Journalists, investigating what we now call the Panama Papers. Last year, 11. 5 million financial records for the to a german newspaper. Possibly the biggest leak in journalism history. Fonseca, oneffett of the worlds top shell companies, with 2. 6 terabytes of data. The newspaper needed help and called in the journalism troops. With such a large number of people trolling through the database, the partners needed to agree on a common strategy for collaboration, and for parsing out the research, as well as a joint promise on holding off on publishing until everyone was ready. This is something a bit foreign to the american media. We are not used to collaborating on investigations with competitors. Today, i am honored to welcome some of the participants in the Panama Papers, to talk about their work and findings. Our forum is sponsored by the npc journalism institute, the nonprofit arm of the National Press club. Please welcome, these reporters. Thank you for this invitation. Yes, we are going to talk about collaboration. But, when we think about to invest gate of journalism sometimes what comes to mind are that at some point we have these in our corner,l doing our story in isolation in and coming out and grouping everyone. But the problem with the lone wolf is it is trying to investigate and is presented with challenges like what is seen right now. The kind of stories were looking into. Fonseca1 of the network. Thesef that is where Panama Papers come from. The consortium is a collection of journalists in more than 65 countries. We collaborate on stories. Over time we have no trust and on that trust is that Everything Else works. There is the trust. Come and the stories we quote from other members of the consortium. Sometimes others get the stories and they come to the consortium to help build a global story. Before the Panama Papers, we had been working on this subject for about war years. Thechina leaks looking at relatives of the communist and how they were using tax havens. And a story about how we were looking at Multinational Companies in luxembourg. On millions a year of dollars in profits for and looking at how hsbc was polluted with criminals. Already at the time we were set up and there was not enough on the offshore world. Came the Panama Papers. Cable left you have the leaks investigation. Offshore leaks. Luxembourg leaks. Swiss leaks. And to the right is the Panama Papers at 96 terabytes. You have a spreadsheet. Else,so have everything emails, faxes, contract, word documents. 40 years worth of information. First of all, let me introduce the others. The ones who first received the league. Icij and so basically they were contacted why an anonymous source who asked them if they were interested in data. Thecondition was that source wanted to remain anonymous and there were going to be no meetings. Everything done over and could did communication. Everything done over encrypted communication. They asked the source about motivation and the source said he wanted to make it public. It could be a sheep, but for simplicity because he has chosen the name john doe we call him he. They asked how much, how big will stop the answer was, more then anything you have ever seen in that was absolutely right. At that point we had already and the first batch of documents was about 3 million files. We already felt like this , youse we figured out know, with our computer if we were to process this information, because of course information does not come all nicely organized and in readable format, we had to process it, make it readable, uploaded to a cloud where the journalists good access it. It would take us one year if we took 10 seconds per file. We deployed an army of 35 servers and we were able to speed up the time in 11 days to process those files and we did the same with the sequence of information we received. That was the beginning of this collaboration, which of course, you know, not only have these technical challenges but also the human challenges. Journalist note only in 10 or 20 countries that in as many countries as possible to do justice to the data. While corruption is local so you need to look at it from a local point of view and if those local journalists who know the powerful people, who the media are, the lawyer, and so on. Icij is to be in the middle of the exploration, helping to build bridges and helping people, you know, communicate with one another and facilitating communication. Email. T do that on we build our own virtual newsroom. We needed to create a space journalists could log in every day and share findings. If everyone hide it in a corner and was a loan we said ok we are going to build a social media room. We call it a facebook of investigative journalism. It is open source but we can tweak it to our needs. Everyone had an avatar. You can post your findings, and he who dwells is looking at any particular point in time and chat with other members of team. There are groups, as you can see, people interested in politicians, latin america, sometimes people would create groups and their own languages so when people ask how we managed to keep it secret for so long, we said, one of the reasons is because reporters had this form where they were able to at least talk to one another saybreak that isolation and everything they needed to say they could not tell their spouses or colleagues. We also met in person. The first meeting was right here and that room nextdoor, there were about 40 reporters and that hearst meeting in june, 2015. That was followed by a meeting of war than 100 reporters in munich and then a meeting in johann is berg. Johann is berg. Another meeting in london where we touch with their reporters that were working on the russias story for obvious was safer to do it that way and that was a very important and complicated story. So yes, meeting in person, there can, youhnology that know, build the trust that a facetorace meeting can. Now what do we do with the documents . We also created a platform to upload documents and you might be thinking, how crazy to put