巴拿马文件和媒体大揭秘时代的来临

Four years passed between The New York Times’s first article based on the Pentagon Papers and the end of the Vietnam War.

从《纽约时报》根据五角大楼泄密文件发出的第一篇报道，到越南战争结束，用了四年。

Two years passed between The Washington Post’s first story establishing Richard M. Nixon’s link to the Watergate burglary and Nixon’s resignation from the presidency.

从《华盛顿邮报》将理查德·M·尼克松(Richard M. Nixon)与水门窃听事件建立关联的第一篇报道发出，到尼克松辞任美国总统，用了两年。

Last week, Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson of Iceland couldn’t make it 48 hours before having to step aside after the disclosure of the shady bank dealings contained in the Panama Papers, some of which involve him.

上周，隐藏在巴拿马文件中的可疑银行交易被曝光不到48小时，与之有牵连的冰岛总理西格门迪 尔·戴维·贡劳格松(Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson)就被迫递交了辞呈。

O.K., I know: It’s just Iceland, remote and adorably tiny. Who knew it had a government position higher than forstodumadur Fiskistofa (director of Fisheries)? Kidding, Iceland, kidding! I understand how you’re at the center of something bigger than both your country and mine, and I promise that you won’t be mad at me by the time you’re done reading this.

好吧，我知道：这只是冰岛，一个遥远而小巧的国家。谁会知道它有一个比渔业部门主管(forstodumadur Fiskistofa)还大的政府职位呢？开玩笑，冰岛的朋友，是开玩笑！我知道你们处在比你的国家和我的国家都大的事件中心，我保证等你看完全文，肯定就不会再因我那句玩笑话而愤慨。

Because while we Americans were transfixed by the latest plot turns in our presidential campaign, you and the rest of the world were living through the biggest corporate data leak in history. It had reverberations not only in Iceland, but in China, Britain, Russia, Argentina and some 50 other countries.

因为，当我们美国人因本国总统大选的最新情节转折而目瞪口呆时，你们和全球其他国家的人正在亲身见证史上规模最大的一起企业数据泄露事件。它不止在冰岛引起巨大反响，也在中国、英国、俄罗斯、阿根廷和其他大约50个国家产生了震动。

But the leak signaled something else that was a big deal but went unheralded: The official WikiLeaks-ization of mainstream journalism; the next step in the tentative merger between the Fourth Estate, with its relatively restrained conventional journalists, and the Fifth Estate, with the push-the-limits ethos of its blogger, hacker and journo-activist cohort, in the era of gargantuan data breaches.

但泄密事件本身还呈现了另外一个非常重大但又不曾被提起的问题：主流新闻报道正式“维基解密化”(WikiLeaks-ization)；这是以相对受限制的传统新闻记者为主的“第四阶级”(Fourth Estate)，和以挑战道德边界的博客作者、黑客和新闻活动人士等为代表的“第五阶级”(Fifth Estate)，在海量数据泄露时代组成临时联盟后的下一步行动。

Back at the dawn of this new, Big Breach journalism, The Times’s then-executive editor, Bill Keller, wondered aloud in the paper’s Sunday magazine whether “The War Logs,” a huge cache of confidential war records and diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks in conjunction with The Times, Der Spiegel, The Guardian and others, represented “some kind of cosmic triumph of transparency.” He concluded, “I suspect we have not reached a state of information anarchy, at least not yet.” That was in 2011.

在这股新的大泄密(Big Breach)新闻潮流刚开启的时候，时任《纽约时报》执行总编的比尔·凯勒(Bill Keller)曾在时报的《周日杂志》(Sunday)上发文，就维基解密与《纽约时报》、《明镜周刊》(Der Spiegel)、《卫报》(The Guardian)和其他媒体发布含大量机密战争记录和外交电报的“战争日志”，是否代表着“追求信息透明的某种巨大胜利”，做出了他的思考。他的结论是，“我想我们并没有达到完全的信息公开，至少现在还没有。”当时是2011年。

Five years later, it is safe to say that we are getting much closer. This is changing the course of world history, fast. It is also changing the rules for mainstream journalists in the fierce business of unearthing secrets, and for the government and corporate officials in the fiercer business of keeping them.

五年之后，可以肯定地说，我们距离那个目标近了很多。这种变化正在快速改变世界历史的进程。而在残酷的揭秘报道领域，以及更加残酷的政府和企业保密领域，规则也在被改变。

Any early questions about the effect of WikiLeaks’s trove were answered a few months after Mr. Keller’s article appeared, when WikiLeaks won credit for helping to spark the Arab Spring. It revealed a cable highlighting the opulence and self-dealing of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and his family, enraging his already restive and economically pinched public. His ouster shortly followed.

在凯勒那篇文章发出几个月后，针对维基解密泄露重要信息的效力所产生的各种疑问都得到了答案。当时，维基解密因帮助激发了“阿拉伯之春”革命而获得肯定。该机构曝光了一份机密电报，揭露突尼斯总统宰因·阿比丁·本·阿里(Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali)及其家人假公济私的行为和奢华的生活，激怒了在经济上备受压迫、本已躁动不安的突尼斯民众。本·阿里很快被罢黜。

Last year, a federal judge doubted the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records after the program was disclosed in data leaked by the former intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden. Mr. Snowden’s information also helped set up this year’s standoff between Apple and the Justice Department over iPhone encryption.

去年，在前美国国家安全局(National Security Agency)情报承包商爱德华·J·斯诺登(Edward J. Snowden)泄露数据，曝光该机构大量收集美国人通话记录的项目之后，一名联邦法官对安全局的行为是否符合宪法提出了质疑。斯诺登提供的信息也部分导致苹果公司今年与司法部(Justice Department)就是否为之破解iPhone手机而僵持不下。

Now we have the 11.5 million files known as the Panama Papers, based on documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca that detail shell companies and tax shelters used by the world’s wealthy and powerful. They are causing political heartburn — and potentially worse — for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, and yes, Iceland.

现在，我们掌握了数量达1150万份的巴拿马文件。这些从名为莫萨克-冯塞卡(Mossack Fonseca)的巴拿马律所泄露的文件，详细记录了世界各地的权贵使用的空壳公司和避税手段。它们正在成为一些政治人物的心病，而对俄罗斯总统弗拉基米尔·V·普京(Vladimir V. Putin)、英国首相戴维·卡梅伦(David Cameron)来说，情况可能会更糟，当然，也包括冰岛。

But for everyday mopes who file their taxes by the letter of the law, as opposed to through its loopholes, the biggest shocker was how much tax avoidance contained in the Panama Papers was legal, as Glenn Greenwald wrote in The Intercept. That is a lit match to the political tinder of the increasingly global view that the game is rigged — something that’s at the heart of the appeals of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump here at home.

但是，就像格伦·格林沃尔德(Glenn Greenwald)在新闻网站The Intercept上的文章所写的，对于依法纳税而非利用其漏洞避税的普通人而言，最大的震惊之处在于，巴拿马文件中的避税行为竟然有那么多是合法的。它引爆了一种日益全球化的观念，即一切都是被操纵的——这也是伯尼·桑德斯(Bernie Sanders)和唐纳德·特朗普(Donald Trump)能在本国集聚人气的一个关键原因。

It’s the stuff journalists live for. But the deep data sets that are making these sorts of revelations possible are presenting new conundrums for reporters and editors more accustomed to banging the phones and interviewing live human beings.

这是记者们渴盼的素材。但让这类泄密事件得以实现的深层数据，也在给习惯于狂打电话、采访活生生的对象的记者和编辑们带来新的难题。

This issue initially surfaced in the WikiLeaks “War Logs” collaboration. In their carefully constructed stories with WikiLeaks, The Times, The Guardian and other partners redacted the names of sensitive sources mentioned in the documents. But later, some WikiLeaks-held reports spilled out online with names of sensitive sources, drawing accusations that lives were put at risk.

这个问题在最早与维基解密就“战争日志”展开合作时就暴露出来了。在精心谋篇布局的多篇维基解密报道中，《纽约时报》和《卫报》及其他合作伙伴对文件中提到的敏感信源的名字进行了涂黑处理。但后来，维基解密持有的一些报道散布到网上，将敏感信源的名字暴露了出来，被指责危及了他人的生命。

The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, and his supporters have noted that no known physical harm came from any of it. But none of this helped the “War Logs” source, Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning), the Army private who received a 35-year prison sentence on charges of violating the Espionage Act. The sentence was part the United States government’s aggressive attempts to put this Big Breach era to an end. Fat chance.

维基解密的创始人朱利安·阿桑奇(Julian Assange)及其支持者表示，并不能确定有哪篇报道真的造成了任何人身伤害。但是它们显然没给“战争日志”的信源——二等兵切尔西·曼宁（Chelsea Manning，之前名为布拉德利·曼宁[Bradley Manning]）带来什么好处。他因触犯反间谍法(Espionage Act)的指控被判处35年监禁。这项判决是美国政府终结大泄密时代的努力之一。他们成功的希望不大。

As a group, investigative journalists and their sources operate in grave fear of jail time, but not as much as they fear being cowed out of important stories by the government.

调查记者及其信源作为一个团队是担着入狱的风险在做事，但相比之下，他们更担心自己因政府恐吓而放弃报道重大新闻。

Things can be trickier when the data belongs to corporations. Consider the Sony Pictures Entertainment hacking, said to have been perpetrated by North Korea in a bid to scuttle the Sony film spoofing the country’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un. Reporters found some juicy tidbits in executive emails. But they were also, as the Sony lawyer David Boies claimed, unwittingly helping “a nation state using the intrusion to attempt to intimidate and suppress the distribution of a film.”

当所泄露信息属于企业时，情况可能就更加复杂。想想索尼电影娱乐公司(Sony Pictures Entertainment)遭遇网络袭击一事——据说是朝鲜为阻止索尼公司上映嘲讽其最高领导人金正恩(Kim Jong-un)的影片。在被曝光的索尼高管邮件中，记者们发现了一些花边信息，并予以报道。但就像索尼公司的律师戴维·博伊斯(David Boies)所称，他们也是在无意识地帮助“一个国家利用这次电脑入侵，恐吓索尼公司，阻止它发行一部影片。”

Mr. Boies got only so far in his attempt to convince the news media that they were legally bound to ignore the data, and delete any they had downloaded. But, he told me, the more reporting gets away from serving an obvious public interest, “the more problematic” it becomes to publish information that was acquired illegally.

博伊斯希望让新闻媒体相信，它们在法律上有责任忽略这些泄密信息，并删除所有已经下载的文件，但他也只能做到这么多。不过，他曾告诉我，新闻报道越偏离于服务显而易见的公众利益的方向，发布通过非法手段获取的信息就“越成问题”。

The organizers of the Panama Papers project, at the nonprofit International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, said they kept that in mind as they pursued the leads in the database of the law firm Mossack Fonseca, which says the information was hacked. When I visited the consortium’s Washington office on Friday, its director, Gerard Ryle, told me he did not know if the data was hacked. But he pointed me to the writing atop the big white board laying out the Panama Papers’ production schedule: “Is an issue of global concern?” (A: Yes.)

在非营利机构国际调查记者同盟(International Consortium of Investigative Journalists)工作的巴拿马文件项目的多名组织者表示，在从莫萨克-冯塞卡律所泄露的数据库中寻找调查线索时，他们一直谨记着这一点。上述律所表示，那些数据是被黑客窃取。当我周五拜访记者同盟位于华盛顿的办公室时，该机构主任杰拉德·赖尔(Gerard Ryle)告诉我，他不知道这些数据是否是被非法窃取。但他指给我看列在大写字板顶部的巴拿马文件报道计划表，其中写道：是一个全球关注的问题吗？（答案：是的。）

Taking some cues from the Sony and WikiLeaks cases, Mr. Ryle said his consortium had been extra careful not to make all of its data public, especially the personal information of nonpublic figures, playing a gatekeeper role.

赖尔表示，因为从索尼和维基解密事件中吸取了教训，他的机构一直非常注意不公开所有数据，尤其是非公众人物的个人信息，而是扮演一个把关人的角色。

Referring to WikiLeaks, Mr. Ryle said, “We’re trying to reclaim ground that they stole — or, they took,” which mainstream journalism allowed because “we got lazy and sloppy and arrogant about what we were supposed to do: shine light into dark places.”

在谈到维基解密时，赖尔说，“我们在试图拿回被他们夺取——或说拿走的阵地，”此前主流媒体给了他们可乘之机，“因为我们变得懒惰、草率而又傲慢，忽略了自己原本该做的事：照亮黑暗的地方。”

Not everyone is thrilled with this. WikiLeaks wrote in a tweet: “If you censor more than 99% of the documents you are engaged in 1% journalism.”

有的人对此是不能苟同的。维基解密的一条推文就写道：“如果你过滤了99%的文件，你做的就是1%的报道。”