Panama Papers: Inside The Technology That Made It Possible To Tell The Story Of The Biggest Leak In History

The numbers are mind-boggling: 11.5 million documents in total, comprising 4.8 million emails, 2.1 million PDFs, 1.1 million images and 320,000 text files. To put it in context, the amount of data in the Panama Papers leak was 2,000 times the amount in the WikiLeaks State Department cables in 2010. Trying to sift through data like this manually would be a Sisyphean task, so technology was required. Enter the little-known Australian company Nuix. The software company has worked with the D.C.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) for over four years, giving them free access to their software that can take huge troves of unstructured data and turn it into an indexed and searchable database.