these documents on the internet. What if you think about it, we would not have enabled to do a collaboration this way without taking that controlled risk of putting the documents online, of course in a very secure manner. Make it easily accessible to journalist. A platform that works like google. You could put any word in you could, you know, type of document, many other ways. You can save your searches. You can also, that was when it was interesting is, you can create a list of your interest didnt and in ideal work and then do a batch search and match it against 11 million records and that was, you know, a very efficient way instead of typing name by name or word by word said that was the other platform journalists annexes to. Some of the documents we had, you know, in this league. Power of attorney documents that were very interesting and important because in many cases they revealed the people controlling the company. The beneficial loner. Ais document is part of the [indiscernible] for a luxury yacht. So, that is interesting. Passports and other identification documents that were of course very important to identify. Make sure we had accurately identified people. [indiscernible] in syria. A client of a lot of interesting communications and communications about his connections to the offshore world. You see the passport. Our lots of emails and following those communications over time, sometimes over one year. It helped build the stories. This is one of the top contractors of the Mexican Government and he got in a lot of trouble last year when it came out he had built a home for the wife of the president of mexico and in this email they are discussing how, in the midst of that scandal, this person is trying to move 100 million a broad. With more traditional shareholding certificates, and this case of an italian fugitive formeraged close to a [indiscernible] nt used the companies to buy and sell apartments in new york anytime one there was a cease order on his property. Allowed and created a cspan system that allow journalists to look at the networks because of course you need to look at the documents but you also need to understand in each company, who were all the players involved and that is when doing a Network Analysis really helps so this is what we use. Of course, we did all, you know, traditional reporting and what well do, not only looking into the league but going outside the leak using databases, lexisnexis, iraq, jones, everything we can get in our hands to verify and can harm information. Do interviews, travel. There is a misconception that leaks are easy. Or that we got documents, read them, wrote a story. This took really bigtime detective work and looking at a besidesublic records the confidential information. It was published all over the world. This is one of our main stories we were able to trace nearly 2 million that Close Associates of president clinton had shuffled around the world president putin had shuffled around the world. That one ofclaims the players one of his friends who is a cellist was using the money to buy instruments. Physical instruments. Musical instruments. Nearly 33und companies and people had been blacklisted in the United States for various serious crimes. Business able to do offshore for canseco and they had them as clients right along time. We looked at the role of big eggs and how more than 500 ranks had helped create more than 15,000 offshore companies for canseco a in many cases to sell clients around help clients taxes. The world evade of course, politicians and Public Officials, that was one of the most surprising findings. You imagine billionaires and celebrities, they have these companies for privacy issues overtax issues, but to find and of200 politicians them, 16 were leaders in this secrecy. Ng the including some were leaders have been at the forefront of the right against tax havens. Really interesting. So we created a whole application to look into this important issue. Reaction and impact has been pretty immediate. Public process in iceland where the Prime Minister stepped aside a few days after publication as well as in london. Some resin nations in the beef up. A lot of interesting information in the world of sports and how they also used secrecy. There were arrests as people connected to it and after publication they were arrested. Your, the states, in u. S. Prosecutor has opened a criminal investigation to look into the Panama Papers. A few days ago, as you probably know, joe dell, the source of the leak broke silence and published a very powerful manifesto. I do not have time to go through a lot of it. We can talk about it in the question and answers should session and he said he does not work for a Government Agency and is willing to collaborate with authorities in he mentioned the cases of Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers when faced retaliation who are now in hiding, being prosecuted in some cases, antisaid that until governments can guarantee real safety for whistleblowers, they are going to do use their own resources to investigate. So he basically calls for immunity and utter rejection. Better protection. He also calls for the registration publicly about who really controls a Company Becomes public and becomes accessible rather than this secret, you know, for tax havens. Monday, was it . A database with information precisely about, you know, the Corporate Information in this leak. So the names of all the Companies Involved and the people that are associated to. Hose companies you can search air, again, like in google, you can search by country, jurisdiction, you can use any name, person, company, and research and find the networks around the companies. ,e have not published Public Private information such as Bank Accounts or Financial Transactions or things like that. We have also not published a lot of documents that are select the documents that have been link to some of our stores but the bulk of the leak remains private. Remains for the journalists who are working and continue to work on this