Translator: Marta Quirós Alarcón Reviewer: Denise RQ
We all have secrets.
Telling them always implies a risk.
Therefore, we tend to share them
with the least number of people as possible.
So when does it stop being a secret?
Perhaps it depends on the number of people who know it, or its content,
or whether we elevate it to what we call the public sphere.
However, George Bernard Shaw said,
"There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses."
Sometimes the biggest secrets are already exposed to the light of day.
A little more than a year ago,
a group of 400 people, 376 journalists, to be precise,
got together to focus
on a topic which was known, but which was being ignored:
the systematic use of tax havens.
These obscure shelters enable a parallel economy
from which the powerful benefit,
no matter their nationality or their profession.
We got together to undertake an investigation which lasted a year,
and which was the largest collaboration in journalism history.
It was known as The Panamá Papers.
How is it that we got 400 people to agree to work together during a year?
The most important thing is having a common goal.
And, in our case, that meant having a good project.
Two German journalists
from the Munich-based paper Süddeutsche Zeitung, had received a leak.
2.6 terabytes of information.
11.5 million documents,
connections with more than 200 countries, from Chile to China.
A huge amount of information
which they couldn't grapple with by themselves.
Therefore, they came to Washington with their harddrive and shared it with
the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists,
which is the medium I work for.
Our job became knocking on the doors of different world media
to form a great global tem.
Don't think that they were easily persuaded.
Some editors asked us,
"Why should I publish information about this
when using tax havens is perfectly legal?
What I want to put on the front page of the newspaper
are corruption matters, topics concerning illegal matters."
The U.S. President, Barack Obama,
summarized the problem in a very simple way,
"Using tax havens is perfectly legal,
but that is precisely the problem."
In tax havens there's a blend
of the actress who wants to buy an apartment in London
through a society in the British Virgin islands
so that nobody knows she lives in that apartment,
and one of the most wanted drug traffickers in the world.
They are black holes
thanks to which terrorism and war in Syria are financed,
or nuclear weapons which end up in North Korea are traded.
Not to mention tax evasion, of course, which affects all of us.
Eventually, we ended up persuading more than 100 media throughout the world.
Each with their own idiosyncracy,
their culture, speaking their own language.
The following step was getting them to collaborate with one another.
That's not something which gets built overnight.
In the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
we have spent almost 20 years working to forge those relationships,
those links between media, and above all, between people, journalists,
to share, develop projects together, to investigate matters across borders.
Sharing, collaborating isn't normal.
In fact, in journalism, we usually work alone.
We usually have an exclusive story,
and what we do with it is publish it
on the front page of the paper with our name on it.
That's what we usually do.
It's basically something similar to "The Lord of the Rings."
Remember Gollum,
who held onto the ring because it gave him power,
and he didn't want to let it go because it was his precious?
Well, what's happening in today's world is something very similar.
Not only in journalism.
Instead of being Gollum, we decided to share it all.
In a radical way.
The almost 400 journalists of the Panama Papers
had access to the 11.5 million documents.
Thanks to the Internet, to the cloud, to having them in a safe platform
which could be accessed by anyone in the team,
at any given time, from anywhere in the world.
Apart from sharing everything, we shared the cost,
because all this has to be financed.
A single medium wouldn't have been able to pay the millions of dollars
that this 400 people, year-long investigation cost.
What we did
is each communication medium paid its journalists.
That way, uniting our efforts, as an effort of collaborative economy,
we were able to pay for this investigation, this great collaboration.
We shared the information, shared the cost, but that's not enough.
There's a moment when you have to trust.
For me, the biggest trust exercise I've ever done in my life
had nothing to do with journalism.
It had to do with something I like to do in my day-to-day,
during the weekend, during my free time,
which is doing trapeze.
What I enjoy is to go jump through the air,
and the truth is that it's a bit shocking,
when you see yourself before a 7-meter tall structure
you've got to climb.
And you do.
You stand on the platform and try not to look downwards,
because the height is impressive.
You've got to grab onto a rail.
You grab onto the rail, and there's a moment when you have to jump.
And you jump.
In that moment, gravity pulls you downward,
the adrenaline enables you to make shapes in midair,
on the trapeze, hanging upside down.
And soon enough you have to jump again, which is flinging yourself
so that the person next to you, presumably, catches you.
You have a millisecond to think about it and say,
"What if I stayed here on my rail, where I'm calmer?
But, hey, no, I'm going to jump!"
Then, you fling yourself, hoping there's someone on the other side,
and don't see a thing.
