The so-called Panama Papers may signify a new era in journalism, an escalation into data breaches often achieved through hacking. It is getting more difficult for governments and giant corporations to keep their unsavory dealings from public scrutiny. The Panama Papers are files from a Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca, altogether 11.5 million documents, with details of tax shelters and shell companies that enable anyone to hide business dealings, legitimate and otherwise. Revelations in the documents rattled the cages of Putin of Russia and Cameron of Britain and precipitated the resignation of the Icelandic prime minister over some questionable bank deals. (The New York Times, April 11, 2016, by Jim Rutenberg)
In 2015 an anonymous source provided the documents to Suddeutsche Zeitung, a German newspaper, that gave the documents to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists so that about 400 journalists from around 100 media organizations in some 80 countries processed the documents converting them to machine-readable and searchable files. The journalists found that the law firms’ clients included criminals and their groups, heads of states and family and associates and almost 200 other government ministers and politicians from across the world. (Suddeutsche Zeitung, April 5, 2016, by Frederik Obermaier, Bastian Obermayer, Vanessa Wormer and Wolfgang Jaschensky)
In GQ, April 8, 2016, Michael Wolff questions the consistency of liberals on the one hand cheering the invasion of the private files of a Panama law firm and on the other objecting to the FBI’s pressure on Apple to reveal their iPhone encryption code. “…how is the hacking of Mossack Fonseca, the law firm whose 40 years and several terabytes of data lay bare the off-shore financial strategies of a wide variety of unpopular world leaders and their families and friends, different from the hack of Sony Pictures, laying bare assorted instances of moral turpitude and hypocrisy in the media industry? Different in the degree of turpitude perhaps, but not necessarily in the nature of the intrusion,” writes Wolff.