Journalists probing the contents of the Panama Papers, one of the biggest document leaks in history were helped by software produced by a little-known Australian developer.

The software helped the journalists to piece together news leads from the mountains of data found that were available in the Panama Papers.

With the intention of helping journalists of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) to sift through the millions of leaked documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, Sydney-based Nuix Pty Ltd donated its document analysis program which helped in accurate and speedy segregation of information and data.

Emails, images, PDFs and other documents of the Panama  Papers amounted to data and information to tune of 2.6 terabytes. The information was about objectionable and questionable 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.

Journalists of Washington based ICIJ were able to cross reference Mossack Fonseca’s clients across these documents with the help of the software that made millions of scanned documents, some decades old, text-searchable.

Global investigations into suspected illegal activities by the world’s wealthy and powerful have been prompted by the massive leak. Any wrongdoing has been denied by Mossack Fonseca, the firm at the center of the leaks.

The growing importance of technology’s role in helping journalists make better sense of increasingly bigger news discoveries is illustrated by the use of advanced document and data analysis technology in this case.

The United Nations, the United States Secret Service and numerous government departments and law enforcement agencies are among the clients of Nuix which now sells software in more than 65 countries. The little known Australian company was started 10 years ago by a software developer who spent his university days figuring out ways to simplify email.

“We’re being used in some very unusual areas of the world,” Bunting said. Child pornography rings, people trafficking and high-end tax evasion are among the other areas where Nuix software is used, he added.

The company claims that it had intentionally kept itself from knowing the contents of the millions of documents the ICIJ scoured using Nuix software. Nuix is privately owned. Taking into account equivalent scenarios rather than specific knowledge of the data, a Nuix consultant provided advice to ICIJ about hardware and workflow which ultimately proved critical in the speedy and accurate analysis of perhaps the greatest gathering of such data ever.

“It’s how most of our business is conducted,” said Bunting.

“We deal with many of the law enforcement and government agencies around the world. We can’t know anything of what they’re doing,” he added.

(Adapted from reuters.com)

Categories: Creativity, Strategy