Leaktivism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Leaktivism is defined as the action of distributing confidential documents to the public in an attempt to directly impact the socio-economic and political spheres. The term Leaktivism was popularized by Micah White, the co-founder of the Occupy movement, in relation to the Panama Papers.
The Panama Papers are a collection of 11.5m leaked files from one of the world's largest law firms, Mossack Fonseca.[1] A German newspaper called Süddeutsche Zeitung was able to obtain the database from an anonymous source acting under the pseudonym John Doe, who stated he was releasing the papers to draw attention to wealth inequality.[2] The different files demonstrated the manner in which the different wealthy individuals are able to take advantage of secrete offshore tax regimes.[1]
Several heads of state and heads of government were included among the 143 politicians impacted within the leak.[1] (See List of people named in the Panama Papers.)
The information leaked in regards to the Panama Papers is considered one of the largest leaks in history. This leak is considered to be larger than both the US diplomatic cables leak in 2010 and the 2010s global surveillance disclosures.[1] In total there 11.5m documents along with 2.6 terabytes of information taken from the Mossack Fonseca’s internal database.[1]
