Jacob Silverman is the author of Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection.

A lone hacker comes along, dumps a massive trove of secret information about the global super-rich and powerful on the world’s media, and then, fearing for his safety and freedom, drops out of view, probably forever. Welcome to the era of the mega-leak. It’s the modern-day equivalent of David and Goliath—with the anonymous hacker or whistleblower playing the role of the hero in most cases—and the mighty and the wealthy had better get used to it, since they are the main targets. And they’re never going to know whether what they’ve been trying to hide for decades, employing a battery of expensive lawyers or accountants, could become tomorrow’s headline.

The Panama Papers leak last week is thus only the latest example of what is plainly becoming a trend, one that comes out of a confluence of two factors. First, the powerful have more to hide than ever. Second, with the development of encrypted communications, whistleblower software, the Tor browser (which allows for anonymous web browsing), and other tools to securely pass documents to journalists, a kind of infrastructure now exists to support leakers, who have also exhibited savvy when choosing the recipients of their secrets.


Edward Snowden, remember, chose to approach filmmaker Laura Poitras on the basis of her celebrated documentary work and her experience with government surveillance. It’s not clear why the person calling himself “John Doe” who obtained documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm specialized in maintaining off-shore hideaways for the assets of the global rich, reached out to a Suddeutsche Zeitung reporter named Bastian Obermayer—asking him simply, “Interested in data?”—but it was likely because the German journalist had already been involved in several investigations into financial scandals. The anonymous leaker said he feared for his life, would not meet the reporters at all, but wanted “to make these crimes public.”

In the world of today’s super-rich, and growing inequality between haves and have-nots, the sense that the unvarnished truth can only be found through accidental disclosures has given leaks a new currency. And we are far from Daniel Ellsberg surreptitiously photocopying pages of the Pentagon Papers. Today's leakers deal in documents numbering into the thousands or millions, and if they do their job carefully, as the source behind the Panama Papers has done, their identities may never be known, but their impact may be immense.

In the end it will be a battle between smart hackers and those trying to secure data. Who will come out on top? Populist outrage favors the former, but big institutions and the global rich have vast resources and, often, the law on their side. (As has been widely noted, the true scandal of the clandestine tax shelters depicted in the Panama Papers is that many of them are legal.) And leaking data is far different than holding someone to account. The excitement surrounding leaks reflects, in part, a sense that the political process is broken, that a rot has set in that can only be excised through extra-legal means.

So in all likelihood, there's a lot more to come—and not just from the journalists still poking through stacks upon virtual stacks of legal documents. The Panama Papers could one day soon be dwarfed by an archive of data from a major international organization, like the International Monetary Fund (a leaked phone call just upset negotiations between the IMF and Greece). Meanwhile, companies are producing and maintaining more data than ever. A decade ago, it might have been a matter of controversy to find out that your employer was secretly recording your keystrokes. Now, many white-collar workers spend their days talking, collaborating, and gossiping on Slack, Hipchat, Asana, or other forms of productivity software that preserve every communication, making them a target for a leak — or a subpoena. Max Read, the former editor-in-chief of Gawker, recently considered the squirm-inducing sight of seeing his old workplace chats laid bare in court, after the wrestler Hulk Hogan sued Gawker for publishing a video clip of him having sex. “All of your Slack data is stored on Slack’s servers, as well as your employer’s,” Read wrote on the website of New York Magazine. “In the unlikely event of a major security breach, the internal chats of many different companies could spill out.”

The infamous Sony Pictures hack was one such breach — a bizarre public soap opera, in which the mandarins of the entertainment industry were the stars. A few months later came another hack that, while well chronicled, didn't nearly capture the public imagination like reading a film executive dishing on Angelina Jolie. But this leak may have been just as important. Last July, someone posted online a 400 gigabyte archive containing internal communications, source code, contracts, and other sensitive information from Hacking Team, an Italian spyware company notorious for providing its services to repressive regimes. The Hacking Team leak humiliated the company, and undermined its maverick image, while also revealing many of its business practices and customers (the FBI among them). Anti-surveillance activists kvelled at Hacking Team being on the receiving end of some of the very tactics it's used on behalf of its clients. While a victory for civil society, the hack raised an uncomfortable question: If people who penetrate computer systems for a living (and work with some pretty nefarious characters) can't keep the door locked, what hope is there for anyone else?

