Pandora Papers: is the world’s biggest leak the world’s biggest cover-up?
michaelwest.com.au
michaelwest.com.au
It's South Dakota. [1]
Former hedge fund manager and financial book author Patrick Boyle explains what these Pandora Papers mean in a video [2].
There are rumors and speculations that both the Panama and Pandora Papers leaks were released by the CIA. The leak is so massive and so many entities were hacked that only a nation state could have pulled it off. And given who was and who wasn't implicated in this and given which news orgs received these papers, it's pretty obvious that CIA or NSA or some other part of the US IC community was behind these leaks. And none of the media companies are asking the question of who is behind these leaks for a very good reason.
Just imagine if Wikileaks had released something like this... all these news orgs would immediately blame it on "russians" and claim it's all fake.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/heres-how-states-like-south-...
That’s a pretty bold conclusion from the premises provided.
Weren’t the Panama Papers almost exclusively data from Mossack Fonseca?
The evidence isn’t that great for the claim you’re making. The other one I hear often when people make this claim which is how good a job the hackers did packaging it and getting it to all the right places in relative secrecy.
I mean.. I kind of see where your coming from if you compare it to the Epik hack recently but I don’t think quietly emailing journalists is some unobtainable skill either for even a single person let alone small crew.
Edit: just by way of reference I wanted to point you to a great example of some of the many motivated people and groups out there who I think are way more likely: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/subcowmandante-marco...
Luckily, Wired did an expose of Mossack Fonseca's security lapses in 2018, and yeah, wow – if any of this is evidence of their broader security patterns at the time of the breach, you definitely would not have needed a team of Fancy Bear hackers to pull this one off:
> Mossack Fonseca has failed to update its Outlook Web Access login since 2009
> Mossack Fonseca's client portal is also vulnerable to the DROWN attack... The portal, which runs on the Drupal open source CMS, was last updated in August 2013
> The version of Drupal used by the portal has at least 25 vulnerabilities, including a high-risk SQL injection vulnerability that allows anyone to remotely execute arbitrary commands. Areas of the portal's backend can also be accessed by guessing the URL structure
> Mossack Fonseca's emails were also not encrypted [and] the company did not use the TLS security protocol
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/panama-papers-mossack-fonsec...
That all being said, of course none of this means it wasn't a nation state! It definitely could have been – the incentives were certainly there. But to call it "obviously" the job of state-employed hackers seems wrong.
If I had to guess the number of individuals that can pull of a sophisticated attack (0 day, at least develop exploit from a cve report/patch, target specific implant/c2, knowledge of how to evade enterprise EDRs) is in the hundreds if not thousands. Most of them don't work for governments.
Ransomware actors get caught because naturally their attack is meant to be discovered. If they decided to silently drop implants everywhere, how many companies do you think can afford to pay for forensics/IR at a massive scale, even if an intrusion is found?
Also, who said it was a hack? It could have been an employee that obtained enough access to get the docs and avoid audit logging.
Did that happen? I am not from the US, so I don't know, but here in Europe it always seemed clear that all leaks by WikiLeaks were genuine. People were discussing whether it's good to leak such stuff but the authenticity was not in doubt.
The four main ones I think have been they were accused of selectively releasing things in a way that looked awfully political. They just so happened to line up with a bunch of political statements Julian Assange had made in private chats that were later leaked.
The second one was that the way in which they went about providing active support in getting some of their documents from sources went way beyond all previously recognised standards of journalism.
Third one of the things that did ultimately come out of the DNC leak they were a part of was that some of the documents were altered from the originals and so they were “mostly real” but did have fake things in them. The reason for that was that it was an intelligence operation by the Russians that was specifically designed to throw the election at the last minute.
Understandably people were a bit upset by this and began to ask a lot of questions focusing on at what point were Wikileaks aware that this was an intelligence operation and I don’t think there are good answers for that still to this day.
The fourth main one is that they have been historically irresponsible with how they have released information and it likely got innocent people killed or put in jail.
So overall I think there’s a bit of a question of do they act differently behind closed doors that isn’t consistent with their public image because there is at least some evidence of that now.
Source?
> historically irresponsible with how they have released information and it likely got innocent people killed or put in jail.
Wasn’t that the media essentially leaking the keys?
I just want to make it clear that the source itself isn’t a YouTube video here but that this video happens to have an incredibly well respected person from the industry addressing that particular topic that might help provide context.
For the second point it went a bit beyond that. There are a lot of examples but here’s a couple https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikileaks-private-medical-da...
For the second point, according to the article it was pretty minor stuff where what The Guardian did was far worse.
"Essentially" seems to suggest that the media didn't literally publish the key. So let's be literal: Luke Harding, who is employed by The Guardian, published (not "leaked") the key, in a book published by - The Guardian.
On the second,you're referring to the supposed hacking claim in the indictment. Even if the accusations are true, the "hacking" provided no additional documents. You can take issue with Assange's action there, but all the documents were acquired by regular journalism standards.
I'd also like a source on the third one. Not someone discussing it, evidence of doctored documents.
And the fourth is just untrue. While Wikileaks was going through the documents, the Guardian published the decryption key in a book.
Your claim that their later releases included too much personal info is true, but that didn't kill people and it happened when Assange was trapped in the embassy unable to create the kind of vetting team.
This isn't a valid criticism of Wikileaks. If the Russians were responsible - and there was so much later-discredited bullshit kicked up about hypothetical Russians in 2016 I'm not taking that at face value - but if they were they could just have posted up a big torrent somewhere to the same overall effect.
Wikileaks isn't an important cog in that plan.
Others have addressed the other points, I just want to note the hypocrisy of the journalists making these claims, as if media outlets would never present facts in a partisan way or exhibit any kind of political bias. It's laughable on its face.
Looking around, it seems screenshots of one document were marked 'confidential', the original documents without that were available, and media turned that into "Russia edited the documents". Is there any other evidence? I can't find it.
Maybe a little bit too obvious? Or maybe that is what "they" want us to believe. Or in short: It is an obvious possibility, nothing proven.
1: https://www.sktst.dk/aktuelt/pressemeddelelser/status-paa-pa... (sorry, source in Danish)
CIA has access to "infinite" money.
That is money to fund future blackops, office coffee, new permanent markers, or whatever else the CIA may need.
Leaking information and earning money on it seems like a win win.
You supply an article that the Danish government paid for some access to the Panama papers.
Do you have any documentation that this happened with the Pandora papers?
> "Who benefits? The US and the Big Four"
I'm a bit confused as I read this article as my understanding was that the Pandora Papers, for once, shed light on how the US is becoming the place of choice for the super rich seeking to escape taxation:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/oct/04/pandora-papers-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/boo...
Not sure exactly how these revelations "benefit the US"?
https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/
The current data leak is a bunch of unprocessed files and emails that would be irresponsible to leak as it could contain private information such as passport scans of no public utility. They said they are in the process of cleaning that data to later make it available.
It will be very responsible to do so to people who have absolutely no reason to hide their wealth, especially in countries without public security problems. It is very morally correct too.
Aside from the fact that many of these structures are not illegal, and are often declared to local tax authorities of the resident, these are private matters. Plenty of money is laundered through onshore jurisdictions as well -- this has nothing to do with the entities itself.
> These documents were stolen
We don't actually know how they were obtained. But given that they were obtained at all, I'd say that the custodian of that data was the principal guilty party.
Personally, I presume the revelations are very selective.
Much less work, and I guarantee that it'll be far more effective than whatever they've been doing so far.
This is bad advice.
It guarantees the leaker will be denied whistleblower privileges and presumptions. It also ensures the leaked material will be useless for legislators, regulators and law enforcers.
Yes, doing zero editorial work and dumping on 4chan will spice up your corner of the web for a minute. But if you want to cause real change, you need to be more disciplined.
Slight change of available loopholes after some legislative changes?
It's a waste of a leak.
Not in how gvmt treats citizens, but at least in how companies and citizens treat gvmnt.
Not the ones actually implementing all of this.
If you're leaking something genuinely upsetting to the ruling class, none will be on offer anyway.
> "The uber-rich in the United States tend to pay such low tax rates that they have less incentive to seek offshore havens. But their absence from the files also may mean that very wealthy Americans turn to different offshore jurisdictions."
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/pan...
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
Hell, the person who used to be president was paying that or less. They have at least 60% of congress paid for in order to not raise taxes or close loopholes as well. Then you have so many otherwise smart people believing that taxation is theft, when they're just not rich enough to pay the good rates.
If you are a wharever-ionaire you could put your gains in index S&P 500 shares, then use them as collateral, paying everything you need with credit and having a $1 annual salary. So technically, that $1 it's their only income to the IRS. But what about interest? with that collateral, you have a special rate close to (or even lower than) inflation. Then you die, the bank takes your shares to pay your debt, and that's it.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/buy-borrow-die-how-rich-america...
At some point you want to open the floodgates so you don't leave any quality of life on the table.
You can't do that on margin loans, whereas you can if you are able to engineer a tax efficient way to cashout without paying capital gain tax
But why? It's a lot of quality of life left on the table.
Because you can't bring that "quality of life potential" in the grave
It’s the way humans are wired, and there’s a whole industry of lawyers, accountants and others to support it.
> Then you die
> The bank takes your shares to pay your debt
> The IRS taxes this against your estate as income
> The entire value of your estate is taxed for any capital gains at the “fair market value” of all your assets at the time of your death
> and then that's it.
