Fra Bustle.com
On Sunday, several major news outlets reported on what’s being dubbed “the Panama Papers,” a massive leak of a Panama-based law firm that handles offshore accounts. The Mossack Fonseca document dump, which amounts to more than 11 million documents, contains potentially damaging information about several world leaders and many of their associates. If you’re curious about what exactly these documents reveal, you’re probably wondering how to read the Panama Papers directly.
Well, you can’t — at least, not yet. So far, there’s no centralized source through which to access the documents themselves, and in fact, news organizations with access to the leak haven’t yet reported on all of its contents. This means that, while there are plenty of news articles about the documents (see here and here) or the English version of the original scoop by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, you can’t read most of the raw documents themselves yet.
But you can read some of them.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, one of the main groups responsible for analyzing the leak, has provided a browsable list of “power players” who are referenced in the documents. Click on a name, and you’ll see a summary of what exactly they allegedly did. Scroll down a bit to the “related documents” section, and presto — you’ll see links to the documents regarding that individual that have been made public.
That may seem less than satisfactory, but there are a lot of good reasons why the entirety of the Panama Papers isn’t yet online. For one, not all of the individuals mentioned in the leak are necessarily criminals, and it’s possible that the documents contain private information about them. Moreover, the documents collectively amount to 2.6 terabytes, a staggeringly enormous amount of data. Providing the web space and bandwidth to make all of it viewable would be prohibitively expensive and, in all likelihood, would crash more than a few servers extremely quickly.
There’s also a strategic reason why news organizations are withholding some of the data. In the 24-hour news cycle, stories come and go with such speed that it’s easy for the important ones to get lost in the shuffle. By staggering the release of the Panama Papers, these news organizations are ensuring that, with each new revelation, the story stays in the news. This strategy was employed to great effect by The Guardian a few years ago, when it slowly but continuously released documents released by Edward Snowden and, in doing so, kept the story alive for years.
One interesting wrinkle to all of this: WikiLeaks, which is not known to be involved with the leak of the Panama Papers, sent out a tweet implying that it had possession of the entire trove of documents and hinting that it may release it in the near future. It’s a cryptic tweet and could well amount to nothing, but it effectively drives home the fact that, as incriminating as some of the available leaks are, we haven’t scraped the tip of the iceberg yet.
