[Music]
who doesn’t have stacks of paper in
their house I do I tell myself that I
can find my way in my own mess and that
if I need any of those papers I will
just go and find them and if I don’t
need them then it means they’re not
important but how do I know they are not
important if I don’t know what’s in each
of them word by word I’m a journalist
and as part of my job I also collect
stacks of papers from public sources or
whistleblowers and my colleagues do the
same these are some of the messiest
journalists desks I could find Florida
New York Japan paper is all around
journalists some reporters are organized
though like this colleague from
Argentina but even if he’s organized
when he’s done with a story he moves on
to the next one and then that’s give
Rico what’s on those papers word by word
probably not even in the digital world
we live in today where most of the
documents we deal with are electronic
when we run out of storage in our
computers what we normally do is we dump
the documents in a backup Drive and then
that’s basically the digital equivalent
to the stacks of paper to make sense of
the future and connect the dots
journalists need to archive their
documents and share them and we’re not
doing it we normally think of archives
as places where we store public records
and historical materials the files are
catalogued and stored in a way that
makes it very easy to search them later
maybe decades later and newspapers are
normally archived let’s think in the
same way about the documents we collect
when reporting the articles that end up
in those newspapers let’s let’s create
archives of those files so that we can
retrieve the knowledge later the need to
do this is much greater in the Big Data
era
the number of documents and data the
journalists are collecting is growing at
a very fast pace in the famous pentagon
papers back in the late 60s the
whistleblower had to make photocopies of
the 7,000 page report on the Vietnam War
before giving it to the journalists in
the Watergate scandal in the early 70s
the Washington Post reporters had to
physically meet with deep throat the
source in a parking garage
to preserve his anonymity in the digital
age
anybody can leak to a journalist from
anywhere in the world without ever
meeting in person one of the first times
were we realized the potential of this
was in an investigation called Cablegate
it happened in 2010 it was done by
WikiLeaks who partnered with several
media organizations including the New
York Times to investigate a document
dump of documents that expose the inner
dealings of the US diplomatic service
but the scale of things blew up last
year in the latest investigation I
worked in the Panama papers it was a
leak of 2.6 terabytes which amounted to
11.5 million files and at the time was
the biggest leak
in journalism history it all started
with a message from an anonymous source
to my colleague Bastian Obermeyer in
Germany and the message said hello
interested in data these big document
leaks are not just affecting
investigative journalism where we have
the time and we have the resources to
slowly look into the documents in the
current political environment we’re seen
a record number of leaks and document
dumps it’s affecting our daily routines
add to that oh the public records we
collect the public databases free of
information requires social media data
and what concerns me is that we haven’t
yet found a way to deal with such a big
an overwhelming amount of information
this is a recipe for disaster
the good news I have good news I think
we’re in time to prevent this disaster
from happening
journalism Ville doesn’t have nearly as
much money as other industries who are
facing the same issues such as big
corporations governments or criminals so
we need to think outside of the box if
we want to keep being the watchdogs of
democracy when my colleague Bastian
received the Panama papers data he
didn’t keep it to himself like most
journalists would have done he and his
newspaper in Germany saw that the
universe of data they were dealing with
was too big and complex for them to
handle so they decided to share it with
the nonprofit organization I worked with
at the time
the international consortium of
investigative journalists we sub
connections in these data to more than
200 countries so in their radical move
we shared all the files with almost 400
journalists in about 80 countries my
team of engineers made all these files
searchable in a secure website that
could be accessed from anywhere in the
world at any point in time the files
expose the offshore system like never
before they reveal a parallel economy
that is being used by the rich and the
powerful for purposes like evading taxes
there were celebrities billionaires
there were politicians and of course
criminals in the leak they were all
using the same law firm with
headquarters in Panama sharing is not
the natural step for a journalist when
we collect documents or wicked leaks
these allow us to have scoops in our
newspapers and have exclusive stories in
the front page so it gives us an added
value inside of our organizations added
value as a journalist
it’s our intellectual property so that’s
exactly what you don’t want to share
with your competitors but Siri was the
only way for us to deal with such a big
amount of information of course when you
share with so many people there’s one
risk and the risk is that somebody
reveals the secret ahead of time we use
technology to
he keep us in touch regularly and we had
our own social networking platform so
technology helped but in the end it was
all about human trust and we had to take
a leap of faith and you know what it
worked and we kept the secret for a year
and the impact was unprecedented
the reporters behind the Panama papers
