Protect your sources or you will endanger getting the real news: CBC declines to turn over Panama Papers data to CRA News organization's spokesman says policy is to never reveal journalistic sources CBC News Posted: Apr 11, 2016 5:27 PM ET Last Updated: Apr 11, 2016 5:27 PM ET Andrew Treusch, the head of the CRA, wrote to the CBC last week asking for the leaked Panama Papers, which outline tax havens. CBC has refused the request. Related Stories Modigliani masterpiece seized in wake of Panama Papers CRA adds more staff to crack down on tax cheats, Diane Lebouthillier says Panama Papers expose human costs of global tax avoidance David Cameron slams 'hurtful' allegations about family's finances after Panama Papers The Canada Revenue Agency has formally asked the CBC to hand over offshore tax-haven data from the massive Panama Papers leak, but the news organization is refusing. The commissioner of the agency, Andrew Treusch, sent an email on Friday to the president of the CBC asking for the data, saying the agency wants to begin work immediately on reviewing the information. CBC spokesman Chuck Thompson said the corporation rebuffed a similar request from the CRA in 2013 for another massive cache of tax-haven data — and will do so again. SPECIAL REPORT | Modigliani masterpiece seized in wake of Panama Papers "Simply stated, CBC News does not reveal its sources and we're not about to start now as a result of this request," he said. Earlier this year, the Panama Papers were distributed electronically to CBC News and other select news organizations around the world, and stories about the contents began to appear this month. The blockbuster revelations are having serious political repercussions in some countries, while others are looking at ways to stop the wealthy from stashing cash offshore to avoid paying taxes. Co-ordinating distribution The Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) is co-ordinating the distribution of the data, and plans to post a subset of the information on a searchable database in early May. Treusch said in his letter he did not want to wait for the ICIJ posting. "As you can appreciate, this information would be of greater value to us if obtained in a timelier manner so that we can begin our work immediately," he wrote. "Please note that we are not asking you to reveal your sources or how you came into possession of the information." 'We are not asking you to reveal your sources.' - Andrew Treusch, CRA commissioner The deputy director of the ICIJ, Marina Walker Guevara, said other tax agencies have approached news organizations in Britain, Italy, Ireland and Latvia, among others, to turn over Panama Papers data, all without success. Tax agencies have also directly approached the ICIJ, which has a long-standing policy to refuse such requests because it "is not an arm of law enforcement and is not an agent of the government." Walker Guevara said the posting of Panama Papers data in early May will be a small slice of the information, allowing anyone to search among 214,000 offshore entities and the people connected to them, including shareholders and directors. But documents, pictures, email addresses, passport numbers and other information touching on privacy will not be posted. CBC President Hubert Lacroix was sent the Panama Papers request from the CRA last Friday. (Left: Nathan Denette/Canadian Press, Right: John Woods/Canadian Press) "We believe that information about who owns an offshore company should be public and transparent," she said in an interview. "So this is going to be a bare bones, searchable database. It's not going to be documents." On Monday, National Revenue Minister Diane Lebouthillier announced more money and more auditors would be put into tracking down offshore money in tax havens.

Panama Papers Leak Signals a Shift in Mainstream Journalism

Here is an important alert to a shift in journalism attempting to adapt and function in a radically changing world. One were we really need real accurate information to function as a responsible citizen in a democracy. From the New York Times - MEDIA Panama Papers Leak Signals a Shift in Mainstream Journalism Mediator By JIM RUTENBERG APRIL 10, 2016 Bjarni Benediktsson, the minister of finance in Iceland, leaving a meeting in Gardabaer, Iceland. Credit Birgir Por Hardarson/European Pressphoto Agency WASHINGTON — Four years passed between The New York Times’s first article based on the Pentagon Papers and the end of the Vietnam War. Two years passed between The Washington Post’s first story establishing Richard M. Nixon’s link to the Watergate burglary and Nixon’s resignation from the presidency. Last week, Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson of Iceland couldn’t make it 48 hours before having to step aside after the disclosure of the shady bank dealings contained in the Panama Papers, some of which involve him. O.K., I know: It’s just Iceland, remote and adorably tiny. Who knew it had a government position higher than forstodumadur Fiskistofa (director of Fisheries)? Kidding, Iceland, kidding! I understand how you’re at the center of something bigger than both your country and mine, and I promise that you won’t be mad at me by the time you’re done reading this. Because while we Americans were transfixed by the latest plot turns in our presidential campaign, you and the rest of the world were living through the biggest corporate data leak in history. It had reverberations not only in Iceland, but in China, Britain, Russia, Argentina and some 50 other countries. But the leak signaled something else that was a big deal but went unheralded: The official WikiLeaks-ization of mainstream journalism; the next step in the tentative merger between the Fourth Estate, with its relatively restrained conventional journalists, and the Fifth Estate, with the push-the-limits ethos of its blogger, hacker and journo-activist cohort, in the era of gargantuan data breaches. Back at the dawn of this new, Big Breach journalism, The Times’s then-executive editor, Bill Keller, wondered aloud in the paper’s Sunday magazine whether “The War Logs,” a huge cache of confidential war records and diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks in conjunction with The Times, Der Spiegel, The Guardian and others, represented “some kind of cosmic triumph of transparency.” He concluded, “I suspect we have not reached a state of information anarchy, at least not yet.” That was in 2011. Continue reading the main story RELATED COVERAGE David Cameron Releases Tax Data After Panama Papers Backlash APRIL 10, 2016 Opinion Patrick Chappatte Chappatte on the Panama