How the Panama Papers journalists broke the biggest leak in history

What do you do if you had
to figure out the information

behind 11-and-a-half million documents --

verify and make sense of it?

That was a challenge

that a group of journalists
had to face last year.

An anonymous person,

calling himself John Doe,

had somehow managed to copy
nearly 40 years of records

of the Panamanian law firm
Mossack Fonseca.

This is one of many firms around the world

that specialize in setting up accounts
in off-shore tax havens,

like the British Virgin Islands,

for rich and powerful people
who like to keep secrets.

John Doe had managed to copy
every spread sheet from this firm,

every client file,

every email,

from 1977 to the present day.

It represented the biggest cache

of inside information
into the tax haven system

that anyone had ever seen.

But it also represented a gigantic
challenge to investigative journalism.

Think about it.

11-and-a-half million documents

containing the secrets of people
from more than 200 different countries.

Where do you start
with such a vast resource?

Where do you even begin to tell a story

that can trail off into every
corner of the globe

and can effect almost any
person in any language?

Sometimes in ways you don't even know yet.

John Doe had given the information

to two journalists at the German
Newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung.

He said he was motivated by --

and I quote --

"The scale of the injustice
that the documents would reveal."

But one user alone can never make sense
of such a vast amount of information.

So the Suddeutsche Zeitung reached out
to my organization in Washington D.C.

The International Consortium
of Investigative Journalists.

We decide to do something

that was the very opposite of everything
we'd been taught to do as journalists.

Share.

By nature,

investigative reporters are lone wolves.

We fiercely guard our secrets,

at times even from our editors,

because we know that the moment
that we tell them what we have,

they'll want that story right away.

And to be frank,

when you get a good story,

you like to keep the glory to yourself.

But there's no doubt that we live
in a shrinking world

and that the media has largely been
slow to wake up to this.

The issues we report on are
more and more transnational.

Giant corporations operate
on a global level.

Environmental and health
crises are global.

So too are financial flows
and financial crises.

So it seems staggering
that journalism has been so late

to cover stories in a truly global way.

And it also seems staggering
that journalism seems so slow

to wake up to the possibilities
that technology brings,

rather than being frightened of it.

The reason journalists
are scared of technology is this:

their profession's largest institutions
are going through tough times

because of the changing way
that people are consuming news.

The advertising business models
that have sustained reporting are broken.

And this has [pushed
journalism into crisis,

forcing those institutions
to re-examine how they function.

But where there is crisis,

there is also opportunity.

The first challenge presented

by what would eventually become
known as the Panama Papers

was to make the documents
searchable and readable.

There were nearly 5 million emails,

2 million PDFs that needed
to be scanned and indexed,

and millions more files
and other kinds of documents.

They all needed to be housed

in a safe and secure
location in the cloud.

We mixed invited reporters
to look at the documents,

and all reporters from more than 100
media organizations in 76 countries.

From the BBC in Britain to La Monde
newspaper in France,

to the Asahi Shimbun in Japan.

Native eyes on native names we called it.

The idea being,

who best to tell you who was important
to Nigeria than a Nigerian journalist--

who best in Canada than a Canadian?

There were only two rules
for everyone who was invited:

we all agreed to share what we
found with everybody else,

and we all agreed to publish
together on the same day.

We chose our media partners based on trust

that had been built up through
previous smaller collaborations,

and also from leads that jumped
out from the documents.

Over the next few months,

my small non-profit organization
of less than 20 people

was joined by more than 350
other reporters from 25 language groups.

The biggest information leak in history

had now spawned the biggest
journalism collaboration in history.

376 sets of native eyes doing what
journalists normally never do.

Working shoulder to shoulder,

sharing information,

but telling no one,

for it became clear at this point

that in order to make
the biggest kind of noise,

we first needed the biggest
kind of silence.

To manage a project over the many
months that it would take,

we built a secure virtual newsroom.

We used encrypted communication systems

and we built a specially
designed search engine.

Inside the virtual newsroom,

the reporters could gather
around the themes

that we're emerging from the documents.

Those interested in blood diamonds
or exotic art, for instance

could share information about how
the off-shore [war] was being used

to hide the trade in both
of those commodities.

Those interested in sport
could share information

about how famous sports stars

were putting their image rights
into off-shore companies,

thereby likely avoiding taxes

in the countries where they
[played] their trade.

But perhaps most exciting of all

were the number of leaders
and elect politicians

that were emerging from the documents.

Figures like Petro Poroshenko
in Ukraine ...

close associates
of Vladimir Putin in Russia ...

and the British Prime
Minister David Cameron,

who is linked through his late
father, Ian Cameron.

Buried in the documents
were secret off-shore entities,

such as Wintris Inc.,

a company in the British Virgin Islands

that had actually belonged
to the sitting Icelandic Prime Minister.

I like to refer to Johannes Kristjansson,

the Icelandic reporter we invited
to join the project,

as the loneliest man in the world.