published more than 4,700 stories the
prime minister of Iceland resigned the
Prime Minister of Pakistan was ousted
from office there were police raids and
arrests around the world less than a
year after the publication of the Panama
papers we accounted for at least a
hundred and fifty investigations in 79
countries we got the Pulitzer Prize the
highest recognition in journalism and
sharing made all these possible one
journalist could not have achieved all
this alone maybe it’s time we reframe
how we look at sharing we didn’t just
want to share with journalists we wanted
to give investigative power to the
people
but for source protection and privacy
issues we couldn’t just dump all the
documents on the internet so we created
a searchable database with the hundreds
of thousands of names of companies in
tax havens and the people behind them
and this database has been used by
millions of people and is regularly
being visited by academics by NGOs and
by tax agencies by connecting their data
to ours they’re finding new leads to
start new investigations for example
Europol which is Europe’s
law-enforcement agency found more than
3,000 probable matches to organized
crime and tax fraud out of those 116
were connected to their program on
Islamic terrorism
traditionally in journalism stories
finished the day you publish them maybe
a few days or a few weeks later
corruption never stops but sometimes our
reporting does
it’s been one year and a half since we
started publishing the Panama papers and
we’re still not done with the
investigation at this point I just don’t
know if we will ever be people keep
finding new leads in the data because by
sharing the files with the journalists
and the world we gave a second life to
these documents as I see all these news
stories unfold I just can’t stop
thinking about all the other leaks that
we have had access to in journalism and
I’m sure I’m sure we’ve missed many
connections to other stories and to
corruption cases because these files
were not archived and shared we didn’t
exploit the real value of those
documents so we didn’t get our true
return on investment there was one
question that kept popping in my head
over and over when I was the head of
data and technology at the IC IJ and it
still haunts me now that I’m a
consultant how can we ensure the
documents of our investigations live
forever so that they can be used to
expose corruption for decades I think
this is one of the major issues
journalism should be dealing with right
now we should be thinking long and hard
about how we archive what we have what
we share and with whom and we should do
it on a regular basis as part of our
daily routines not just in unique
investigations like the Panama papers
this is very important for us not to
miss stories in the future our democracy
depends on on this thank you
[Applause]
who doesn’t have stacks of paper in
their house I do I tell myself that I
can find my way in my own mess and that
if I need any of those papers I will
just go and find them and if I don’t
need them then it means they’re not
important but how do I know they are not
important if I don’t know what’s in each
of them word by word I’m a journalist
and as part of my job I also collect
stacks of papers from public sources or
whistleblowers and my colleagues do the
same these are some of the messiest
journalists desks I could find Florida
New York Japan paper is all around
journalists some reporters are organized
though like this colleague from
Argentina but even if he’s organized
when he’s done with a story he moves on
to the next one and then that’s give
Rico what’s on those papers word by word
probably not even in the digital world
we live in today where most of the
documents we deal with are electronic
when we run out of storage in our
computers what we normally do is we dump
the documents in a backup Drive and then
that’s basically the digital equivalent
to the stacks of paper to make sense of
the future and connect the dots
journalists need to archive their
documents and share them and we’re not
doing it we normally think of archives
as places where we store public records
and historical materials the files are
catalogued and stored in a way that
makes it very easy to search them later
maybe decades later and newspapers are
normally archived let’s think in the
same way about the documents we collect
when reporting the articles that end up
in those newspapers let’s let’s create
archives of those files so that we can
retrieve the knowledge later the need to
do this is much greater in the Big Data
era
the number of documents and data the
journalists are collecting is growing at
a very fast pace in the famous pentagon
papers back in the late 60s the
whistleblower had to make photocopies of
the 7,000 page report on the Vietnam War
before giving it to the journalists in
the Watergate scandal in the early 70s
the Washington Post reporters had to
physically meet with deep throat the
source in a parking garage
to preserve his anonymity in the digital
age
anybody can leak to a journalist from
anywhere in the world without ever
meeting in person one of the first times
were we realized the potential of this
was in an investigation called Cablegate
it happened in 2010 it was done by
WikiLeaks who partnered with several
media organizations including the New
York Times to investigate a document
dump of documents that expose the inner
dealings of the US diplomatic service
but the scale of things blew up last
year in the latest investigation I
worked in the Panama papers it was a
leak of 2.6 terabytes which amounted to
11.5 million files and at the time was
the biggest leak
in journalism history it all started
with a message from an anonymous source
to my colleague Bastian Obermeyer in
