Panama Leak: Behind the scenes

By Himal Kotelawala

Three German journalists attached to the daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung responsible for the historic Panama Papers exposé, one of the biggest leaks of all time, elaborated on the intricacies of the scandal on reddit’s popular Ask Me Anything (AMA) sub on Wednesday.

Investigative reporters Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer and investigative data journalist Vanessa Wormer fielding questions from reddit users around the world spoke about the process that led to the leak, its consequences and their collaboration with other international media organisations.

How the leak happened

“Over a year ago, an anonymous source contacted the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and submitted encrypted internal documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that sells anonymous offshore companies around the world,” said Obermaier, opening the session.

Ultimately, SZ acquired about 2.6 terabytes of data, making the leak the biggest that journalists had ever worked with, he added.

“The source wanted neither financial compensation nor anything else in return, apart from a few security measures. The Süddeutsche Zeitung decided to analyse the data in cooperation with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). In the past 12 months, around 400 journalists from more than 100 media organisations in over 80 countries have taken part in researching the documents,” he said.

No plans to release raw data

Responding to questions, the journalists said they were not planning on releasing the raw data (worth 2.6 terabytes). 

“We are not going to release the raw data and we have valid reasons to do so. The source decided to give the data to journalists and not, for example, to Wikileaks. As journalists, we have to protect our source: We can’t guarantee that there is no way for someone to find out who the source is with the data. That’s why we can’t make the data public,” said Obermaier.

“And as responsible journalists we also stick to certain ethical rules: You don’t harm the privacy of people who are not in the public eye. Blacking out private data is a task that would require a lifetime of work – we have 11 million documents,” he added.

Technical aspects

Touching on the technical aspects of the data analysis involved, data journalist Wormer said the leaked data was largely unstructured, meaning they h ad to deal with different file types such as mails, .tiff, .jpg, .pdf, etc., and the data had to be indexed systematically in order to make searching possible. 

“It was important to make pictures (scanned passports, contracts with signatures!) searchable. It’s called OCR, optical character recognition. We at Süddeutsche Zeitung used the software Nuix. Further, the ICIJ set up a new database for all our partners. I think the most important thing was to enable all 400 journalists to search through the documents easily. They were also able to use “batch searching” techniques – so the journalist put names on a list and ran it through the data. I remember the day when ICIJ announced that nearly all the documents are searchable: That day we and our international partners had lots of great findings,” she said.

The digging started with just two, Obermaier and Obermayer. In May 2015, it was had increased up to around 40 people worldwide and at the end of the year almost 400 people.

“And these were only the people who worked with the data itself. Each news outlet had a lot more staff that was working on different aspects of the story – like design, publishing or reporting on the ground, researching different aspects,” they said.

A matter of safety

Responding to a question about any reluctance on the part of the journalists to release the information they had uncovered, Obermaier admitted that were worried at first.

“Of course we were and still are worried. But we know that Germany is a pretty safe country for journalists. We are more concerned about our colleagues in other regions of the world, like Russia, Africa, Latin America,” he said.

Most of the important stories to come out of the leak have already gotten media attention, the journalists said, but it was impossible to study all the published stories in nearly 80 countries.

In a lighter vein, said Obermaier, Mossack Fonseca addressed some of his very secretive clients by code names like “Winnie Pooh” or “Harry Potter”.

Trusted partners

Deciding on what other news organisations to work with on the story, said Obermaier, took them “quite some time” and they made these decisions together with the ICIJ. 

“To trust the partners was extremely important for us. That’s why ICIJ firstly contacted partners we had already worked with.  It was less important for us how big the news outlet is. What mattered more was their expertise, their willingness to cooperate and their awareness for security issues. We also tried to have journalists from a lot of different countries on our team to make this a global project,” he said.

Bizarre and often difficult

When asked what it was like have the information and know about the gravity of the situation a year before it was published, both Bastian and Frederik said it was sometimes almost bizarre and often difficult.

“We work at a daily newspaper – to work on a story for that long an amount of time was quite extraordinary. We almost didn’t write anything in the last year. And at the same time we were not able to talk about our work at all. Not with friends, not with co-workers, not with family. People even made fun of us because we had to be so secretive. At Christmas, Bastian’s sister even joked if he was allowed to reveal his cookie recipe or if that was a secret as well,” said Frederik.

Impact on personal life

Working on such a secretive project can have an impact on a journalist’s personal life. Hiding things becomes part and parcel of daily life.

“We tried to be vague. And we tried to make our work sound as boring as possible, so that no one wants to ask any more questions. It worked most of the time,” said Obermaier.

How did the journalists agree who was getting which stories or had they split the data up between everyone? If so, how did that work? Did some media outlets think they should get more or better stories?

“All partners had access to the whole data-set. There was no division of stories or documents. Every journalist was free to report an anything they wanted. We also talked openly about our findings and shared them with each other,” said Obermaier.