Papers APRIL 8, 2016 British Banks Must Disclose Links to Panama Papers Law Firm, Regulator Says APRIL 8, 2016 Before and After the Panama Papers: David Cameron of Britain on Tax Avoidance APRIL 8, 2016 Advertisement Continue reading the main story Five years later, it is safe to say that we are getting much closer. This is changing the course of world history, fast. It is also changing the rules for mainstream journalists in the fierce business of unearthing secrets, and for the government and corporate officials in the fiercer business of keeping them. Any early questions about the effect of WikiLeaks’s trove were answered a few months after Mr. Keller’s article appeared, when WikiLeaks won credit for helping to spark the Arab Spring. It revealed a cable highlighting the opulence and self-dealing of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and his family, enraging his already restive and economically pinched public. His ouster shortly followed. Last year, a federal judge doubted the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records after the program was disclosed in data leaked by the former intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden. Mr. Snowden’s information also helped set up this year’s standoff between Apple and the Justice Department over iPhone encryption. Now we have the 11.5 million files known as the Panama Papers, based on documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca that detail shell companies and tax shelters used by the world’s wealthy and powerful. They are causing political heartburn — and potentially worse — for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, and yes, Iceland. But for everyday mopes who file their taxes by the letter of the law, as opposed to through its loopholes, the biggest shocker was how much tax avoidance contained in the Panama Papers was legal, as Glenn Greenwald wrote in The Intercept. That is a lit match to the political tinder of the increasingly global view that the game is rigged — something that’s at the heart of the appeals of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump here at home. It’s the stuff journalists live for. But the deep data sets that are making these sorts of revelations possible are presenting new conundrums for reporters and editors more accustomed to banging the phones and interviewing live human beings. This issue initially surfaced in the WikiLeaks “War Logs” collaboration. In their carefully constructed stories with WikiLeaks, The Times, The Guardian and other partners redacted the names of sensitive sources mentioned in the documents. But later, some WikiLeaks-held reports spilled out online with names of sensitive sources, drawing accusations that lives were put at risk. The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, and his supporters have noted that no known physical harm came from any of it. But none of this helped the “War Logs” source, Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning), the Army private who received a 35-year prison sentence on charges of violating the Espionage Act. The sentence was part the United States government’s aggressive attempts to put this Big Breach era to an end. Fat chance. As a group, investigative journalists and their sources operate in grave fear of jail time, but not as much as they fear being cowed out of important stories by the government. Things can be trickier when the data belongs to corporations. Consider the Sony Pictures Entertainment hacking, said to have been perpetrated by North Korea in a bid to scuttle the Sony film spoofing the country’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un. Reporters found some juicy tidbits in executive emails. But they were also, as the Sony lawyer David Boies claimed, unwittingly helping “a nation state using the intrusion to attempt to intimidate and suppress the distribution of a film.” Mr. Boies got only so far in his attempt to convince the news media that they were legally bound to ignore the data, and delete any they had downloaded. But, he told me, the more reporting gets away from serving an obvious public interest, “the more problematic” it becomes to publish information that was acquired illegally. The organizers of the Panama Papers project, at the nonprofit International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, said they kept that in mind as they pursued the leads in the database of the law firm Mossack Fonseca, which says the information was hacked. When I visited the consortium’s Washington office on Friday, its director, Gerard Ryle, told me he did not know if the data was hacked. But he pointed me to the writing atop the big white board laying out the Panama Papers’ production schedule: “Is an issue of global concern?” (A: Yes.) Taking some cues from the Sony and WikiLeaks cases, Mr. Ryle said his consortium had been extra careful not to make all of its data public, especially the personal information of nonpublic figures, playing a gatekeeper role. Referring to WikiLeaks, Mr. Ryle said, “We’re trying to reclaim ground that they stole — or, they took,” which mainstream journalism allowed because “we got lazy and sloppy and arrogant about what we were supposed to do: shine light into dark places.” Not everyone is thrilled with this. WikiLeaks wrote in a tweet: “If you censor more than 99% of the documents you are engaged in 1% journalism.” But that criticism is not universal in Fifth Estate circles. Which brings us back to Iceland. A leader of the opposition Pirate Party there, Parliament Member Birgitta Jonsdottir, was a WikiLeaks volunteer who at times worked intimately with Mr. Assange. She has the United States subpoena for her personal Twitter information to show for it. (The “Game of Thrones” actress Carice van Houten plays her in “The Fifth Estate.”) When I spoke with her last week, she was thrilled with the Panama Papers. “It’s amazing to see,” she said. Ms. Jonsdottir’s party is vying to take control of the government on a platform that includes making Iceland “one place in the world where data could be hosted without danger to whistle-blowers” — a haven for data breach journalism. As they say in Iceland, if that isn’t the raisin at the end of the sausage. Correction: April 10, 2016 An earlier version of a picture caption with this article rendered incorrectly the English spelling of a town in Iceland. It is Gardabaer, not Garoabaer. A version of this article appears in (In the New York Times) print on April 11, 2016, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Data Breaches Change the Rules. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe