Posted on 04/27/2016 12:07:59 PM PDT by Lorianne
German states have called for media outlets to release the cache of 11.5 million documents to authorities. But the journalists behind the largest data leak in history say it's not going to happen.
Germany's federal states on Friday called for increased measures against tax havens and for media outlets to allow prosecutors to examine the contents of a cache of 11.5 million documents known as the "Panama Papers," which had been leaked to the press.
"If the data sets from the 'Panama Papers' are not made accessible, then we cannot draw any consequences," said Lower Saxony's Finance Minister Peter-Jürgen Schneider, Reuters news agency reported.
However, the Munich-based newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung's (SZ) investigative unit on Tuesday said it would not hand over the cache nor would it publish the leak online, despite calls to do so by government officials and representatives of the whistleblowing organization WikiLeaks.
"As journalists, we have to protect our source: we can't guarantee that there is no way for someone to find out who the source is with the data. That's why we can't make the data public," the team said during an "Ask Me Anything" session on Reddit, which included journalist Bastian Obermayer, who was first contacted by the anonymous source.
(Excerpt) Read more at dw.com ...
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