Panama Papers - 2.6TB leak on offshore tax havens
panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de
panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de
- https://www.yahoo.com/news/putin-aides-among-world-leaders-e...
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/associates-of-...
- http://www.usatoday.com/ (prominent on front page)
- http://time.com/4280200/panama-papers-vladimir-putin-russia-...
- newyorktimes.com buried under politics http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/04/us/politics/leaked-documen...
Nothing on CNN's front page as of yet. Don't know if on TV. Imagine editorial staff doing catch up, but wonder why they weren't collaborating earlier. Maybe AOL/TimeWarner are in there?
https://twitter.com/ploechinger/status/716773530436825088
https://twitter.com/ploechinger/status/716763595820941312
Also, I hope journalists are asking the "accused" for their comments, and giving them time to respond, as journalistic best practice.
I will have a hard time believing any of the reporting until the raw data is released.
Makes me skeptical to say the least.
Even if this was orchestrated by the usual US suspects, the rest of the world has some house cleaning to do.
(BTW, people will believe your rather out-of-the-box accusations more if you don't create separate brand-new accounts to post them.)
The "Oh this is the biggest leak ever because it's lots of TB" is also stupid. For all we know it's huge because it contains a bunch of scanned faxes.
My question is - what legal right do these journalists have to read this confidential information?
What happens if your clearance is secret and you are doing your job and some time later, they decide something you were working is now top secret?
Or if your clearance is secret and TS stuff is on the morning NYTimes?
I'm sure the military has all sorts of rules about this that makes no sense but a lot of non military also have these clearances. Who reads the 150 some page application in its entirety?
It might seem backwards, but members of the military are subject to trial by military tribunal. They agree to this when they sign up, and you agree to more restrictions on your actions when you apply for security clearances. I don't know specifically what they are and I am not a military lawyer, but I have five or six friends who have at one point or another had S or TS clearance in the army, navy, and two other three-letter agencies and have had casual discussions with them about it.
tl;dr: You agree not to read things outside your security clearance when you get one. If you do so, you're subject to legal repercussions. It's my understanding that going to a website and knowingly downloading these things would be treated similarly to reading something using a coworkers network account that has access to a higher security level than your own.
1. I can assure you that the majority of people purchasing services from Mossack Fonseca are not "completely innocent".
2. There is firm precedent for the legality of whistleblowing when you believe there to be crimes occurring.
3. "Who owns a business" is not generally considered to be a highly protected class of information, and that's mostly what the data in the leak is about. It's generally about board structure and ownership of various shell companies.
4. Only in Panama (and a few other countries) is business ownership information considered to be "confidential" information.
But to answer your direct question - what legal right do these journalists have? I believe they have the same legal right all citizens do: the right to know if our leaders are committing crimes secretly.
However engaging in publishing of the leaked information 'may' get them in trouble, unless it is in public's interest to do so. And that's a big 'may'.
See the quoted block below.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/information-antidote-f...
If you are interested in the current jurisprudence surrounding the matter of when possessing information can be (and can't be) illegal, you might be interested in "illegal numbers": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
This is not the case. Presumably the original leaker(s) are in violation of their contracts with the company and possibly Panamanian criminal law (which I know nothing about). In some jurisdictions, there may also be statutory civil liability surrounding the subsequent losses realized as the result of the information being in the hands of these non-parties.
If there is no license, full rights are reserved and copyright is implied.
"Fair dealing for criticism, review or quotation is allowed for any type of copyright work. Fair dealing with a work for the purpose of reporting current events is allowed for any type of copyright work other than a photograph. In each of these cases, a sufficient acknowledgment will be required."
>Generally speaking, owning an offshore company is not illegal in itself. In fact, establishing an offshore company can be seen as a logical step for a broad range of business transactions. However, a look through the Panama Papers very quickly reveals that concealing the identities of the true company owners was the primary aim in the vast majority of cases.
This makes it sound like owning an offshore company solely to conceal your identity is illegal. Is that true?
If that were true then the concept of registered agents wouldn't be tolerated, but in reality they're commonly used - even by the lowly working class setting up their LLCs. In any case, an appeal to the tyranny of the majority isn't a strong argument - I certainly wasn't a part of that decision... unless we're talking about the social contract I implicitly agreed to upon emerging from the birth canal.
You could also own a company that does the majority of its business overseas. If you need to move money from one part of the world to another, sometimes it is just easier to keep it in Panama or Singapore. When you move the money back into the US, you would have to pay taxes on it.
However in all cases, if you have an overseas account with a lot of money in it, you must accept that you are willing to flee the US to keep it.
"The leak is being managed by the grandly but laughably named “International Consortium of Investigative Journalists”, which is funded and organised entirely by the USA’s Center for Public Integrity. Their funders include
- Ford Foundation - Carnegie Endowment - Rockefeller Family Fund - W K Kellogg Foundation - Open Society Foundation (Soros)" [1]
[1] https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/04/corporate-me...
Otherwise it's like reading a research paper that provides no raw data - this way the analysis is not replicable by third parties.
Are you accusing SZ to be in the pocket of your US corporate overlords? Or are you trying to drop names to discredit the leak?
I guess the real world isn't so boring afterall.
My guess is some sys admin presumely at some central office (as this spans the whole company); I mean 2.6TB data - not so easy for an average lawyer to download to his laptop.
The data probably would have been handed over in person.
My guess is he is German speaking; maybe from Switzerland or Liechtenstein.
But I wonder about doing something like this: He is not exactly protected, what he has done is illegal (at least to some extent - whistleblower laws etc.), he stands to make no personal gains.
One thing is being a high profile whistleblower like Snowden or Assange. But this guy? Where does he end up?
It would be cool to see the global engineering community coming together in a similar manner that the journos have, towards one such big project.
If anything it will be an interesting insight into how tightly knit world leaders are to one another and their investments. The story does say that more data is expected to come in, about 700GBs worth...so that could be new material. However, as it stands I don't think this will cause much upheaval. It does almost read like a plot to a Stieg Larsson novel though, and I'm sure someone is going to write a terrific book about it all.
I do hope there is a lot of explosive material in here, but I do have my doubts, given the amount of time the data has been available.
Here's the Vice article from 2014. http://www.vice.com/read/evil-llc-0000524-v21n12
Someone, somewhere, is building the theory of the optimal leak.
Is this one of the times when conspiracy theory could be conspiracy fact? It feels like this is an extremely selective release.
Why are you hoping one of your presidential candidates is corrupt? Shouldn't you be crossing your fingers not to find dirt?
It's like the Snowden leaks. Many knew about the NSA conspiracies years before his information came out. For all those years the public was blind to their rights slowly slipping away as precedents were set, while those that knew were ignored as paranoid nutters. Now we can see the light.
edit: to be clear, I'm not talking about any specific politician here.
Many of us know that establishment politicians are utterly compromised. It's similar to the Edward Snowden revelations. We just need proof.
(I don't have strong opinions on the matter, by the way.)
"The leak is being managed by the grandly but laughably named “International Consortium of Investigative Journalists”, which is funded and organised entirely by the USA’s Center for Public Integrity. Their funders include
Ford Foundation Carnegie Endowment Rockefeller Family Fund W K Kellogg Foundation Open Society Foundation (Soros)"
- Drivers Licenses: Also Not Secret.
- Banking details of the people who have been ripping off the rest of the world...sorry if I fail to see the downside of dumping all of it :)
EDIT:
At the same time, I understand where you're coming from so thanks for the info mikeyouse!