>Yet somehow many of us approve when the victims are wealthy and higher status, as is the case with the Panama Papers. Furthermore most of those individuals probably did nothing illegal, but rather they were trying to minimize their tax burden through (mostly) legal shell corporations.<p>This is a scary thing that has been building over the last 10 years. Wealthy people are vilified for being wealthy even when they play by the rules. You saw this a lot with Occupy Wall Street and you hear similar rhetoric from Bernie Sanders supporters condemning the "donor class" and being angry at banks for being big regardless of anything else. But these people do exactly the same thing you and I do. I take advantage of the tax system when I deduct education expenses. I lobby the government when I contribute to the EFF. I want the companies I invest in to be as big and as profitable as possible. If I had more money, those things would simply be in higher quantities. That is the only thing most of these people are guilty of, doing the same thing we all do but at a much higher magnitude. We can recognize that magnitude difference is a problem and want to shrink it without resorting to vilifying people who simply play the hand they are dealt.
The difference between sharing information about ordinary people charged with crimes and about the rich and powerful, is that the rich and powerful people are rich and powerful. These are people who exert power over the rest of society and therefore their business dealings - especially shady, quasi-legal or outright illegal business dealings - are in the public interest.<p>The fact some random person has been charged with a DUI is not comparable with the fact the Icelandic prime minister engaged in questionable business practices and possibly a conflict of interest, especially from the perspective of Iceland's citizens.
Slowly but surely, I'm coming to the position that "hacking and leaking" is <i>never</i> "wrong". It's a form of speech, and I'm a free speech absolutist. Let's stipulate that some things are illegal and not "wrong", just as others are legal and "wrong".<p>It's not clear to me, however, that this case actually is a hack, in the sense that whoever released this material might have had legitimate access to it as a part of doing business. In that case this is certainly an unethical failure to uphold terms of contract. Who's going to enforce that contract, however? Certainly not IRS or any other USA agency.<p>[EDIT:] In case it's not clear, I don't think that society in general is ethically limited by any "poison tree" doctrine in situations like this. Once this information is public, however it came to be so, we are free to use it as we see fit.
<i>Furthermore most of those individuals probably did nothing illegal, but rather they were trying to minimize their tax burden through (mostly) legal shell corporations.</i><p>I've looked into offshore banking and shell companies and the like a bit over the years. I'm not sure why; I guess I just have a fascination with business and finance. My conclusion has long been that, for an individual who intends to comply with the law, there is very little benefit to these structures. Generally, an individual can't legally lower their tax burden through the mechanism of an offshore shell company.<p>The legal versions of this involve genuine corporations headquartering in a business friendly location. They don't do it secretly, however. It is done in the open, and the corporation's owners (the shareholders) still have to pay their taxes on any dividends or capital gains in whatever jurisdiction they live in. You can argue whether or not Google should be legally allowed to move most of their income to Ireland, but that is a totally different scenario to a single person starting a company in Panama to hold his investments. In the United States, at least, a single shareholder company that does nothing other than hold investments is treated as a pass through for income tax purposes. I.e. you can't avoid taxes simply by keeping the money in the company. Moreover, even if you could avoid the tax on the company profits, you would still have to pay tax when your wanted to take the money out to actually spend it.
> probably did nothing illegal, but rather they were trying to minimize their tax burden through (mostly) legal<p>Mostly legal and nothing illegal are contradicting.
An article by Tyler Cowen of the Mercatus Center - "the most important think tank you've never heard of." [1]<p>If you're interested in the background of this interesting organization, there's some funding information at [2].<p>It's maybe not that surprising that a board member of an economics outreach effort heavily funded by Koch Industries would argue for the freedom of the very rich to "to minimize their tax burden through (mostly) legal shell corporations," especially considering that the Kochs were exposed doing just this by a previous round of ICIJ published leaks. [3]<p>But maybe it's worth asking why such a reasonable practice, totally within the law, would be so secret in the first place that it takes leaks like these to make it known.<p>1: <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20070824203256/http://gazette.gmu.edu/articles/index.php?id=5895" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20070824203256/http://gazette.gmu...</a><p>2: <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/mercatus-center" rel="nofollow">http://www.desmogblog.com/mercatus-center</a><p>3: <a href="https://www.icij.org/project/luxembourg-leaks/new-leak-reveals-luxembourg-tax-deals-disney-koch-brothers-empire" rel="nofollow">https://www.icij.org/project/luxembourg-leaks/new-leak-revea...</a>
<i>How many of us would approve of that behavior? Keep in mind the hacker is spreading the information not only to prosecutors but to the entire world, and outside of any process sanctioned by the rule of law.</i><p>The Panama Papers didn't get uploaded to the internet, it was distributed to journalists. The person who leaked the information was deferring to the judgement of journalists to publish information in a responsible way. It's entirely possible that there is material in the Panama Papers that is <i>exactly</i> what he describes, but we haven't seen it because it's not being published.<p>The journalists have come up with some criteria about what's responsible here. It might be not be the right criteria, but it does exist.
The writer assumes that the laws work and asks "Is it ethic leak this illegal activities?". And he says that in this condition, proper way would be the legal ways. No! The laws and legal ways do not work always, in such cases people themselves will be the law and the prosecuters. It is like asking to catch all ISIS members without killing them, that would be the proper law! Not bombarding them! Don't kill ISIS, catch them and prosecute them, oh yeah what lawfull legal world! Would you expect justige from corrupt countries and corrupt procecuters? Revealing these corruptins is proper act and I support these hackers.
These authors are confounding malum in se / malum prohibitum. Common error when the law legislates the boundaries of social / economic class.<p>Was it wrong for rosa parks to hack the segregated bus system in montgomery?
I think the flaw in the analogy is that we as a society have had the chance to openly debate things like attorney-client privilege. We understand that we have a legal system in which guilty people may enjoy protection, and we understand the reasons for it. At the very least, the fact of the matter is public knowledge. That's not the case for kinds of tax-avoidance and general shadiness being revealed in the Panama Papers.