But there's a moment
when two hands approach you, grasp you, and pull you towards the other side.
That is a fantastic moment.
In that moment, magic happens.
It's the magic of trapeze, the magic of the circus.
So, what we did
was tell all the Panama Papers journalists,
"Let's do trapeze together.
Have trust!
If you jump and share, there will be someone on the other side."
And the truth is that they did share.
We worked together for a year,
using an internal social network like Facebook,
but wherein we could privately share what we found.
Sometimes, you got up and found
someone on the other side of the world had found an amazing topic
which would end up on the front cover of your medium,
and they'd found it while you were sleeping.
Little by little, day by day, sharing, we formed a great global family.
A family impossible to betray.
Like the Three Musketeers, working all for one and one for all.
After a year of sharing,
not only what we found in the documents but what we were doing on the outside,
the people we talked to, interviews, notes, court documents.
So, a year later, we published.
On April 3, 2016.
Eight p.m., Spanish time.
The media in different parts of the world were opening.
Here you have some front pages.
Here in Spain, we were talking about it on La Sexta and El Confidencial.
In the UK, The Guardian was opening with it,
Le Monde in France, UniVision in the United States.
We were all talking about the same thing,
about how tax havens were being used
by sportspeople, celebrities, businesspeople,
politicians, a lot of politicians.
And they were being aided by intermediaries we are familiar with:
banks, managers, law firms, all which work in our countries.
The impact we had was unprecedented,
and we managed to do it because we published together,
not because one of us published.
A few hours after publication,
people went out on the streets of Reikiavik, in Iceland,
demanding the prime minister's resignation.
The prime minister did resign hours after that.
Other politicians have resigned, even in Spain.
(Laughter)
Moreover, tax agencies are searching for that money which some didn't pay.
The best thing is witnessing that the laws are changing,
laws to make those obscure havens more transparent,
so those taxes can be paid back home
and we don't have problems
to pay for public services, schools, hospitals.
So that we no longer have this great inequality
we've got this day in age in society,
which is aided by these obscure havens of tax havens.
We didn't want to stop there,
with "only" 400 journalists more or less having access to this information.
We wanted to go a little bit further,
so that any one of you could become an investigator
of the Panama Papers.
We couldn't publish the 11.5 million documents
because there was a lot of private information, bank accounts, passports.
We couldn't publish them, we didn't have time to see all of them,
but what we could do was publish the names of companies in tax havens.
And those names of opaque societies
are followed by the names of the people
who have hidden, who have kept secret for years,
precisely because that's what tax havens sell, secrecy.
Now, anyone can search for those names and become an investigator.
We have transformed the power of hundreds into the power of millions of people.
What is clear is
we wouldn't have reached this point without the greatest trust effort of all.
That which was once done by someone somewhere in the world
when they shared those documents with the German journalists.
I'm talking in generic terms, I'm saying "someone", "once", "in the world,"
because we don't know the source for the Panama Papers.
It's an anonymous source who is known as John Doe.
John Doe gave the documents
to the journalists and not to the governments,
and he or she says they did it
because governments fail to protect informants, leakers.
In fact, they cited an example in a statement they wrote
after we published this information,
where they said that we only had to look at recent examples,
such as Edward Snowden.
I don't know if you remember that worker from the US National Security Agency
who helped all of us see the US government spies on citizens.
It's paradoxical that today he has to live as a recluse in Russia
because he's the one who they want to judge in the United States
for being a spy.
The Panama Papers are just the beginning of a new era
in which these massive electronic leaks have become ordinary,
the order of the day.
We live in a sea of data so huge that it's impossible for a single person
to analyze all that information and make sense of it.
The world is too complex
for us not to join forces and take on matters on a global scale.
Organized crime, terrorism, they work on a global manner.
We, the journalists, and citizens must do this as well.
People like you, I don't care what your job is.
Whether you work for a government, a great company, or a small school,
together we can achieve great things
if we share knowledge, if we collaborate.
We need honest and reliable people who know how to keep a secret,
and who, at the same time, are sufficiently responsible
to know when they should publish or make it public.
Together with 400 people,
I kept a secret which affected half the world.
And this has taught me many things,
but if I had to mention one, just one thing,
about why it has worked,
how come nobody revealed the secret ahead of time,
or took advantage of this information at a personal level,
is that we had the same goal.
We got aligned for something
much bigger that ourselves as individuals or as journalists.
I believe that is the sense,
the transcendence of individuality for the common good,
which is precisely the secret of what makes us human.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)