a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: When Journalism Goes Global

Episode Date: May 23, 2018

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is the organization responsible for the compilation and release of the first the Panama Papers, a series of 11.5 million documents that detailed the offshore dealings of governments and individuals the world over, soon followed by the Paradise Papers. In this podcast, a16z general partner John O'Farrell interviews ICIJ director Gerard Ryle discuss how journalists manage, sort through and coordinate so much information and data to pull out a series of tightly coordinated exposés around the globe for investigative journalism on this scale.  With so many moving parts, how does the ICIJ manage to keep high-stakes news stories under wraps until their slated day of release? What kinds of technologies are available to investigative journalists -- tools that might aid in information gathering and data security? And what does the modern media and tech landscape portend for the future of investigative journalism?

Hi, and welcome to the A16Z podcast. Today's episode, a conversation between Jared Ryle, director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, best known for the release of the Panama Papers, and A16Z general partner John O'Farrell covers investigative journalism today, how the job is changing, what kind of different business models work,

and how new technologies are being used and are shaping the job. You're an independent organization today. How did you get started? ICAJ began as a branch of the Center for Public Integrity in D.C. It really began as a network of reporters, and they would come together once a year, and they would talk about investigative reporting. When I arrived, I was used to having newsrooms with 400 reporters, photographers, graphic artists, and all the resources of the commercial world.

We were a little non-profit with about $800,000 to spend, so we had about three staff and maybe room for every now and again a freelance reporter. I figured basically what we'll do is we'll find a great story, and then we'll bring the story to the publications, get their reporters to get involved, get them to invest in the story from the beginning, and that way you wouldn't have to worry at the end about getting it published because it would be published by everyone who had basically invested in it. So what we do is we bring investigative reporters from around the world together

to work on joint projects of global significance. We basically try and find a really great story, and then we barter the story for the resources of all our media partners. So we go to them with the story, and we say to them, you give us four of your reporters for a year, we'll give you access to the story or this document set. And it was kind of a radical idea at the time, and still probably with the organization in the world, it really does it at this kind of scale. There's probably no better example of that than the Panama Papers. Tell us about what they were and how you got involved and where it went.

Yeah, the Panama Papers really began with an anonymous person called John Dole. And he'd managed to copy about 40 years, basically, of records of this Panamanian law firm called Mossack-Fonseca. And most like a second place I could work kind of a notorious firm around the world that set up accounts and offshore tax havens for rich and powerful people who like to keep secrets. John Doe had copied every file from this firm, every client sheet, every record since 1977 to the present day. They've represented about 11.5 million documents. And he gave them to the German newspaper. We'd been working with this German newspaper for a while. So they immediately turned to us and said, let's make this into a global investigation.

And so that's where it began. And then we basically made the documents searchable and readable for the journalists that we brought into the project. And then we approached all our media partners and then more and more media partners. In the end, we had about 400 reporters working on the stories in 76 different countries. And we worked in silence and total secrecy for about a year.

There were only two rules. We all agreed at the beginning that everyone who found anything would shared with everybody in the group. and we also agreed to publish together on the same day. I can tell you, when you publish simultaneously in 76 countries all in the same day at the same time, it was like an explosion, you know, because then all of their rivals have to catch up.

And so they're all jumping in, and you get this great momentum on a story that you would never get if you just publish one detail. And that's the real power of ICIJ. The only thing we ask, the media partners, that we at ICHA decide when we're going to publish because we want to have a huge bang for our bucket. end. And there has to be a kind of a neutral party in the middle that decides these things, because you can imagine the New York Times trying to negotiate with The Guardian, the Americans want

to publish it on Sunday, the British want to publish on a Monday. So ICIJ acts as that kind of neutral referee in the middle that decides these kind of big decisions in the end, really. So you worked for over a year and none of this leaked out. It was like extraordinary, really, 400 journalists and all these publications. How on earth did you manage to maintain secrecy for that long. It's the quite opposite of everything you've been taught to do as a journalist to keep a secret, but also to share information. You know, you looked at these documents, your immediate reaction was, well, here's a great story. I want to publish it right away. You know, our Argentine partners, for instance, had to put up with the fact that there were elections in Argentina

