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Are they going to release the source material to the public so that we can find anything that the 380 journalists "accidentally" missed or forgot to report in their zeal to be completely unbiased and impartial while on the payroll of major news organizations?

Last time they did release a complete searchable database of the leak - https://panamapapers.icij.org/..., https://offshoreleaks.icij.org... - so there's every reason to believe they'll do the same this time.

Indeed, last time after the full release there was no indication that the journalists had failed to be unbiased or impartial in their initial reporting. So there's zero grounds for you to be suspicious this time.

Are they going to release the source material to the public so that we can find anything that the 380 journalists "accidentally" missed or forgot to report in their zeal to be completely unbiased and impartial while on the payroll of major news organizations?

Last time they did release a complete searchable database of the leak - https://panamapapers.icij.org/..., https://offshoreleaks.icij.org... - so there's every reason to believe they'll do the same this time.

Indeed, last time after the full release there was no indication that the journalists had failed to be unbiased or impartial in their initial reporting. So there's zero grounds for you to be suspicious this time.

Because the Panama Papers release did wonders for the world?

Oh I agree. The sad thing is these 'leaks' are the only way we are getting any semblance of journalism.

Hell CNN blurred out a dudes t-shirt that said trump on it. It was nothing to do with political things. It was one of those fluff 'dude saves girls life' stories. Yet they went through the trouble of blurring out the dudes t-shirt. They are all so busy stroking each others cocks on who they want to win. They have not bothered to do much real investigative journalism. They are addicted to one liner sound bites that fit in 120 chars and mic drops.

I also would not be surprised one iota if the whole mess he is leaking came from Russia. Rumor is the CIA tried to screw over the Russians with that panama thing. The Russians are very good at their game. You dont fuck with them unless you know what you are doing. The dudes running the Panama thing are resigning because the govs keep meddling around in it. https://panamapapers.icij.org/... My guess there was a bit more in that large blob of papers than they wanted to admit. So there is some blowback.

ICIJ is publishing the information in the public interest.

The new data that ICIJ is now making public represents a fraction of the Panama Papers, a trove of more than 11.5 million leaked files from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, one of the world’s top creators of hard-to-trace companies, trusts and foundations.

ICIJ is not publishing the totality of the leak, and it is not disclosing raw documents or personal information en masse. The database contains a great deal of information about company owners, proxies and intermediaries in secrecy jurisdictions, but it doesn’t disclose bank accounts, email exchanges and financial transactions contained in the documents.

With the online database, if there were any political figures in the US who had an offshore connection it would be all over the headlines by now. It is possible to search by country, so it is easy to find people or companies in a particular jurisdiction.

ICIJ is a very sophisticated organization and they use advanced big data techniques to create the database.

We believe in open source technology and try to use it as much as possible. We used Apache Solr for the indexing and Apache Tika for document processing, and it’s great because it processes dozens of different formats and it’s very powerful. Tika interacts with Tesseract, so we did the OCRing on Tesseract.

... Then we put the data up, but the problem with Solr was it didn’t have a user interface, so we used Project Blacklight, which is open source software normally used by librarians.

... We had the data in a relational database format in SQL, and thanks to ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) software Talend, we were able to easily transform the data from SQL to Neo4j (the graph-database format we used).

So there was a lot of data analysis and not much "selectively editing".

ICIJ is publishing the information in the public interest.

The new data that ICIJ is now making public represents a fraction of the Panama Papers, a trove of more than 11.5 million leaked files from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, one of the world’s top creators of hard-to-trace companies, trusts and foundations.

ICIJ is not publishing the totality of the leak, and it is not disclosing raw documents or personal information en masse. The database contains a great deal of information about company owners, proxies and intermediaries in secrecy jurisdictions, but it doesn’t disclose bank accounts, email exchanges and financial transactions contained in the documents.

With the online database, if there were any political figures in the US who had an offshore connection it would be all over the headlines by now. It is possible to search by country, so it is easy to find people or companies in a particular jurisdiction.

ICIJ is a very sophisticated organization and they use advanced big data techniques to create the database.

We believe in open source technology and try to use it as much as possible. We used Apache Solr for the indexing and Apache Tika for document processing, and it’s great because it processes dozens of different formats and it’s very powerful. Tika interacts with Tesseract, so we did the OCRing on Tesseract.

... Then we put the data up, but the problem with Solr was it didn’t have a user interface, so we used Project Blacklight, which is open source software normally used by librarians.

... We had the data in a relational database format in SQL, and thanks to ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) software Talend, we were able to easily transform the data from SQL to Neo4j (the graph-database format we used).

So there was a lot of data analysis and not much "selectively editing".

ICIJ is publishing the information in the public interest.

The new data that ICIJ is now making public represents a fraction of the Panama Papers, a trove of more than 11.5 million leaked files from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, one of the world’s top creators of hard-to-trace companies, trusts and foundations.

ICIJ is not publishing the totality of the leak, and it is not disclosing raw documents or personal information en masse. The database contains a great deal of information about company owners, proxies and intermediaries in secrecy jurisdictions, but it doesn’t disclose bank accounts, email exchanges and financial transactions contained in the documents.

With the online database, if there were any political figures in the US who had an offshore connection it would be all over the headlines by now. It is possible to search by country, so it is easy to find people or companies in a particular jurisdiction.

ICIJ is a very sophisticated organization and they use advanced big data techniques to create the database.

We believe in open source technology and try to use it as much as possible. We used Apache Solr for the indexing and Apache Tika for document processing, and it’s great because it processes dozens of different formats and it’s very powerful. Tika interacts with Tesseract, so we did the OCRing on Tesseract.

... Then we put the data up, but the problem with Solr was it didn’t have a user interface, so we used Project Blacklight, which is open source software normally used by librarians.

... We had the data in a relational database format in SQL, and thanks to ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) software Talend, we were able to easily transform the data from SQL to Neo4j (the graph-database format we used).

So there was a lot of data analysis and not much "selectively editing".

What a load of FUD. Without citing any evidence, this guy gets modded up to a +5 insightful, GGs slashdot. Clearly OP spent zero time looking at the papers before posting. https://panamapapers.icij.org/... sort by country and find your Nigerian.

A simpler explanation than the OP's conspiracy: someone that pays their fair share in taxes sees a litany of billionaires and millionaires not paying their fair share and/or pillaging already impoverished nations and has the wherewithal to expose that.

What would OP do in the leaker's shoes and had access to this information? Sit on it?

https://offshoreleaks.icij.org...

HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) continued to offer services to clients who had been unfavorably named by the United Nations, in court documents and in the media as connected to arms trafficking, blood diamonds and bribery.

HSBC served those close to discredited regimes such as that of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, former Tunisian president Ben Ali and current Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad.

Clients who held HSBC bank accounts in Switzerland include former and current politicians from Britain, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Kenya, Romania, India, Liechtenstein, Mexico, Lebanon, Tunisia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Paraguay, Djibouti, Senegal, Philippines and Algeria.

The bank repeatedly reassured clients that it would not disclose details of accounts to national authorities, even if evidence suggested that the accounts were undeclared to tax authorities in the client’s home country. Bank employees also discussed with clients a range of measures that would ultimately allow clients to avoid paying taxes in their home countries. This included holding accounts in the name of offshore companies to avoid the European Savings Directive, a 2005 Europe-wide rule aimed at tackling tax evasion through the exchange of bank information.

HSBC files show how Swiss bank helped clients dodge taxes and hide millions

HSBC’s Swiss banking arm helped wealthy customers dodge taxes and conceal millions of dollars of assets, doling out bundles of untraceable cash and advising clients on how to circumvent domestic tax authorities, according to a huge cache of leaked secret bank account files.

Routinely allowed clients to withdraw bricks of cash, often in foreign currencies of little use in Switzerland.

Aggressively marketed schemes likely to enable wealthy clients to avoid European taxes.

Colluded with some clients to conceal undeclared “black” accounts from their domestic tax authorities.

Provided accounts to international criminals, corrupt businessmen and other high-risk individuals.

So not only were they breaking US law, they were breaking EU law and the laws of various European governments, as well as Swiss banking regulations. The clients included members of outlaw regimes, international criminals, and citizens of countries who economies are in crippled in part because of corruption and the siphoning of national treasure by the elites.

So this is a story of international corruption on a massive scale. Nice to know that you are defending the "rights" of drug dealers, despots, crime bosses, dealers in blood diamonds, ...

Phil Collins held money in a swiss bank account. What a crook! Where does Phil Collins live? Oh right. Launsanne SWITZERLAND.And OMG, David Bowie had a bank account in Switzerland.... where he lives.

I'm not going to defend the rich musicians claiming to reside in tax advantageous locations (cough*Isle of Man*cough). Nor am I going to defend those who advocate revolution (wait till you see what the regime is trying to repress) and failed to study history (hint: France had three revolutions, technically 5) - and I'm definitely not going to defend those that complain from the comfort of their armchairs:-

• while continually voting for major parties in the hope that optimism will overcome experience (or votes lost in a previous election to minor parties will set the agenda for following elections.
• work for a wage (or worse, don't work) and expect the same returns as those that take risks and work for themselves (even if it's using daddies money).

Anarchy is not destruction - it's the opposite of outsourcing responsibility to others.

Enlightened self-interest is not shitting upstream, unenlightened self-interest is. Enlightened self-interest is creating a business that doesn't dump sewage upstream and marketing the non-polluting aspect to advantage. Unenlightened self-interest is demanding a bigger government (composed of people who claim/believe levying taxes = production) that will regulate sewage dumping - which is like hiring someone to train a cat not kill things.

Sheep is a good analogy, they are stupid, but they feed themselves (and they don't go around saying other species can't be bred to be stupid). So just keep bitching, I won't call you sheep.
Don't take that the wrong way.

So did anyone actually stop to think that this guy stole bank details and sold them?

Yes, and no. Some of us thought "Maybe that's bullshit - let's check, before we believe the bank who makes it's money helping themselves to the profits from helping their clients break the law - 'cause, ya know, what if.... one crime gets lonely?"
So maybe the question you ask should have been four questions:-

1. Did the guy try and sell the data about illegal activities?
2. If so - so what?
3. Why am I so quick to hang him?
4. Maybe the world ain't simple (no matter how much I wish it was so), and maybe, just maybe - there are more than two options

And yeah - Phil Collins should go straight to jail for crimes against music (as should the rest of Genesis).
Of course, if I thought he was a musician, like David Bowie, then spending the requisite amount of time in countries that charge him less tax on his complicated corporate tax structure than I would have to pay using obfscurated family trusts in my country, would be OK.

These files were stolen by a disgruntled employee and sold to various governments.

That's not an undisputed fact. It is the version of the story supported by Swiss authorities and banks. In his own version, mostly supported by some French officials, he claims that he never asked for any money and that he first contacted the authorities of Switzerland and of other countries, and decided to leak the data when they ignored him.

It is nice anti-apple spin. This case is so much more than just Apple and you had to go and kill an even more important story, just for some apple bashing.
http://www.icij.org/project/lu...

The War on the IRS

(The Bush-Obama administration's castration of the IRS.)

What was one of George W. Bush's first actions after he stole the 2000 presidential election (other than snarfing down a celebratory cheeseburger pizza)?

Bush shut down the "high roller" division in the IRS; that section which garnered the greatest recovered tax revenues by auditing the richest individuals and the richest corporations --- and redirected the IRS against much lower-income working Americans!

Now, this information about several IRS agents targeting the Tea Party and affiliated groups isn't breaking news --- they've been sitting on this for quite some time!

So why the sudden newsy firestorm now?

On the very same day this bullcrap spewed forth, on the IRS web site (please see special links below) an international, joint investigation was announced. Their target: trillions of untaxed dollars sitting in offshore tax havens (i.e., offshore financial centers, etc.). This investigation will be undertaken by the IRS, the UK and Australia, thanks to leaked data from these tax havens.

Now this is the big story which they are misdirecting our attention away from, the one not being covered by the CorporateMedia today!

Instead, we are treated to "breaking news" of the moronic type.

Now, I'm no fan of the IRS, and we all should realize by this time that the tax code was written by the super-rich to benefit the super-rich (one need only read IRS Rule 401(a)(5) which essentially states that structured inequality, that is, screw the workers, is legally acceptable to them to comprehend that), so this is the first real egalitarian action by the IRS in many decades, but the CorporateMedia and the Bush-Obama Administration wishes to kill it!

Support the IRS in their investigation and tell the gov't to ignore this bullcrap!

Special Links:

http://www.online-accounting-degrees.net/tax-havens/

http://www.icij.org/blog/2013/05/authorities-announce-tax-haven-investigation

http://www.irs.gov/uac/Newsroom/IRS,-Australia-and-United-Kingdom-Engaged-in-Cooperative-Effort-to-Combat-Offshore-Tax-Evasion

http://wallstreetonparade.com/2013/05/it%E2%80%99s-high-time-the-irs-investigates-the-funding-of-the-tea-party/

Reading sources:

Treasure Islands, by Nicholas Shaxson

Offshore, by William Brittain-Catlin

The source of the leak is not nearly as cloak and dagger as everyone is making it out to be.
http://www.icij.org/offshore/how-icijs-project-team-analyzed-offshore-files

Gerard Ryle, ICIJ's director, obtained the data trove as a result of his three-year investigation of Australia's Firepower scandal, a case involving offshore havens and corporate fraud.

The offshore information totaled more than 260 gigabytes of useful data. ICIJ's analysis of the hard drive showed that it held about 2.5 million files, including more than 2 million e-mails that help chart the offshore industry over a long period of explosive growth. It is one of the biggest collections of leaked data ever gathered and analyzed by a team of investigative journalists.

The drive contained four large databases plus half a million text, PDF, spreadsheet, image and web files. Analysis by ICIJ's data experts showed that the data originated in 10 offshore jurisdictions, including the British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands and Singapore. It included details of more than 122,000 offshore companies or trusts, nearly 12,000 intermediaries (agents or âoeintroducersâ), and about 130,000 records on the people and agents who run, own, benefit from or hide behind offshore companies.

When ICIJ further analyzed the data using sophisticated matching software, it found that about 40 percent of files and emails were duplicates.

As usual, most of our questions are answered in the source.
And since this was a global reporting effort, like Wikileaks, lots of national papers are reporting the dirt they've found that's relevant to their country.
I only bring that up to head off the "so what, they haven't uncovered anything important," which was a common rebuttal to the various wikileaks releases.
This document dump is touching all corners of the globe. Read some international news.

There is only one American on the list published so far, although I'm sure there will be more. But I understand your sentiment and forgive your lack of RTFA.

Also, keep in mind that 60 degrees farenheit is pretty far from freezing and that the inside of your house is unlikely to reach the temperatures required to freeze the pipes *inside* your home.

For the record, the inside temperature (at the thermostat, at least) was about 65 degrees when the pipes were frozen. This had happened before to earlier tenants, so there was a small access opening cut into the wall space where the pipes ran. I had to cram a hairdryer in and run it intermittently over the course of about an hour before the water started flowing again. By the way, we're talking about the edges of Zones 5 & 6 here. Not exactly North Dakota.

After that, I reluctantly left the tap on with just the slightest drip, and that was enough. Moving water doesn't freeze as easily. That winter got even colder for a while, but the pipes never froze again. Needless to say, I didn't renew my lease. Ah, campus slumlords.

the problem with letting profit motivated organizations control essential resouces is where the responsibility lies. they don't want to provide you with power/water ... they want to charge you money. they are only accountable to their share holders not their customers. now true, letting the gov. control is a form of monopoly but at least you can vote to change the gov. you can't do much of anything to change a private/public company.

what happened on the east coast might have been a problem with the grid but what happened in california was because not generating power ment more money for the power barons.

water degulation
a good reason the lights went out the american press won't tell you about