investigation. Compare the two models and see what each model brings so we have the lone wolf model and the network model. Proposeswill model snooping. We propose collaborating. The lone wolf model has individual achievement and we have shared ownership. There is start treatment often in the loan will model. Nothing wrong with that but we offer no special treatment to any journalist. , welone wolf is proprietary are very opensource and collaborative in our approach. The lone wolf usually achieves national impact. Model protects is a global impact. We are published at an agreed time and do it together to be able to get that kind of impact. Is very wolf approach vertical and ours istwoyear. Peer. R to doe. Nish with john thank you so much. [applause] good morning. With icj. Orter i am going to talk about one of the two hats that i as an icj reporter wears. On the one hand being a journalist. That is after all white icj hired me. Also, to my surprise, case and all frustration being a collaborative journalism administrator. I came this morning from a conversation that spanned 13 hours speaking to departments at my primary role, really, including the Panama Papers was working with our african partners. Icj, over two years ago now, i think without being critical, it was a core of journalists who were excellent at what they do but who largely came from, especially those who participated in regular projects, came from the global correctlyas john doe says, theres no reason why that needs to be the case. Needs the larger global are really a few people who are willing to wake up at 2 00 a. M. So they can speak to their kenyan colleague and make sure they are just as on board as our partners at the bbc in london or in washington, d. C. Is. So that is what i have done in the Panama Papers. Largestt icij our collaboration from cape town to cairo across africa this time. 10t was, journalists from newsrooms that included major thecan news outlets such as daily nation in kenya, but also something i found particularly inspiring and inspirational, small oneman bands working in molly bang in their living room. Member earlier, i is a of staff at icij do not give a demand oro request or email from the guardian u. K. Or more attention than i would from my friend david in west africa and i find that are inspiring as a journalist and i find that very motivating. I think what is impressive about this kind of model of journalism often probably escapes is. We are here in washington, d. C. , reflect on the impact that lettersapers has had on sent by members of congress and senators to officials in nevada and wyoming or perhaps the press conference that president obama gave. What we have to and miss but what is equally important, especially in light of the anticorruption conference happening in london at the moment is, what are the impacts of these kind of stories and in what ways is investigative across thethat works border empowering and changing countries, governments, and lives in countries that are far from america. We do not every day unless you wee obsessive subscriptions, do not receive the news that sierra leones president announced a review of mining contracts based on reporting that some of our west african colleagues didnt to diamond deals. We do not receive regular changes are what being moved to full political interest for political officials based on reports of our colleagues did in botswana. I find the benefit is the kind of benefit that is often unseen. It is work that requires rather a lot of effort and hard work. Confidentto first be that who we are working with, especially in a world that might have limited press freedom have issues regarding internet freedom. Tacticalave monday issues such as, you know, electricity blackouts in senegal. How do we work with as partners in a way that allows icij to control risks, as marina said earlier. That is not something we do within 24 hours. That is facetoface meetings. Increasingly easy now thanks to icij and others recent successes, the growing understanding among journalists that yes, they can have a national scoop unto themselves but especially if youre working in tunisia, you can be part of something much more global if you bide your time and go with your peers. From my own experience and a continent as fast as africa, working is part of a collaboration and brings personal and professional protection in many cases to the journalists we work with. Journalists who would otherwise have a story killed immediately because and we saw this happen in a number of countries where a businessman, a politician, calls atv owner and says, theres no way you are running that story. Within twoed minutes. Thanks to the icij network, that businessman is less likely to make the phone call and even if and Network Intent can be alerted and handed is fair to say there is a health of a healthy dose of solidarity among journalists. Serve one members feeling under attack, it is more likely to have the opposite attack and will increase and embolden other partners to run that story so it gets the increase and impact it deserves. When i am not struggling with internet connections, i am writing stories as a journalist as a member of icij. Two of the stories i did in Panama Papers came out of the issue from vastly different approaches. One was those individuals on the sanctions list within the United States who appeared within the penama papers. Was, we thought, in important story to tell because its situated america in something that was very important and that has been in congress. As many told us in the interviews for a long time. That was in some ways and the easy story to do. You could enter in the term sanctions and get a result that has one partner writing, oh my god we have to get this off as soon as possible. But also required a more thoughtful data approach to counterbalance so that we were not cherry picking, incriminating emails. It goes back to what marina said where we use batch searches to upload these specially designated National List to the department of treasury to mat