Technology Behind The Unfolding of 'Panama Papers' Leaked

MASSAPEDIA NEWS - Leaked investment data origin Panama law firm, Mossack Fonseca amid global spotlight. Because, Mossack Fonseca allegedly helped the action of money laundering, tax fraud and avoid sanctions.

Documents labeled "Panama Papers" was leaked to the German media, the Süddeutsche Zeitung since last year. Leaked data is then distributed to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) for later investigated by a group of more than 100 media and 400 journalists in the world.

So how data can be leaked and read by media Süddeutsche Zeitung?

Quoting Wired site, required a series of processes for the team of journalists to be able to manage and access the raw data received from the Süddeutsche Zeitung unknown person anonymous alias.

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A series of the process broadly encompasses the conversion of data into a digital format using high-tech computer and use an algorithm to find the names listed in the "Panama Papers".

"Data diverse very difficult to digest and is able to cross-reference," said one professor of computer science at University College London. "File format tables, figures, and PDF is almost impossible to penetrate."

Then the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the ICIJ collaboration with software company Nuix from Australia to comb and manage data leaked.

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According to a statement Nuix senior consultant, Carl Barron, handle the data in the document "Panama Papers" are all stored in a private server that is not connected with the outside world. Once separated, then the data can be indexed, he said.

Barron also said it would pull out text and metadata update this information, as well as start using Nuix to investigate of big data and analytical perspective.

The biggest challenge of the process mentelaah these data is the amount of text that initially could not be recognized by the machine. Device optical character recognition (OCR) is used to convert the data into text that can be understood and sought after by the computer.

When text can go out, then it can be entered into the index and database. Barron end database size estimated, reaching 30 percent of the original data size.

"We let the ICIJ and the Süddeutsche Zeitung run a keyword search alone, we can also pull entities such as first name, last name and number," said Barron.

He continued, "we also can use the analytic yourself to discover how these names refer to the documents. If you find a name in the email, then you will want to find some where else it was spoken in other data."

Then, if the information has been incorporated into the index, the algorithm was used to track specific links in the database. Finally, the information is combined with data manually contrived.

"The team of journalists compiled a list of important politicians, criminals, international, famous professional athletes, and others," as an explanation Süddeutsche Zeitung in an editorial.

Unknown document "Panama Papers" leads to 214 thousand corporate entities in many countries. Mossack Fonseca himself has branches in more than 35 countries. The document said 140 names of political figures, including 12 leaders or former leaders of the country.

How much data is leaked?

The original leaked document has not been published, ICIJ said the list of all the companies involved in the "Panama Papers" will be revealed in May.

However, the amount of data already known to leak. Leaked data to reach 11.5 million documents from Mossack Fonseca.

Quoting Wired, the data cover 4.8 million email, database records 3 million, 2 million of data in PDF format, 1 million images and 320 thousand text documents.

The dataset was mentioned more than the case of Wikileaks or Edward Snowden.

Overall, the document "Panama Papers" reach a capacity of 2.6 TB.

In addition to world leaders, some 2,960 Indonesian citizens names listed as clients of 43 offshore companies affiliated with Mossack Fonseca.