Re: <nettime> "Offshore Leaks" clickthrough

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

ICIJ's also states that much of the gargantuan leak is near-useless
debris, a relatively small portion useful for investtigation, and even
that requires sophisticated judgment to avoid miscontrual into
scandalous outrage like that the early stories hyped and shamelessly
flaunted with duplicitous charts, spidery diagrams, packs of keyboard
peckers.

No admission yet what percentage, or number of terabytes of data
and 11.5 million files grandiosely announced, are worthy of
consideration except for reams of fishwrap.

It would be brave of ICIJ to backtrack its perfervid claims, restart
its campaign on a more judicious footing and state what it has: what
percentage or number of files are valid, accessible data, what is
licit, illicit, legal and illegal among those files and data according
to the laws of the countries involved, or if not that what study is
needed to sort the legal from the criminal, and who or what
organizations are qualified to make that assessment.

This could if nothing else provide a corrective to over-zealous
promotion of leaks, neglect of "shoe-leather" investigation,
over-reliance upon laptop potato-couchism, at the expense
of deeper public understanding and broader participation
beyond commodified outrage and inflammation -- and
weariness of too much bellowing for attention with dumps
of spurious voluminous data and shoot from the lip polemics,
trite headlines and shallow op-eds, calculated handwringing and
botoxed indignation -- the industrialization of WikiLeakification,
Snowdenization, Panama Paper Banana Republication.

On the other hand it satisfying to graze among the 1.7M
items released by ICIJ yesterday, to ogle the 100,000s
of offshore officers entities around the world, led by China
and the Five Eyes, Russia a distant third, Europe hardly
in the running. Then see North Korea and South Korea
in a near tie of stashing Dollars and Renminbi.
Broader involvement of knowledgeable parties in assessing
leaked material, beyond the capabilities and interests of
commercial journalism, would be saluatory.


At 09:45 PM 5/10/2016, you wrote: ><https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/>

>      Please read the statement below before searching
<...>

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: