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Panama Papers - 2.6TB leak on offshore tax havens
- agjacobson 11y agoLooking for some creative data filtering here, hackers.
- paraxisi 11y agoPrevious discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11416928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11416928
- Nishioka 11y agoI have never heard of this paper. But really impressed with what they have managed to pull off. Kudos! It would be cool to see the global engineering community coming together in a similar manner that the journos have, towards one such big project.
- jmspring 11y agoSueddeutsche is one of the major papers in Germany. It is worth being aware of major papers in large countries if you pay attention to foreign affairs.
- ajmurmann 11y agoWarning: If you click through to the article itself it will automatically start playing music. You might want to turn your volume down if you are in an environment where that would be inappropriate.
- hendler 11y agoI think less quality coverage, but interesting to watch the news spread through media here: - https://www.yahoo.com/news/putin-aides-among-world-leaders-exposed-tax-haven-195848285.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/putin-aides-among-world-leaders-e... - https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/associates-of-russias-putin-had-2-billion-in-offshore-accounts-report-says/2016/04/03/25437e1e-f839-11e5-8b23-538270a1ca31_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/associates-of-... - http://www.usatoday.com/ http://www.usatoday.com/ (prominent on front page) - http://time.com/4280200/panama-papers-vladimir-putin-russia-mossack-fonseca-leak/?xid=homepage http://time.com/4280200/panama-papers-vladimir-putin-russia-... - newyorktimes.com buried under politics http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/04/us/politics/leaked-documents-offshore-accounts-putin.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/04/us/politics/leaked-documen... Nothing on CNN's front page as of yet. Don't know if on TV. Imagine editorial staff doing catch up, but wonder why they weren't collaborating earlier. Maybe AOL/TimeWarner are in there?
- chvid 11y agoNo leaks involving Americans (yet).
- retrogradeorbit 11y agoDon't expect to hear much on that front: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/04/corporate-media-gatekeepers-protect-western-1-from-panama-leak/ https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/04/corporate-me...
- hendler 11y agoEditor says there may be some: https://twitter.com/ploechinger/status/716773530436825088 https://twitter.com/ploechinger/status/716773530436825088 https://twitter.com/ploechinger/status/716763595820941312 https://twitter.com/ploechinger/status/716763595820941312 Also, I hope journalists are asking the "accused" for their comments, and giving them time to respond, as journalistic best practice.
- sshykes 11y agoIs there a torrent available for us to download the documents?
- mikeyouse 11y agoThere are banking details, passports, drivers license info for thousands of people.. It'd be hugely irresponsible to publish all of that in a Torrent.. Redacted docs are accompanying all of the news reports.
- sshykes 11y ago- Passports: Not Secret. - Drivers Licenses: Also Not Secret. - Banking details of the people who have been ripping off the rest of the world...sorry if I fail to see the downside of dumping all of it :) EDIT: At the same time, I understand where you're coming from so thanks for the info mikeyouse!
- mikeyouse 11y agoSome of whom had been ripping off the world, many of whom who are completely innocent.. Also, it'd be incredibly easy to steal identities of just about anyone in the data dump if you had the level of detail the documents have.
- NamTaf 11y agoHow are documents that can directly lead to the identity theft of people not a privacy issue?
- jeremonda 11y ago> At the same time, I understand where you're coming from so thanks for the info mikeyouse! I know right. But don't worry, sshykes, history repeats itself. :) There's always some great revolution that would wipe out corporate hypocrites off the face of this planet (I think ageing does that too). :-)
- txdv 11y agoYou see, in a civilized world you would treat people by the same standards that you want to be treated.
- tomlock 11y agoIs it just me or is this expose surprisingly low on American citizens? Is this one of the times when conspiracy theory could be conspiracy fact? It feels like this is an extremely selective release.
- chadzawistowski 11y agoI think it is selective. They say they will reveal more in May.
- digitalchaos 11y agoIt's definitely a very focused search. There will almost certainly be more coverage over the coming days/weeks. It is reported that a full list of names and companies linked will be released in early May. http://www.irishtimes.com/business/what-are-the-panama-papers-1.2595463 http://www.irishtimes.com/business/what-are-the-panama-paper...
- sebiche 11y agoFrom the Reddit live thread: The Editor in Chief of Süddeutsche Zeitung responded to the lack of United States individuals in the documents, saying to "Just wait for what is coming next".
- tomlock 11y agoGood news :)
- wrong_variable 11y agoFinger crossed for some dirt on Hillary.
- scrollaway 11y ago(Assuming you are a US citizen from your previous comments) Why are you hoping one of your presidential candidates is corrupt? Shouldn't you be crossing your fingers not to find dirt?
- ikeboy 11y agohttp://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/articles/56febff0a1bb8d3c3495adf4/ http://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/articles/56febff0a1bb8d3... >Generally speaking, owning an offshore company is not illegal in itself. In fact, establishing an offshore company can be seen as a logical step for a broad range of business transactions. However, a look through the Panama Papers very quickly reveals that concealing the identities of the true company owners was the primary aim in the vast majority of cases. This makes it sound like owning an offshore company solely to conceal your identity is illegal. Is that true?
- qaq 11y agoIt highly depends on your country of tax residence and citizenship.
- dragonwriter 11y agoAnd the countries in which you do business that in some way involves the offshore entity.
- sdenton4 11y agoEven if concealing your identity isn't illegal, you may be concealing it because you're involved in something shady. Like tax evasion.
- woodman 11y agoYou wouldn't describe your position on cryptography and privacy in general as "moderate" by any chance?
- themartorana 11y agoI don't think those two things are analogous. Being an owner of a company is something decidedly public. It has nothing to do with encryption or privacy.
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- chvid 11y agoI wonder who did the leak? I wonder if the law firm knows who did it and where he is now? My guess is some sys admin presumely at some central office (as this spans the whole company); I mean 2.6TB data - not so easy for an average lawyer to download to his laptop.
- Nishioka 11y agoGood call and probably European given the choice of paper leaked too.
- chvid 11y agoIt is Germany's largest newspaper. The data probably would have been handed over in person. My guess is he is German speaking; maybe from Switzerland or Liechtenstein. But I wonder about doing something like this: He is not exactly protected, what he has done is illegal (at least to some extent - whistleblower laws etc.), he stands to make no personal gains. One thing is being a high profile whistleblower like Snowden or Assange. But this guy? Where does he end up?
- dluan 11y agoMy guess is more than one IT person is not going to show up to work tomorrow.
- usaphp 11y agoCan someone explain me if reading these documents is even legal for journalists? I mean I am pretty sure most of the people that used that law office are completely innocent and having their personal information leaked and now read and investigated by some journalists is kind of crime in its own, I would not want my legal papers stolen and read by anybody if I am doing everything according to the law. My question is - what legal right do these journalists have to read this confidential information?
- ixtli 11y agoI am not a lawyer, but as far as I know there is no US law that makes it illegal for a civilian to see something. It's important, though, that if you have a security clearance you can be fired or put in jail for reading something outside of your clearance but those laws don't apply to normal people.
- ixtli 11y agoIt's unclear why my response is getting downvoted when other people are giving normative answers to a legal question.
- newjersey 11y ago> It's important, though, that if you have a security clearance you can be fired or put in jail for reading something outside of your clearance but those laws don't apply to normal people. What happens if your clearance is secret and you are doing your job and some time later, they decide something you were working is now top secret? Or if your clearance is secret and TS stuff is on the morning NYTimes? I'm sure the military has all sorts of rules about this that makes no sense but a lot of non military also have these clearances. Who reads the 150 some page application in its entirety?
- ixtli 11y agoAgain, I'm pretty sure that the military will not hold you responsible for something you were shown. That is, I don't see how they would hold someone responsible for being accidentally exposed to something on the morning news. That said, there are many articles from around the Snowden times that talk about the Navy and Air Force blocking wikileaks so that people won't expose themselves to things outside their sec level. Here's one I was able to find from around that time: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/15/us/15wiki.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/15/us/15wiki.html . It might seem backwards, but members of the military are subject to trial by military tribunal. They agree to this when they sign up, and you agree to more restrictions on your actions when you apply for security clearances. I don't know specifically what they are and I am not a military lawyer, but I have five or six friends who have at one point or another had S or TS clearance in the army, navy, and two other three-letter agencies and have had casual discussions with them about it. tl;dr: You agree not to read things outside your security clearance when you get one. If you do so, you're subject to legal repercussions. It's my understanding that going to a website and knowingly downloading these things would be treated similarly to reading something using a coworkers network account that has access to a higher security level than your own.
- usaphp 11y agoWhy is Mossack Fonceca company website excluded from Wayback Machine? https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://mossfon.com https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://mossfon.com
- akanet 11y agoYou can choose to have your own website excluded from archival.
- ISL 11y agoIt's interesting to see how leak disclosure has changed over the years. Leakers/reporters are increasingly sophisticated at maximizing the impact of their information through titrated disclosure. Someone, somewhere, is building the theory of the optimal leak.
- chroma 11y agoIf you want to burn your ideas into the minds of as many people as possible, the timings are probably similar to spaced repetition[1]. In other words: Lots of leaks early on; on the order of every day or two. Then taper off and only leak new stuff right before people are likely to forget you exist. If you can stretch things out for six months or so, you're embedded in the public psyche. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
- woodman 11y agoI'd be surprised if the method employed for Snowden's leak is ever topped - several of the first reveals were responded to by the USG, and then the following day the next reveal would demonstrate the response to be a lie. I don't remember the specifics of it, but I do remember wondering how long it would take the PR folks in government to realize that their spin was actually amplifying the message. I'm pretty sure it took three news cycles. It might have been less to do with masterfully predicting the media and government response, and more to do with the amount of evidence available - but it was hilarious (in the darkest way possible).
- a-dub 11y agoIt pleases me greatly that the firm is located in Panama, and therefore has a strange sounding name to native English ears and a menacing looking logo that looks like something that walked right on out of a Bond movie. I guess the real world isn't so boring afterall.
- woodman 11y agoNative english ears reporting in, sorry to disappoint you but the name and logo do not strike me as sinister in the least - it looks like the name and logo of a company that would make ink blotters.
- hbbybhybhb 11y agoOh gosh this is huuggeeeeeeeeeeee!
- hbbybhybhb 11y agoBut this is very generic news.
- wglb 11y agoIn terms of e-discovery, 2.6TB is not really all that large.
- wglb 11y agoLarge, in terms of e-discovery, is on the order of 1PB.
- partiallypro 11y agoThis data has been out there for a year, Vice did a piece about it a long time ago. I'm sure there are some juicy things in there, but I highly doubt it will be as explosive as some seem think it will be (especially as the stories begin to rollout over the next 14 days.) If anything it will be an interesting insight into how tightly knit world leaders are to one another and their investments. The story does say that more data is expected to come in, about 700GBs worth...so that could be new material. However, as it stands I don't think this will cause much upheaval. It does almost read like a plot to a Stieg Larsson novel though, and I'm sure someone is going to write a terrific book about it all. I do hope there is a lot of explosive material in here, but I do have my doubts, given the amount of time the data has been available. Here's the Vice article from 2014. http://www.vice.com/read/evil-llc-0000524-v21n12 http://www.vice.com/read/evil-llc-0000524-v21n12
- xor_null 11y agoIt's kind of sad, that the data is not really published. I mean i cant go to some side and take a look at the data. Maybe this is one reason: "The leak is being managed by the grandly but laughably named “International Consortium of Investigative Journalists”, which is funded and organised entirely by the USA’s Center for Public Integrity. Their funders include - Ford Foundation - Carnegie Endowment - Rockefeller Family Fund - W K Kellogg Foundation - Open Society Foundation (Soros)" [1] [1] https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/04/corporate-media-gatekeepers-protect-western-1-from-panama-leak/ https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/04/corporate-me...
- radicality 11y agoI also wish the data was published in its raw form so people can not only form their own conclusions but maybe someone out there would find an interesting link that no other journalists have found. Otherwise it's like reading a research paper that provides no raw data - this way the analysis is not replicable by third parties.
- MagnumOpus 11y agoHi throwaway user, The leak is being managed by Süddeutsche Zeitung, which used the ICIJ to distribute the data to 100+ different newspapers. Are you accusing SZ to be in the pocket of your US corporate overlords? Or are you trying to drop names to discredit the leak?