Panama Papers source issues statement

There&#x27;s a lot to parse in that statement, but the call for whistleblower protections seems to be the single most important (and achievable) item. Most people are aware of Snowden and Manning, but it really surprises me that these haven&#x27;t been reported more:<p><i>&quot;Bradley Birkenfeld was awarded millions for his information concerning Swiss bank UBS—and was still given a prison sentence by the Justice Department. Antoine Deltour is presently on trial for providing journalists with information about how Luxembourg granted secret “sweetheart” tax deals to multi-national corporations, effectively stealing billions in tax revenues from its neighbour countries.&quot;</i><p>Law enforcement agencies don&#x27;t have the resources or knowledge to go after much of the corruption and wrongdoing inside governments and large companies. If insiders with integrity don&#x27;t have a safe way of stepping forward there will never be a way to keep wealthy&#x2F;powerful&#x2F;connected individuals from abusing the system.

<i>But most of all, the legal profession has failed. Democratic governance depends upon responsible individuals throughout the entire system who understand and uphold the law, not who understand and exploit it.</i><p>Sigh. One of the most puzzling questions I have to deal with in my mind. Why is there so little moral left in this world?

The call for whistleblower protection is important, but it&#x27;ll never happen. The powers-that-be don&#x27;t want to encourage whistleblowers.<p>What <i>may</i> change their mind is if all the data were made public. Since whistleblowers have not much protections, their only protection right now is to release everything on the &#x27;net, anonymously. Now, clearly this is not a good idea, as in many cases there will be collateral damage. But what is the alternative? Once the governments see that such collateral damage is the only alternative, they will be force to enact meaningful whistleblower protection.

This statement is very interesting, it is very well written and researched, and it uses less common words. I wonder if there was some level of editing&#x2F;embellishment done to it.<p>Might as well be a non-native speaker. It also seems to me that the author might have had some personal reasons to target MF<p>But to be honest, I don&#x27;t think Income Inequality is one of the most defining issues of our time, through human history, inequality, not only monetary, but cultural and intellectual has usually been higher.

&quot;issues involving taxation and imbalances of power have led to revolutions in ages past.&quot;<p>Given that all the checks and balances have failed, I don&#x27;t see very few other options.

And yet... why no American names in the leaks? Funny that.

There will never be better protection for whistleblowers. That is just not in the interest of those who make the laws nowadays. What will come are new laws which will make the publishing of whistleblower material illegal. The EU for example is currently working on a law for better protection against theft of trade secrets. Which such a law in place no newspaper would risk anymore to publish something like the panama papers.

Question for John Doe. Where&#x27;s the missing American names and other retracted elements. Further given his naive calls for governments to do something to fix the problem seems naive to the extreme since they were the ones who created the &#x27;problem&#x27; or backdoors in the first place

&gt;&gt; &quot;Source known only as John Doe says income inequality &quot;one of the defining issues of our time&quot; and calls on governments to address it.&quot;<p>Calling on any government to create change, not it citizens, is a mistake - especially on a topic like this.

The revolution might be digitized, but if it does indeed happen, I&#x27;m afraid it will also be bloody as hell, as almost all revolutions are. I suppose some things never change.

I think their upcoming release is more interesting:<p><i>The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists will release on May 9 a searchable database with information on more than 200,000 offshore entities that are part of the Panama Papers investigation.</i><p><i>The data [...] includes information about companies, trusts, foundations and funds incorporated in 21 tax havens, from Hong Kong to Nevada in the United States. It links to people in more than 200 countries and territories.</i>

more and more this feels like a big smoke screen to keep sheep walking in circles. german publications are losing readers in droves. they desperately need to capitalize on a good story.<p>there&#x27;s absolutely no real news here. but suddenly &quot;democracy’s checks and balances have all failed&quot;.<p>come on.

This seems to be long enough for a statistical attack to narrow things down to ~100 people.

Why can&#x27;t I donate bitcoin

The tone of the statement is very anonymous in nature. Cold and factual. I wonder if this is how its author normally express theirself or if they&#x27;ve written in this style in order to defeat authorship attribution.

I am impressed at how well it&#x27;s written.