularly in European Parliament communiqués and legislative actions related to corporate tax dodging.
In 2015, yet another leak of financial data revealed the secret account details of tax-dodging and sanction-evading customers of HSBC’s private banking arm in Switzerland. This prompted numerous government inquiries as well as a full apology from the bank itself.
This truncated history of ICIJ’s investigations in the years leading up to the Panama Papers is worth recounting. The leaked material at the heart of each of these investigations was the result of earned trust and increased visibility.
ICIJ had developed an enviable track record of cracking global stories and building cohesion among erstwhile competitive news organisations. Its reporting was proof that this team of journalists was trustworthy, diligent and able to produce stories that had results. Governments, companies, individuals and their enablers that chose to operate in this netherworld now had to look over their shoulders. This was an attractive proposition for would-be whistleblowers.
Among the collaborative cohort were the German reporters who would go on to receive the Panama Papers leak: Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier.
John Doe’s path to the leak – a ‘concerned citizen’
We do not know how John Doe came by the data, but there was a lot of it. “More than anything you have ever seen,” he would eventually tell German reporter Bastian Obermayer (Obermayer and Obermaier 2016, p. 9).
As we have seen, Obermayer and Obermaier had been part of the international team working together on ICIJ’s previous leaks of financial information, but why did John Doe choose them as the best conduits for his information? The answer likely lies in one very specific story about the raid on a German bank.
On February 24, 2015, more than 150 prosecutors, tax investigators and detectives swooped on offices and bank branches across Germany as part of a massive investigation into tax evasion and money laundering focused on the country’s second-largest bank: Commerzbank. The German authorities were acting on information from leaked data purchased for almost 1 million Euros two years previously. The data came from inside a Panama-based law firm, Mossack Fonseca, and related mostly to offshore companies linked to the tiny European tax haven of Luxembourg.
Obermayer and Obermaier...
