How a network of journalists uncovered billion-dollar accounts and toppled world leaders

Ideas53:58How a network of journalists uncovered billions and toppled world leaders

In 2011, Gerard Ryle, an Irish journalist working in Australia, received a package. Inside was a disk featuring content that would lead to multiple investigations, exposing corruption worldwide, and forcing some political leaders to resign.

Ryle is the executive director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, or ICIJ, a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., responsible for some of the biggest international investigative stories of our time. 

The Offshore Leaks. The Panama Papers. The Paradise Papers. The Pandora Papers. Just to name a few. These stories uncovered billions of dollars stashed away in secret offshore accounts.

Before taking the job at ICIJ, Ryle had published a major newspaper investigation into a company called Firepower. It claimed to have invented a pill that, if you put it in your gas tank, would vastly improve your mileage. The Australian government celebrated the company as a major success story. 

However Ryle found out that it was a Ponzi scheme, and that the pill was a scam and didn't work. 

Ryle later wrote a book about his investigation into Firepower. And someone who read it put a disk in the mail to Ryle. This disk would change Ryle's life dramatically, leading to the ICIJ becoming a leader in global investigations, and expose the nefarious world of dark money in offshore accounts, among other revelations.

IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed recently interviewed Gerard Ryle onstage at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick. It was part of the annual Dalton Camp Lecture in Journalism.

Here is an excerpt from their conversation. 

GR: "After I wrote the book, someone then sent me a disk in the mail, and it was like a computer hard drive. It was the offshore law firm in Singapore that had set up all the offshore structures for this particular Firepower pill."

NA: But you didn't know that when you got this disk? 

"Well, I had a fair idea. Another tip for you as a journalist is try to get stuff anonymously because you can always then say you don't know who the source was. And so when I was dealing with the sources, I was saying, 'Well, look, if you wanted to give me this material, please just send it to me in a brown paper bag at my newspaper address.' And when it arrived, my biggest challenge was understanding it and trying to work out what it was."

So what did you do with it?

"Well, at that stage, I had taken a new job in Canberra, and I bribed the IT guy with beer to try and open up the disk and to let me know what was in there. I found lots of spreadsheets of names [and] a lot of material about my company, but at that point, I'd written the book and I thought, 'Well, there's nothing new that I can really do with this.'"

About Firepower? 

"About Firepower. But I'm not making this up, but I saw all these names from around the world and I remember distinctly seeing a Canadian name that got me really interested. It was a guy…"

Do you remember the name?

"I don't. And I can't even replicate what I'm about to tell you because I did try and search for this afterward and I still can't find it. But it's a true story. So, I saw this Canadian guy and apparently, he'd been killed involving some sort of drug deal. I think it was in Toronto. And there I saw an email address with his offshore company and the email address was something like: 'On the run at hotmail.com.' And honestly, it was like a light bulb [moment] for me. I thought, 'Oh my God, I wish I knew a Canadian journalist, I could give this to.' But when you're an investigative reporter and you're working in one country, you really have no interest in helping anybody else. 

"And so I sat on the material."

For how long did you sit on the material? 

"A few months later, again, out of the blue, I got a call from Washington D.C. And it was from [a person who] was sitting on an organization called the Center for Public Integrity in Washington. And part of the Center For Public Integrity was the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. They were desperately searching for a new director. What I hadn't realized was that the ICIJ, at the time, was really just a fundraising device for the center, for the larger organization.

"The ICIJ only had one grant, it was from a Dutch foundation. And the Dutch foundation had been very critical. The ICIJ had been going for about 12 years at that point. They'd given it a three-year grant. They were saying, we won't give you another three-year grant because you're too American-focused. So I thought I was being hired for my skills. But in fact, the only reason I was being hired is that I wasn't American.

"But of course, I did have this disk in my back pocket."

Right. Did you tell them about the disk?

"I did not. Because again, I was worried that maybe it was a story, maybe it wasn't a story. I couldn't unpack the disk. It turned out the disk had two and a half million records. And my beer-consuming IT person had only allowed me to look at a very small part of it.

"But I had an instinct that there had to be a good story in there somewhere. I just needed to work out a way of doing it."

I am curious: are there ethical lines or boundaries for you in terms of what you will do to get at that data, or maybe what you won't do? 

"It's a good question. I mean, I obviously deal with a lot of people who have stolen material, and they're giving you stuff that is stolen. And often they get a reaction, 'Well, why would you take material that has been stolen?' But I keep asking myself the same question, which again, is the question that my lawyer in the U.S. keeps asking me: 'Is the material of public interest?' Your job as a journalist is to the public. It's not to courts or anyone else. Is this material of public interest? And if it is, then I will take the material.

"There are things I would never do though. I mean, I would never pay for material and there are certain ethical lines that I would never go past. But generally speaking, what I tend to do if I do manage to get a big data set is that I will sit down, look at the data first, then I would write a note to my lawyer with what I'm seeing and make a case for why we should look at that material in more detail. And that was what we did every time."

Would you ever endorse the idea of hacking into any kind of database or information source? 

"If I did the hacking myself, I wouldn't be able to use the material. If I paid for the material, I wouldn't be able to use it, so I'm very, very careful not to cross that line. But of course, I'm aware that a lot of material has been hacked, and the last 20 years have been transformational for information. Everything has been digitized... when people actually have access to them, they can be copied quite easily. And therefore, that's why whistleblowers now give you more and more data."

This hasn't come up a lot lately in public, but what do you think about WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange?

"The model that he was using was very much: publish everything. And I think that was a model that went against journalism because the idea of journalism is that you filter the information. You only publish what's in the public interest, not everything. The criticism of WikiLeaks was that it was just basically raw data dumped."

"One of the things I wanted to do when I took over ICIJ was literally to take on that model in a different way, to show that journalism was important, that when we publish our big data sets, we do not publish all of the information that we find. 

"We have people's passport details, their bank accounts, passwords to their bank accounts. That is not in the public interest. But if it's a politician or if it is a public figure who's in there and they've got a secret offshore account and it's linked to something that you can prove is in the interest, then that is the kind of material that I think we need to, as journalists, do." 

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*Q&A edited for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Mary Lynk.