April 5, 2016
Software produced by a little-known Australian developer has helped journalists piece together news leads from the mountains of data found in the contents of the Panama Papers, one of the biggest document leaks in history.
Sydney-based Nuix Pty Ltd donated its document analysis program to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) to sift through the millions of leaked documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.
The Panama Papers include 2.6 terabytes of data including emails, images, PDFs and other documents and raise questions about the financial arrangements of high profile politicians and public figures through the use of offshore companies.
“What we’ve done is enabled the ICIJ to do what they couldn’t do in probably months or years,” Nuix vice president Angela Bunting told Reuters in a telephone interview on Tuesday.
By using the software, the Washington-based ICIJ was able to make millions of scanned documents, some decades old, text-searchable and help its network of journalists cross reference Mossack Fonseca’s clients across these documents. The company is privately owned and intentionally kept itself from knowing the contents of the millions of documents the ICIJ scoured using Nuix software. A Nuix consultant provided advice to ICIJ about hardware and workflow based on equivalent scenarios rather than specific knowledge of the data.