Panama Papers leak signals a shift in journalism

The deep data sets that are making these revelations possible are presenting new conundrums for reporters and editors

Four years passed between The New York Times' s first article based on the Pentagon Papers and the end of the Vietnam War.

Two years passed between The Washington Post' s first story establishing Richard M Nixon' s link to the Watergate burglary and Nixon' s resignation from the presidency.

Last week, Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson of Iceland couldn' t make it 48 hours before having to step aside after the disclosure of the shady bank dealings contained in the Panama Papers, some of which involve him.

OK, I know: It' s just Iceland, remote and adorably tiny. Who knew it had a government position higher than forstodumadur Fiskistofa (director of Fisheries)? Kidding, Iceland, kidding! I understand how you' re at the center of something bigger than both your country and mine, and I promise that you won' t be mad at me by the time you' re done reading this.

Because while we Americans were transfixed by the latest plot turns in our presidential campaign, you and the rest of the world were living through the biggest corporate data leak in history. It had reverberations not only in Iceland, but in China, Britain, Russia, Argentina and some 50 other countries.

But the leak signaled something else that was a big deal but went unheralded: The official WikiLeaks-ization of mainstream journalism; the next step in the tentative merger between the Fourth Estate, with its relatively restrained conventional journalists, and the Fifth Estate, with the push-the-limits ethos of its blogger, hacker and journo-activist cohort, in the era of gargantuan data breaches.

Back at the dawn of this new, Big Breach journalism, NYT's then-executive editor, Bill Keller, wondered aloud in the paper' s Sunday magazine whether "The War Logs," a huge cache of confidential war records and diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks in conjunction with NYT, Der Spiegel, The Guardian and others, represented "some kind of cosmic triumph of transparency." He concluded, "I suspect we have not reached a state of information anarchy, at least not yet." That was in 2011.

Five years later, it is safe to say that we are getting much closer. This is changing the course of world history, fast. It is also changing the rules for mainstream journalists in the fierce business of unearthing secrets, and for the government and corporate officials in the fiercer business of keeping them.

Any early questions about the effect of WikiLeaks' s trove were answered a few months after Keller' s article appeared, when WikiLeaks won credit for helping to spark the Arab Spring. It revealed a cable highlighting the opulence and self-dealing of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and his family, enraging his already restive and economically pinched public. His ouster shortly followed.

Last year, a federal judge doubted the constitutionality of the National Security Agency' s bulk collection of Americans' phone records after the program was disclosed in data leaked by the former intelligence contractor Edward J Snowden. Snowden' s information also helped set up this year' s standoff between Apple and the Justice Department over iPhone encryption.

Now we have the 11.5 million files known as the Panama Papers, based on documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca that detail shell companies and tax shelters used by the world' s wealthy and powerful. They are causing political heartburn - and potentially worse - for President Vladimir V Putin of Russia, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, and yes, Iceland.

But for everyday mopes who file their taxes by the letter of the law, as opposed to through its loopholes, the biggest shocker was how much tax avoidance contained in the Panama Papers was legal, as Glenn Greenwald wrote in The Intercept. That is a lit match to the political tinder of the increasingly global view that the game is rigged - something that' s at the heart of the appeals of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump here at home.

It' s the stuff journalists live for. But the deep data sets that are making these sorts of revelations possible are presenting new conundrums for reporters and editors more accustomed to banging the phones and interviewing live human beings.

©2016 The New York Times News Service