while we were researching, and they had information that could have potentially affected the election from both sides of politics. While we were researching the stories, the FBI began to died officials at FIFA. And of course, we were seeing in the Panama papers all of this information that would have been relevant to the FBI investigation. So there was like huge pressure on us to publish as we were going along, but we had to maintain that secrecy because we knew that if we managed to publish together on the same day, it was going to basically have a much bigger impact if we awaited. How we kept a secret was we basically built an online newsroom where all the journalists would go every day. And in this online newsroom, they were able to

gather around the topics of interest. But that also allowed them a kind of eventing where if they found something amazing, they were able to tell everybody else what they were finding. And that is a very important part of investigative reporting, because when you find something important, your first instinct is to scream out loud to your wife, to your best friend. You want to go to the pub and have a drink and say, hey, I just found blah, blah, blah. Whereas by allowing them to talk to each other, they were able to share the secret and then go home and keep quiet. So when you did come out, It was with a big bang, as you say. So tell us a few of the big stories that came out of the Panama Papers and the impact they had.

Yeah, so we published in April 2016. Within 24 hours, the Prime Minister of Iceland had to resign. There were public protests around the world. After about a year, we also took down the Prime Minister of Pakistan. So we had two world leaders who had to fall. And what was revealed about them that caused them to fall? Well, we knew from almost day one that the Prime Minister of Iceland was in the documents. If you looked at the dates very closely, you would see that he had this secret offshore company in the British Virgin Ireland called Winters Inc.

But the date of the company, you know, preceded his time in politics. So in order to make that a story, we had to bring in a journalist from Iceland. Iceland is such a small place that we had to be very careful who we picked. Now, ICAJ, we don't pay the journalists, so we gave him the story. That was his reward. But for nine months, he had to give up all paid work and work in secret. He basically found that the Prime Minister had sold the company to his wife a day before he was supposed to reveal this to Parliament, and it was for $1.

And then the real breakthrough came later in the research when we found that Goodlaugsen, who is the Prime Minister, actually had a financial interest in those banks, and how we found that out was by going through the records of the bankruptcies of the various banks. So he had this secret company that had a financial interest in the banks that he hadn't told anyone about, And he was the one negotiating the settlements for the banks. So he had a huge conflict of interest. Within 24 hours, the parliament in Iceland was surrounded by people, and they were throwing bananas and yogurt at the building

and demanding his resignation. What about the Pakistani Prime Minister? He also had offshore accounts. We found that his family, his kids, basically, who were not even teenagers at the time, owned these multi-million-dollar or multi-million pound properties in London. which they couldn't possibly have afforded. So, of course, the allegation was that he had been funneling money through his kids.

And there was a high court case in Pakistan that went on for almost a year. And finally, they basically found him guilty of corruption, and he had to resign. At the moment, we've got about 150 inquiries in something like 80 countries around the world. Governments have recovered about half a billion dollars in taxes. And basically the message there was that the behavior that they were engaged in was no longer acceptable. Mossack-Fonseca itself, which was a sprawling empire of companies around the world, has now closed. The principals ended up in jail. One of my favorite things was this Mexican drug cartel who were arrested after we published

details about their hideout. And they'd been using the address for their offshore company to launder their money. And it was kind of an unexpected consequence there. You uncovered some nefarious doings by Russian oligarchs as well? Yeah. arguably the biggest story that came out of the Panama Papers was that we found about $20 billion that was being funneled through offshore companies that was linked to a guy in Russia who was the godfather of Vladimir Putin's child. And here was a guy who, you know,

had no outside sign of wealth at all. He had never appeared on any radar with any of the intelligence agencies. It was never on any lists of people to watch. He played a cello in an orchestra in Moscow. And yet here he was the owner of 20. billion dollars worth of money. And we had this sort of crisis moment in the Panama Papers. We also had to go to Vladimir Putin and say, can you please answer these questions? And almost within minutes of us sending the email with all the questions to the Kremlin, they called a press conference of the Kremlin, and denounced ICIJ as an arm of the CIA, and it was an American plot to bring down Russia.

