Icelanders urge leader to resign
Thousands protest at Iceland’s Parliament on Monday, demanding Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson step down after the data leak linked him to an offshore company. Lawmakers called for a no confidence vote. Gunnlaugsson denied wrongdoing. list of the ac
Pentagon to Panama Papers, a history of leaked data
SAN FRANCIS The 11.5 million CO leaked documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca are providing a treasure trove of data on a hidden world of offshore accounts and murky dealings.
Expect more such leaks in the future.
“It’s becoming much easier than it used to be to store and move very large amounts of data. I would expect this to continue,” said John King, a professor of information at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
The history of such leaks shows a steady increase in their depth and breadth, as informa- tion technology has become more sophisticated and allowed more data to be captured and revealed by leakers.
In 1948, spy Whittaker Chambers famously hid two rolls of microfilm in a hollowed-out pumpkin in a pumpkin patch. The film contained just 58 images of State and Navy Department documents.
By 1969, anti-war activist Daniel Ellsberg spent multiple nights laboriously making photocopies of the so-called Pentagon Papers, a 700-page report by the Department of Defense covering U.S. decision-making in Vietnam. Excerpts were eventually published in The New York Times and the Washington Post.
WikiLeaks has published nearly 500,000 documents leaked by hackers who attacked Sony Pictures Entertainment on Thanksgiving of 2014.
In 2013 Edward Snowden leaked more than 1.5 million documents from the National Security Agency to the press. What are being called “the Panama Papers” contain 10 times that amount.
The documents are estimated to contain about 2.6 terabytes of data, according to the Sud
deutsche Zeitung, the German newspaper that first obtained them. It’s not that much data. Ten terabytes would be about 260 HD movies. Today, big-box stores routinely sell solid-state drives that hold 3 terabytes of data and are just a little thicker than a smartphone.
Moving that much data surreptitiously out of a network also isn’t that hard. “If you have the time, you can remove an enormous amount of data in not very much elapsed time because you can take it in chunks,” King said.
According to a report by cyber security firm Mandiant, the median number of days hackers spend inside a system before they’re discovered was 205 in 2015. Of course, that depends on the network, whether the people who own it are watching and what kinds of movement they are used to seeing.
“Transferring 11 terabytes of data wouldn’t even be noticed on the Netflix or Amazon networks, but would stand out pretty quickly most other places,” said Jonathan Sander, vice president of Lieberman Software, a cyber security firm based in Los Angeles.
Thousands turned out Monday evening to protest Iceland’s prime minister outside parliament in Reykjavik, a day after the release of the massive Panama Papers leak.
One protester was arrested for throwing skyr — an Icelandic dairy product that has the consistency of yogurt — at the house of parliament, according to the Iceland Monitor website.
Police estimated that 8,000 people protested at Austurvöllur Square, which duty officer Arnar Runar Marteinsson said is the largest protest he had seen in Reykjavik, the Associated Press reported.
Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson faced a possible no-confidence vote in parliament over allegations that he deliberately hid vast holdings in troubled Icelandic banks.
He denied any wrongdoing and told parliament he will not resign.
“I have not considered quitting because of this matter, nor am I going to quit because of this matter,” a defiant Gunnlaugsson said, according to the AP. “The government has had good results. Progress has been strong, and it is important that the government can finish its work.”
Gunnlaugsson and his wife allegedly set up a company in the British Virgin Islands with help from Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm at the heart of the leak. Gunnlaugsson told parliament he and his wife have paid their taxes.
“He’s just lost all credibility,” Arntho Haldersson, a financial services consultant, told The Guardian. “Our prime minister, hiding assets in offshore accounts. … After all this country has been through, how can he possibly pretend to lead Iceland’s resurrection from the financial crisis? He should go.”