The reality is that when you have enough cash to justify, you roll your assets into a series of South Dakota trusts and that money is perpetually tax-free.
Another tactic is to use Nevada and Delaware corporations to buy real property everywhere, and use that to avoid most taxation.
The exotic trust structures talked about here are money laundering structures, which exist because gullible voters are duped with tales of widows losing houses and farm families losing the mythical family farm. There’s a reason why the home base for this is a state with weird banking laws where there’s more cattle than people.
Mitt Romney’s (I point him out because of his fame in this regard, he’s not unique or alone) great-great-grandchildren will be living off some untaxed trust 150 years from now when we’re all dead.
-- Mitt Romney
Not sure if worse than his descendants living tax free hundreds of years for now, is having his image whitewashed for his "bullwark against Trump" that weirdly only manifested in the latter part of his term.
Maybe we should ban interest instead, just like how we were told thousands of years ago. See: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loans_and_interest_in_Judaism
…or “sabbath mode” on many appliances on the market.
The funny part to me is believing in an all-powerful and omnipotent god whom you can nonetheless fool with semantics and shuffling papers.
We don't do that in Islam.
We also have explicit texts in Hadith that call out and reprimand attempts to bypass usury by buying an item in installments, then selling it back to the original seller for a lower cash price. The effective transaction being a money for money contract with a disposable item in the middle. All this is prohibited.
You will not find a single Muslim scholar say that it is ok for a woman to wear a wig instead of a headscarf, even though technically she is still covering her hair.
There's no fooling going on. There's just faith traditions that believe God, either generally or for specific subsets of the overall rule set, is extremely concerned with the letter of the rules and not what humans might infer the spirit to be from the letter. That is, the rules are the rules, not an imperfect approximation serving some higher but difficult to express set of rules.
I'm not positive this works out, but:
- Banks tend to be well-established, identifiable entities.
- They are highly regulated and audited.
The question I'm not certain of the answer is what the result of such a tax would be. I suspect such loans would tend to be crowded out or inerest rates increased (raising costs to the billionaire utilising this cash-out option).
This seems to me along the lines of an HFT transaction tax, possibly operating similarly.
Sale of stock should be taxed at each states tax rate, because it’s the buying and selling of a good, it’s not capital investment.
It's not the rich that arent paying their fair share here.
The only “loophole” is inheritance with a stepped up basis, which every American gets.
I’d be happy to get rid of that rule. No need for inheritance taxes, just make the estate pay all capital gains up death.
I'm curious how I should rationalize that this is not in fact a giant loophole for billionaires. Bezos' wealth increased immensely such that he is now one of the richest people in the world, and yet his effective tax rate is far lower than anything you or I will ever see. If he needs "income", he can simply take out a low interest loan with his stock as collateral to pay for whatever he needs (yachts, spurious lawsuits against NASA, etc.). His stock is effectively cash, loans effectively "realize" his gains, and yet we don't treat any of it as income.
There's a vast difference between the unrealized gains of not-filthy-rich people with 401ks / middling stock portfolios and the unrealized gains of filthy rich people who primarily take stock as income (which they do for the exact purpose of paying lower taxes).
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahhansen/2021/06/08/richest-...
.98% sounds like he paid just under 1 billion on 4.22 billion of reported income (or just under 25%). I guess it sucks to be Bezos, because he spent more in one year on taxes than I'll have to pay in my life.. I'm going to go out on a limb and suspect that figure is not AGI, but total income. I suspect he had many deductible expenses like donations to charity, though 25% isn't that low since the top marginal bracket for capital gains is 20%.
I guess I'm curious how he paid so much in taxes...
Alternatively, tax consumption over a certain threshold as though spending is income. Effectively instate a federal sales tax after one has spent $X dollars.
Although violence can resolve a situation, negotiation with only the threat of violence gets much better results.
The problem here is as always the government, which is not doing as much as we'd like and has supposedly gotten captured by bad individuals. We can't have our cake and eat it.
And despite being against taxation I'm all for flat or proportional taxation, while we have it. This whole mess arguably came about because we wanted the ability to make the rich pay more than the rest of us, and then while we were at it decided to use taxation to manipulate the behavior of the public. And look how it turned out, the market spoke and found optimal solutions around taxation, and unfortunately it only works for the wealthy. It's like shaking our fists at the sky because the rain caused a lake and mosquitos bred there.
/rant
The thing that irritates me about it is that none of these intermediate steps seem to get any traction. My pet theory about that is they don't get implemented because they would inevitably lead to full public control over social spending. And when we get there we're essentially doing libertarianism anyways and realise we are responsible for our neighbours and society and have no need for a government that does stuff without our consent.
By all means, I'm in favour that anyone can voluntarily opt-out of the social contract and go live in a cabin in the woods unmolested. But if you don't, then you need to pay taxes and obey laws.