This was before the Panama Papers was a week before we were ready to publish. So you can imagine the calls. I nearly blew your cover then. You bill your cover then. You bill your story, did they? Well, they did. Suddenly the phone started going off and it's the editor of the Guardian and it's, you know, it's this and it's that. And they're all saying, oh, we have to publish now, we can't wait another week. And, you know, my job was to say, no, we're waiting a week. This is

great pre-publicity. People now are waiting for this to happen for a week and it's only building an audience for our shows. You followed that with the Paradise Papers? It was a very different challenge for us. And it was actually more documents on the Panama Papers. We had about 13.4 million documents

on the end of the Paradise Papers. probably the most exciting stuff came from this law firm called Appleby. And Appleby was almost a direct opposite of Mossack-Monseca. It was very high-end. It was what they called a magic circle law firm. It's a reference to the top seven law firms in London. In the offshore world, there's actually a magic circle as well. And Appleby were at the very top of it.

And their clients were like Nike and Uber, and as it turned out, the Queen and Bono and all those people were also clients. And again, we did it the same way. We set to work with about 95 media organizations around the world. We built a system to allow the journalists to look at the documents. We put them all in an online newsroom again. Same methods, but there were more challenges to the documents because they were in different formats

and very, very difficult to understand and read. And we were looking at a lower level of criminality. When Mossack from Second, whereas Appleby, my favorite reference to them is the British used to refer to it, like when you were in the official world and you were in trouble, and then Apple we would appear, it was like watching British Airways land. It was that sort of sense of comfort they had. So you've been working in secrecy with hundreds of journalists around the world,

and you're tackling vast amounts of data as well. So I'd imagine you make a lot of use of technology, or you must. Could you talk about that a bit? Maybe we could break it down into categories, for example, how do you communicate and how do you maintain secrecy, both between your journalists but also with sources? One of the first things I did as ICAJ director was to hire two technologists, two engineers, because I figured that if we were going to succeed, we really needed to use the power of machines to help aid the journalists

because we had impenetrable documents. And so we first of all actually had to make them searchable and readable, but we also then needed to write scripts so that we could search every member of Congress or every member of the Senate at the same time, so that the computers could do a lot of their legwork for the reporter. would feed in thousands of names at a time and get potential hits. And then the business of being a journalist would start and you would go through each of these hits to see if you actually had a story.

The virtual online newsroom that we built was a technology called Oxwell, which, you know, was basically built for dating websites. And so we adapted that for our own use. And then with the documents itself, we adapted technology called Blacklight, which was built for librarians. There's this company in Sydney called Newix that do reasonably sophisticated. software that they sell to governments around the world and tax offices. So I thought, okay, maybe we can use their

technology. So I approached them and said, we're a non-profit. Can you give us your technology for free? And if we ever do publish, we can't tell you what we're doing, we'll give you some publicity. They were the first to back us back in 2012, and now they're a billion-dollar company. A technology called Neo4J allowed us to build our third tool that the journalists used. We're able to put all of the names, addresses, and companies into notes, but it allowed us to look at very sophisticated networks and work out potential stories. Like, for instance, the story on FIFA that we did for the Panama Papers was all done

using that way, because we knew that node there through all these different lines, ended up with that node there. So we knew it had to be a connection between that node and that node. And that node was a lawyer, and this node were bad people that were being mentioned by the FBI. And in the end, that guy was quite interesting because he turned out to be a guy who was sitting on the Ethics Committee at FIFA and he was the one setting up the offshore companies for the guys that were being indicted by the FBI. We'd never have been able to do that as journalists

because you would have had a way through millions whereas this technology allowed us to see something and visualize a map and then it was a matter of just reverse engineering and working through and seeing what the connections were. What about visualization in terms of your internal work? Are you able to then show your work with visualization tools as well

that shows these connections? between different nodes? Yeah, so when they were looking at these nodes, we were looking at what potential graphics we could do. So with the Prime Minister of Iceland, you can click on this and you can see where Winters went, where its address went and other things. You can click on a node and it'll expand out,

so you can see these vast networks that we were looking at. Did you make available the actual records that were uncovered in the Paradise or Panama Papers? No, no. The history of the Panama Papers really go back about five projects. The very first project we did on offshore was in 2013, And it was called offshore leaks. It was first leak of offshore material. And we decided at the end of that project,

that this information needed to be made public. So we went to the lawyers and they said, well, yes, it can be if there's a public interest argument. At the time, David Cameron, who was the British Prime Minister, was visiting the White House. And he was reacting to our stories. And he was saying, this is the kind of information that should be public.

So we had our public interest arguments straight away. And so we stripped down all the underlying documents and only made basic information, name address, and the name of the company available. And then every time we get a new leak, we would build on that. So when we got the Panama Papers, that has now gone into the offshore leaks website. And so we've now built the biggest collection of offshore material that anyone's ever seen. And it's now being used by governments all over the world to do basic research. Banks that are doing compliance work, we're almost like a go-to destination website now for anyone in the offshore world.

And with the Paradise Papers, we've been adding the directories of the various countries onto that. And journalists are also finding stories that we didn't find. There was a story in the L.A. Times this week that we had missed. They came to us and they'd spotted something. They pitched the idea, asked for access to the underlying documents. We just got a grant, actually, from the Swedish Postcode Lottery this year to try and expand on that and bring all the leaks together into one sort of searchable, readable database that can automatically send out information to journalists.

It's a bit like a Google Alert. We can do that for you now. So you made this available to the public. Is there a role for ordinary citizens in this, or is this really the problems of journalists? The original idea of the Offshaar League's website was to crowdsource new stories. So we had a little link from the original website

that allowed people to give us tips and things they saw, and that actually led to a number of stories. And we get tips all the time. People email us two or three times a week with things that we've missed. We found the president of the Seychelles in there that we'd missed the first time. So we did a big story on that eventually. Let's talk a little bit about communications specifically.

How do you make sure your communications are secure and also provide security to sources? We used what we call the iHob, which is our online newsroom, to communicate among each other. We also extensively use PGP communications. All of our emails are encrypted. We use all these open source software that anyone can use, like wire, even WhatsApp. One of the problems we have at the moment, and one of the biggest problems you're has is that you have to assume that you're being watched or that your emails are being read, your phone is potentially being not necessarily tap, but at least the information is being collected

for future use. So it makes it very difficult for us as journalists now because we're trying to protect sources in the age of information where sources can gather millions of documents in a way that's never been possible before. And the challenge also these days of journalists is to go through those documents. And so we're in a kind of an inflection point, I think. Ideally, what I would really love is to be able to build a system where you could have communications with us just by going to our website and talking and knowing that it's secure. And I guess maybe someone in this room will work that out and come to me and tell me what to do. But the technology is there because it's being used by a lot of these apps that are being made available. It's just a matter of

adapting that for journalism. What about physical security, given the number of people, you've managed to create trouble for you? Honestly, I don't worry about it, but it's a very real issue for us because a number of our journalists were threatened. Some of them lost their jobs. We've had a couple of very high-profile incidents, of course. One of our employees, his mother was blown up in Malta. She was a journalist working on the Panama Papers, but separate to us. Recently, you saw another journalist in Slovakia was killed.

Again, he was working on the Panama Papers. Again, not through us, but through another organization, but we've given them access to. So there are very real threats. I know our Russian reporters, before we published a story in Putin, had left the country. So when we published, they weren't there. They did go back afterwards. Journalists are putting their lives in danger in some cases. I want to open it up to the audience. I just have one more for you before we do that, Jared.

What is ICHA's position on privacy? How do you balance the right of people to know versus the right of the individual to maintain privacy? It is a delicate balance. I always try and apply the public interest rule and everything. You know, when we're looking through these documents, we're not interested in people's bank accounts. They're passport details. in making that public. And I think that's the difference between ICIJ and say an organization like WikiLeaks that just publishes everything. I very much believe in that journalists should apply journalistic methods and ethics to what they're seeing and that we should be a filter for the public and we should publish what's in the public interest. That's not to say we don't

get complaints almost every day. We published the entire Malta registry recently and they're saying, well, I'm a multi-citizen and I have a company in Malta, why is my name and address there? Malta is a tax haven. It is being used by others. around the world, and therefore there is a public interest in having this information available. It's a bit like if you registered a company in California, that information is available. So why should there be a different rule for the offshore world? I mean, the offshore world really only sells one product in that secrecy.

And if you can take away the secrecy, then you wouldn't have all of the issues. And when I say issues, it's not just about tax avoidance, it's money laundering, it's harm stealing, it's corruption at every level. That's a journalist, story after story after story. I always ended up in the offshore world, and that was the end of it. And you would talk to the police and other agencies, and they would always say, oh, look, you haven't a hope once you get to the offshore world, it's a complete blank. And I remember thinking in the beginning, wouldn't it be great to break that secrecy?

What if you could get inside the secrets of the offshore world? And that's what we found. With the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers, we found hundreds of politicians and world leaders, and they all had secret offshore accounts. Great. Questions? How do you decide what makes a great story? We have three really basic questions. we ask every time, basically, is something a public interest?

Say there was a pothole outside your front door. It's of interest to you. And a lot of people write to say, I've got a pothole outside my front door, but no one else in the room has got the pothole. But if everyone here in the room in Menlo Park was going outside the front door and stepping into a pothole, you would clearly have an issue of public interest.

And you have to ask yourself, who cares about this story? And you really have to apply that public interest test. Now, if we were all stepping into potholes, then clearly there's a systemic issue, which is the second question we always ask. Is there some sort of systemic issue here we're looking at? In other words, is there something that people would not expect to happen? You mean you expect your potholes to be filled because you pay your taxes?

If that isn't happening, then we have a systemic failure of some kind, and that is the second question we always ask. And the third question, which is a little bit controversial again for a journalist, is can we get a result from publishing the story? So if we publish the story about the potholes, will the councils or whoever is responsible will come along and fix it. Can we actually make a difference? And when you apply those three tests or three questions to any story, you'll find that if they pass the three questions,

you've got yourself a good story. But you do focus on, you focus particularly on corruption? Is that fair? We focus on anything that's global. So it's got to be something that affects people in Brazil and France, in Germany, because we have to have kind of a unique story for each of our media partners to get them interested in the story. With your experience and background, do you have thoughts on how we can course correct the news that's out there and getting accurate information to the people? It's a difficult environment. I mean, the whole journalism world is imploding and has been imploding for the last 10 years. So the business models that have sustained reporting, which is the advertising business model, it's no longer.

I worked for the Sydney Morning Herald at the time when they had 450 journalists. They've been looking at have 50 now. And it's the same everywhere you look. So I guess the answer really is we've got to, as journalists, we've got to find some sort of new business model that allows to pay for the journalism because otherwise what you're getting is what you're seeing. Now, I'd given up investigative reporting

before I took this job. I had gone into newspaper management because I no longer had time to do the stories I wanted to do, and they had no stomach for it anymore. I was too expensive. Investigative reporting teams are the most expensive parts of every newspaper because you've got to give the journalist time,

to do the research, you then often just get sued every time. You have to be able to have very deep pockets to be able to do that kind of journalism. And of course, the first thing that happens when they've got no money is that they get rid of investigative journalism teams. So I think the nonprofit is one way, I think, because this is one of the few countries where it's tax deductible. We are very, very cost-effective for every media organization that we work with. We're able to bring economies of scale here. So we're worth real money to these. They're only giving us a couple of reporters and for that they're getting days and days of material. It should be doing on the local level. But also go back to journalists are not making use of technology.

They're not gathering information. They're not doing things in a smart way. They're still doing things the way we've been doing them for 40 or 50 years. Journalism is all about information and we should be gathering the information because once you have the information, you can look for the patterns and that's what stories are really about, the potholes, the patterns you're seeing. Why haven't we got every bit of information about a long time already on record. Why shouldn't we be just querying? Why isn't that happening in a local level where you just team up with your local radio station and TV station and do the story together, share the information, and then you get the huge bang. I think you'd all agree. Investigative journalism

has never been more important than it is right now. So thanks again, Jared, for joining us today.