Company
Date Published
Author
Mar Cabra
Word count
3382
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) is a network of around 200 journalists in more than 65 countries that collaborate on cross-border investigations and issues of global concern. The ICIJ uses technology such as Neo4j, a graph database, to help tell great stories. In the Panama Papers investigation, the ICIJ used open source tools like Oxwall, Blacklight, Solr, Tesseract, Talend, and Linkurious to process 2.6 terabytes of leaked data from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm. The team built a private social network for reporters, a mini-Google-like search engine, and visualized the data using graph databases like Neo4j and Linkurious. These tools allowed the ICIJ to cater to both tech-savvy and non-tech-savvy journalists, share information securely, and collaborate on complex investigations. The investigation exposed how offshore tax havens are used by elites from around the world, revealing 140 politicians in over 50 countries with connections to Mossack Fonseca.