The Panama Papers leak is orders of magnitude larger than anything we’ve ever seen
195 million pages covering 39 years of offshore holdings
It is going to take a very long time for people to wrap their heads around the “Panama Papers”, mostly because there are so many of them. The 2.6 terabytes of data leaked to journalists can be estimated to about 195 million sheets of paper printed out.
That’s orders of magnitude more than the first major leak, 1971’s Pentagon Papers. And even compared to the other big 21st-century gets — the cables leaked to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning and the files leaked by Edward Snowden—the Panama Papers stand alone.
Daniel Ellsburg had to get access to physical papers when he revealed a US Defense report concerning the Vietnam War. Today’s whistleblowers have digital documents, which may be easier to carry and are not necessarily more secure. As for Süddeutsche Zeitung, which got the Panama leak, it’s not done yet. As its digital editor tweeted Monday morning, “Just wait for what’s coming next…”