Through these leaks, we’re also learning more about how power operates in a globalized world. The growth of governmental and corporate secrecy, especially across borders, means that many of us feel as if the deliberations of the powerful take place exclusively out of view, shielded by armies of lawyers. The only way to know what our elites are actually up to, it appears, is to pry into their most privileged communications. (Much of what we know about the Trans Pacific Partnership treaty, for instance, comes from documents published by Wikileaks.) Thanks to the Panama Papers, we have documentary evidence showing how Vladimir Putin and other powerful figures have utilized secretive (at least they used to be secretive) networks of friends and business partners to conceal their ill-gotten wealth. After the Wikileaks dump several years ago, we learned a lot about how the U.S. government really views its counterparts and its rivals—for example, the spectacle of then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton asking, as she would never dare in public, about China: "How do you deal toughly with your banker?" Journalists are still drawing on the cache of diplomatic cables to flesh out stories about America's relationships around the world.

As of now the Panama Papers is the new pacesetter for mega-leaks, clocking in at about 2.6 terabytes. That's a tremendous amount of information — more than 11 million documents, according to Süddeutsche Zeitung, the German newspaper that first received the archive — but all of it would fit on a $100 portable hard drive. That is not to diminish the scope of the leak, only to emphasize how advances in computer storage and other technologies have rendered the question of size almost moot, at least when it comes to securing and transporting data. Free tools like Onionshare, created by Micah Lee, a technologist who now works at The Intercept, make it possible to securely and anonymously send files of almost any size.

Even with these tools in place, and even as many media organizations now pride themselves on having a secure digital dropbox for sources, the effort and care that leakers, journalists, and NGOs must go through to preserve their privacy rivals that of spies. It's not uncommon to hear national security reporters talk about “commsec” as a matter of professional tradecraft. Yet these new practices reflect an awareness of just how imperiled private communications have become, with intelligence agencies and tech giants alike racing to scoop up as much personal information as they can. The Obama administration's aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers and the bureaucratic nightmare of FOIA requests belie the predictions that an era of instantaneous communication would somehow yield more transparency, citizen participation, or some other lofty democratic notion. Instead, it has brought us industrial-scale surveillance, while empowering authority figures to keep information from the public.

The backstory of the Panama Papers reminds us how much time, labor, and resources it takes to process these leaks. Süddeutsche Zeitung partnered with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), and together they brought in dozens of other media organizations from 80 countries. The ICIJ worked with object-character recognition software to digitize the documents and make them searchable. A secure online interface and chat rooms were created so that journalists from different countries could talk and work with one another. The year-long effort is deeply impressive, even if the sclerotic elites whose tax dodges and shady business affairs are chronicled in these stories manage to escape consequence. One can be cynical about the possibility for the Panama Papers leading to political reform — although don't tell that to Icelanders, who flooded the streets to protest their prime minister, whose secret offshore assets have been exposed — while still admiring the idealism, technological ingenuity, and the diligent collaboration underpinning the project.

One popular theory posits that an outside hacker — and not an outraged Mossack Fonseca insider — is the source of the Panama Papers. The law firm apparently has shoddy security procedures, from using outdated software to failing to change the password to its main web portal in several years. A few routine software updates might have saved one of the world's most secretive law firms from disaster. Many big companies and law firms are beefing up their IT budgets, deploying encryption, and hiring computer security officers, but plenty don't. And the general state of computer security is deplorable — the widely used Flash browser plugin, to take one small example, is also a favorite of hackers because it's so riddled with vulnerabilities. Insecure or buggy systems sometimes help take down a big fish, like Mossack Fonseca, but they also imperil the privacy and livelihoods of millions of people.

Thanks to today’s data-rich environment, each of us has a personal Panama Papers, an archive describing who we are, what we do, where we go, what we want. This archive, however, isn't entirely in our hands; it belongs to the companies and government agencies that sift through our personal information to furnish healthcare or monitor us for signs of extremism. The smooth flow of commerce and governance now relies on the security of this datastream. President Obama understands this as surely as the partners of Mossack Fonseca now do. The Insider Threat Program, established after Chelsea Manning leaked millions of diplomatic cables to Wikileaks, promises to snuff out future leakers before they can get started — which, in turn, only makes the kind of raw data promised by whistleblowers all the more desired.

We live in a time of informational superabundance, but much of it comes pre-spun or filtered by a sophisticated public relations apparatus. Leaks promise something rarer and more valuable: the truth. Whether that promise bears fruit depends not only on what we dig up about the rich and powerful, but also on what we decide to do about it.