ABSTRACT
In the analogue era, leaking was usually an act between two consenting adults carried out secretly. Sometimes it involved an exchange of documents, but these had to be physically reproduced. The first major episode in the new era involved the leaking of around 1,000 emails and 3,000 documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, a leading global institute, and a contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The November publication of diplomatic cables unleashed a flood of rhetoric. Italy’s Foreign Minister Franco Frattini called it “the 9/11 of world diplomacy”. The Panama Papers, published in April 2016 and deliberately named to evoke the Pentagon Papers, constituted yet another leap in scale. While the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks consisted of 1.7 gigabytes, the Panama Papers were 2.6 terabytes, or roughly 1,500 times bigger. The WikiLeaks submission system had been disabled by a collaborator after a falling-out with Assange.