Germany and the message said hello
interested in data these big document
leaks are not just affecting
investigative journalism where we have
the time and we have the resources to
slowly look into the documents in the
current political environment we’re seen
a record number of leaks and document
dumps it’s affecting our daily routines
add to that oh the public records we
collect the public databases free of
information requires social media data
and what concerns me is that we haven’t
yet found a way to deal with such a big
an overwhelming amount of information
this is a recipe for disaster
the good news I have good news I think
we’re in time to prevent this disaster
from happening
journalism Ville doesn’t have nearly as
much money as other industries who are
facing the same issues such as big
corporations governments or criminals so
we need to think outside of the box if
we want to keep being the watchdogs of
democracy when my colleague Bastian
received the Panama papers data he
didn’t keep it to himself like most
journalists would have done he and his
newspaper in Germany saw that the
universe of data they were dealing with
was too big and complex for them to
handle so they decided to share it with
the nonprofit organization I worked with
at the time
the international consortium of
investigative journalists we sub
connections in these data to more than
200 countries so in their radical move
we shared all the files with almost 400
journalists in about 80 countries my
team of engineers made all these files
searchable in a secure website that
could be accessed from anywhere in the
world at any point in time the files
expose the offshore system like never
before they reveal a parallel economy
that is being used by the rich and the
powerful for purposes like evading taxes
there were celebrities billionaires
there were politicians and of course
criminals in the leak they were all
using the same law firm with
headquarters in Panama sharing is not
the natural step for a journalist when
we collect documents or wicked leaks
these allow us to have scoops in our
newspapers and have exclusive stories in
the front page so it gives us an added
value inside of our organizations added
value as a journalist
it’s our intellectual property so that’s
exactly what you don’t want to share
with your competitors but Siri was the
only way for us to deal with such a big
amount of information of course when you
share with so many people there’s one
risk and the risk is that somebody
reveals the secret ahead of time we use
technology to
he keep us in touch regularly and we had
our own social networking platform so
technology helped but in the end it was
all about human trust and we had to take
a leap of faith and you know what it
worked and we kept the secret for a year
and the impact was unprecedented
the reporters behind the Panama papers
published more than 4,700 stories the
prime minister of Iceland resigned the
Prime Minister of Pakistan was ousted
from office there were police raids and
arrests around the world less than a
year after the publication of the Panama
papers we accounted for at least a
hundred and fifty investigations in 79
countries we got the Pulitzer Prize the
highest recognition in journalism and
sharing made all these possible one
journalist could not have achieved all
this alone maybe it’s time we reframe
how we look at sharing we didn’t just
want to share with journalists we wanted
to give investigative power to the
people
but for source protection and privacy
issues we couldn’t just dump all the
documents on the internet so we created
a searchable database with the hundreds
of thousands of names of companies in
tax havens and the people behind them
and this database has been used by
millions of people and is regularly
being visited by academics by NGOs and
by tax agencies by connecting their data
to ours they’re finding new leads to
start new investigations for example
Europol which is Europe’s
law-enforcement agency found more than
3,000 probable matches to organized
crime and tax fraud out of those 116
were connected to their program on
Islamic terrorism
traditionally in journalism stories
finished the day you publish them maybe
a few days or a few weeks later
corruption never stops but sometimes our
reporting does
it’s been one year and a half since we
started publishing the Panama papers and
we’re still not done with the
investigation at this point I just don’t
know if we will ever be people keep
finding new leads in the data because by
sharing the files with the journalists
and the world we gave a second life to
these documents as I see all these news
stories unfold I just can’t stop
thinking about all the other leaks that
we have had access to in journalism and
I’m sure I’m sure we’ve missed many
connections to other stories and to
corruption cases because these files
were not archived and shared we didn’t
exploit the real value of those
documents so we didn’t get our true
return on investment there was one
question that kept popping in my head
over and over when I was the head of
data and technology at the IC IJ and it
still haunts me now that I’m a
consultant how can we ensure the
documents of our investigations live
forever so that they can be used to
expose corruption for decades I think
this is one of the major issues
journalism should be dealing with right
now we should be thinking long and hard
about how we archive what we have what
we share and with whom and we should do
it on a regular basis as part of our
daily routines not just in unique
investigations like the Panama papers
this is very important for us not to
miss stories in the future our democracy
depends on on this thank you
[Applause]
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