For nine months,

he refused paid work and lived
off the earnings of his wife.

He pasted [tacks]
over the windows of his home

to prevent prying eyes
during the long Icelandic winter.

And he soon ran out of excuses
to explain his many abcenses

as we worked red-eyed,

night after night,

month after month.

And all that time,

he sat on information

that would eventually bring down
the leader of his country.

Now when you're an investigative reporter
and you make an amazing discovery,

such as your Prime Minster can be linked
to a secret off-shore company,

that company has a financial interest
in Icelandic Banks,

the very issue that he's been elected on,

well you're instinct
is to scream out very loud.

Instead, as one of the few people
that he could speak to,

Johannes and I shared a kind of
[gallowish] humor.

"Wintris is coming" he used to say.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

We were big fans of "Game of Thrones."

When reporters like Johannes
wanted to scream,

they did so inside the virtual newsroom,

and then they turned
those screams into stories

but going outside the documents
to court records,

official company registers,

and by eventually putting questions
to those that we intended to name.

Panama Papers actually gave reporters,

or allowed reporters

to look at the world through a different
lens than everybody else.

As we were researching the story --

unconnected to us --

a major political bribery scandal
happened in Brazil.

A new leader was elected in Argentina.

The FBI began to indict officials at FIFA,

the organization that controls
the world of professional soccer.

The Panama Papers
actually had unique insights

into each one of these unfolding events.

So you can imagine the pressure
and the ego [...]

that could have ruined what
we were trying to do.

Any of one of these journalists --

they could have broken the pact,

but they didn't.

And on April third this year,

at exactly 8 p.m. German time,

we published simultaneously
in 76 countries.

(Applause)

The Panama Papers quickly became
one of the biggest stories of the year.

This is the scene in Iceland
the day after we published.

It was the first of many protests.

The Icelandic Prime Minister
had to resign.

It was the first of many resignations.

We spotlighted many famous people
such as Lionel Messi,

the most famous
soccer player in the world.

And there were some
unintended consequences.

These alleged members of a Mexican
drug cartel were arrested

after we published details
about their hideout.

They'd been using the address
to register their off-shore company.

(Laughter)

There's a kind of irony in what
we've been able to do.

The technology --

the Internet --

that had broken the business model

is allowing us to reinvent
journalism itself.

And this dynamic is producing

unprecedented levels
of transparency and impact.

We showed how a group of journalists
can effect change across the world

by applying new methods and
old-fashioned journalism techniques

to vast amounts of leaked information.

We put all-important context to what
was given to us by John Doe.

And by sharing resources,

we were able to dig deep --

much deeper and longer than most
media organizations allow these days

because of financial concerns.

Now it was a big risk,

and it wouldn't work for every story,

but we showed with the Panama Papers

that you can write about any country
from just about anywhere

and then choose your preferred
battleground to defend your work.

Try obtaining a court injunction

that would prevent the telling
of a story in 76 different countries.

Try stopping the inevitable.

Shortly after we published I got
a three-word text from Johannes.

"Wintris has arrived."

(Laughter)

It had arrived and so too, perhaps
has a new era for journalism.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Bruno Giussani: Gerard, thank you --

We're going to send that applause

to the 350 journalists
who worked with you, all right?

Now a couple of questions
I would like to ask you.

And the first one is

you've been working in secrecy
for over a year

with 350-something colleagues
from all over the world.

Has there ever been a moment

when you thought
that the leak may be leaked?

That the [...] collaboration

may be blocked by somebody
publishing a story?

Or somebody not in the group releasing
some information they would get to know?

GR: We had a series
of crises along the way,

including when something major
was happening in the world

of course the journalists from that
country wanted to publish right away.

We had to calm them down.

Probably the biggest crisis we had
was a week before publication.

We'd sent a series of questions
to the associates of Vladimir Putin,

but instead of responding,

the Kremlin actually
held a press conference

and denounced the whole thing as being
I guess, a plot from the West.

At that point Putin thought
it was just about him.

And of course a lot of the editors around
the world were very nervous,

they thought that the story
was going to get out.

You can imagine the amount
of time they'd spent,

the amount of resources --

money that'd been spent on it.

So I had to basically spend the last week
calming everyone down,

a bit like a general,

where you're holding your troops back --

"Calm, remain calm."

And then eventually
of course they all did.

BG: And then a couple weeks or so ago

you released a lot of the documents
as an open database

for everybody to search
via keyword essentially.

GB: We very much believe

that the basic information about
the off-shore world

should be made public.

Now what we didn't do,

we didn't publish the underlying documents
of the journalists we're working with,

but the basic information,

such as the name of a person,

what their off-shore company was

and the name of that off-shore company,

is now all available online.

In fact, the biggest resource
of its kind basically,

is out there now.

BG: Gerard, thank you
for the world you do.

GR: Thank you.

(Applause)