Company
Date Published
Author
Emil Eifrem
Word count
672
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The Panama Papers data leak is a massive financial dataset that exposed offshore tax structures created for high public officials and celebrities by Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca over the past 40 years, at a size comparable to every data leak in the last decade. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) analyzed this data using graph technology, specifically Neo4j and Linkurious, which enabled them to process large volumes of connections quickly and efficiently. This approach allowed the ICIJ team to work with complex and interconnected datasets without requiring technical expertise. The use of graph technology in big data analysis is no longer exclusive to the ivory tower, as scalable solutions are now available to everyone, including startups and investigative journalists, making it possible for anyone to make sense of massive datasets at scale.