Even ignoring taxes why would anyone ever want to get paid billions dollars in a direct cash transfusion? Nothing they would be buying regularly costs that much!
They should be leading with how much of the tax burden the billionaires are responsible for shouldering, not how much they are shouldering via one specific tax that isn't there to tax them. Income tax isn't for business owners, it is for people who earn an income!
You can't put a private investigator on the tail of every business owner.
Personal expenses will be justified as business expenses, it's a matter of catching the very big and obvious cases, doing it so very publicly with the help of the press and try to scare all the other business owners in order to scale down the amount of personal expenses that they claim as business expenses
That’s not single digit.
Not saying system is perfect but exaggerating the problem is definitely not the best way to fix it.
It's not an exaggeration to say the rich rarely actually pay these taxes you describe. There are innumerable ways around it.
You need to have income to pay income tax.
Proof: none
https://news.yahoo.com/kidnapping-assassination-and-a-london...
So, now the CIA can use "hack-and-dump operations". So, now so when I see a big "hack-and-dump operations" with 0 results about the US, it is - at least - a bit suspicious.
In any case, he buried the lede at the very end of the story, after briefly mentioning in the beginning that he worked with the director of the program:
“
Who is calling the shots? One man apparently, Gerard Ryle. In the wake of the Panama Papers, when we asked Ryle on a number of occasions for an ICIJ log-in to analyse the data, we were denied.
“My path, my call,” said Ryle. We already have our media partners, he said.
“
This reads more like his feelings were hurt by not being included.
"Russia-funded hackers broke into one party's emails to expose geopolitical enemies while protecting their stooge."
Get it?
The non-action of the IRS vs the .1% is quite well documented: https://www.gq.com/story/no-irs-audits-for-the-rich
> "ProPublica estimates that as a result, the U.S. is losing at least $18 billion dollars in revenue each year. In a letter to Congress, Rettig told Democratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon that he and the agency are well aware that it would be far more lucrative and productive to pursue tax fraud and evasion of the wealthiest Americans, but without Congress restoring its budget, there's no way to make that happen."
I have no doubt that $18 billion figure is wildly underestimated. In Ireland we lose at least 10 billion euro a year to tax evasion by the wealthiest, with only 5 million people.
The EITC helped 28 million families at an estimated net cost of 17% of $70 billion - 12 billion dollars [0]. That's quite a bit less than the at least 18 billion easily recoupable, as mentioned.
If the EITC is abused, then by all means fund the IRS so they can fight the abuse (which they seem to be doing already).
And again - it helped 28 million families, rather than some oily tax accountant, offshore goons, and private jet company shareholders. I'd like to see America start punching up instead of down - it's really the countries only hope of being somewhere worth raising children in.
[0] https://www.pgpf.org/budget-basics/what-is-the-earned-income...
The Wall Street Journal has a sober review of the Pandora papers: https://www.wsj.com/articles/pandora-papers-flat-tax-reform-...
I don’t think that’s true. Significant corruption has been found in this and previous leaks at multiple levels of government around the globe. The problem is not enough has been done about it.
""" • The most reliable outcome of Panama Papers reporting around the world has been various forms of official deliberation and information-gathering, observed in 45 percent of countries tracked in this study.
• Nearly a fifth of countries tracked have seen at least one instance of concrete reform, such as a new law or policy designed to address problems exposed in the reporting. This is a higher rate than has been found in comparable analyses, due in part to the global scope of the Panama Papers and the nature of the institutions implicated.
• Various tax enforcement measures have been a regular outcome of the reporting, and numerous companies and individuals have been penalised or prosecuted as a result. Direct accountability for public officials remains rare, with officials losing office in fewer than 10 percent of countries tracked.
• Backlash against journalists was recorded almost as often as substantive reforms, though in different parts of the world: predictably, reporters have come under threat in countries that score low in press freedom. """
[1] https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/fil...
Delaware as a secret tax haven? What?? How?
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/09251...
What about the legality of this? Every decent person seems to love these types of leaks while admitting there's nothing inherently illegal going on. Does that mean it's nothing more than "celebrity secrets exposed"? With elected officials you could make the case that they should be held accountable but what about people who never held or no longer hold office?
What argument justifies that all this dirty laundry should be exposed? Is it morally correct to hack my neighbor's email and expose the fact he didn't declare his taxes properly, or is there some kind of threshold that should be applied?
You don't have to "hold office" to be a corrupt crook. Mafia bosses don't normally "hold office".
On a more meta note I find that many HN posts (including this one) follows Betteridge's Law of Headlines (1) and is obviously clickbait. Why would this be upvoted? What relevance does this have to do with "[something] that good hackers would find interesting" (per HN guidelines)?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline....