Exposing Global Corruption: Tech For Investigative Journalism, with Drew Sullivan of OCCRP

Transcript

Jim Fruchterman [00:00]

Welcome to Tech Matters, a, weekly podcast about digital technology and social entrepreneurship. I’m your host, Jim Fruchterman. Over the course of this series, I’ll be talking to some amazing social change leaders about how they’re using tech to help tackle the wicked problems of the world. We’ll also learn from them about what it means to be a tech social entrepreneur, how to build a great tech team, exit strategies, the ethical use of data, finding money of course, and finally, making sure that when you’re designing software you’re putting people first.

Welcome to episode 4 of season 2 of the Tech Matters podcast. Today I’ll be interviewing Drew Sullivan of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a winner of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship.

Drew Sullivan [00:49]

We’re an investigative reporting organization, and we work cross-border globally, and we write stories on organized crime and corruption. And what we soon realized is that journalism is an information technology business. I mean, we’re into handling large amounts of information, whether it’s dusty old government documents or interviews with people. And you have to manage it.

Jim [1:20]

I really like OCCRP for two big reasons. First, they’re using data for a really exciting purpose, which is to build the best global database of international corruption and then make it available to their local journalist partners around the world, who decide which stories to investigate. They’re another great example of using data and software to make people more powerful in their context. This should sound familiar from our last episode where I interviewed Yvette Alberdingk Thijm of Witness, who has the same philosophy but around video storytelling instead of OCCRp’s data storytelling and investigative journalism.

Second, they’re an excellent example of the anti-pattern I discourage people from generally following, which is to build a giant database in the sky expecting something good to happen. OCCRP built that database, and great things have happened.

Drew [2:14]

It started, I was running the, center for investigative reporting in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Sarajevo. And, a colleague that I had met through some training was running a center in Romania to really fight… what we realized is that organized crime is networked. And Paul Radu, who was the other reporter, came to Sarajevo and he met a trafficker — human trafficker — in Sarajevo, who then proceeded to explain the whole trafficking industry to him, you know, in a completely different country. He was completely surprised that they had this knowledge. And then we thought about it and said, well, it makes sense. We understand what journalists are doing in other countries. It’s likely that organized crime works the same way. It’s a network. And when we realized they had a network, we realized we needed a network and so we started working together. So “it takes a network to fight a network” became the phrase that we came up with.

Jim [3:16]

And of course there’s power in a network where a single organization doesn’t have, maybe, all the capabilities.

Now, I understood that you guys actually started as sort of a buyer’s club?

Drew [3:26]

Well, so we decided to cooperate and the first thing we said was, well, we need LexisNexis, which is this wonderful database. But the licensing agreement on it meant that we each had to pay for our separate organizations. So we started an organization called the Journalism Development Network, to develop our journalism, and it was basically a vehicle to buy LexisNexis. That was really our first envisioning of what we needed. And then it became a tool to buy insurance, libel, and slander insurance. And then it became a tool for something else. So it was a very organic development. And what we realized is the network was being manifested through this organization called the Journalism Development Network. And then we applied for money because we said, well, now maybe we can get money as a network. And we applied for a grant and we turned it in — it was to the United Nations Democracy Fund — and we called it the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. [laugh] And that’s how we got the name.

Jim [4:40]

[laugh] Totally descriptive.

Drew [4:41]

Yeah, exactly. No fancy, consultants to come in, no branding, no icon or anything like that. We started calling everything that we were doing under that money the OCCRP. And that’s really, how we got our name.

All of us were still individually collecting all our information, but we weren’t sharing it. And it’s one thing to work together individually to work on a story, but it’s another to have access to each other’s information. And that’s when we decided we really need to kind of build some kind of tool, some central database, to put this together. And we had pretty naive ideas as to what that might be and how that might work. We’re thinking, “oh, well, we’ll just get Foxpro ” or some old database that I used to use and we’ll just put everything in there and we’ll be able to search it. And that was pretty ignorant of us at the time, but we didn’t realize it, but… we really needed expert help. And so we went through a process of trying to find the right person to hire. We got a grant. Actually Google supported us on a grant to kind of build out this kind of tool. And it became really what we call kind of a poor man’s Palantir. It was really Palantir, but without the general nature of it. It was kind of specifically designed around human social networks, and criminal network.

Jim [6:14]

Yeah, Palantir without the evil overtones. [laugh]

Drew [6:17]

[laugh] Exactly. We have some creepy, unfortunately, some of our…. we call ourselves, the “people’s NSA”. Anytime you’re dealing with large amounts of data, you kind of get into this creepy business of collecting information on people. But we were really thinking about, how do we track organized crime as it moves around the region? How do we find out where it’s operating? How do we know all of its structures? How do we connect all this together and really make sense of it? And so that became the core.

Jim [6:53]

Can you tell us a little bit more about the kind of data you’re collecting and how assembling this actually gives you insight into what’s going on as opposed to just raw data?

Drew [7:02]

Sure. So a lot of it is public records. A lot of it is really basic records like company registration. You’re following people networks and you’re following financial networks. And we really thought about how we describe these people. And we came up with a series of entities to describe the lifecycle of a person or a company, and we put together basically a database designed around that.

And so, it started off with public records, but it got exotic pretty quickly. We also wanted a place to keep our various records that we’ve collected during stories. And so we designed the system to suck in basically any type of record we had, whether it was a .pdf file, whether it was a .tiff, whether it was a structured database, whether it was an unstructured database. And we just designed it to go in and basically do an entity extraction on all the information we were putting in to match it to that model that we had come up for the lifecycle of a person or a company and their connections to each other.

Now it’s everything. It’s leaked data, it’s emails, it’s all sorts of creepy stuff and not so creepy stuff that just comes across our desk and that people give to us and we suck it in there. And then you can find out, you could do a timeline, you can do a map of connections between a group of people or companies. And we can match data. If we get a whole set of data that we get, which we do now quite often, we match it against our existing entities. And now we’ve got over 3 billion entities connected to organized crime and corruption.

Jim [8:57]

So these are entities like people, like, corporations, like property…?

Drew [9:05]

… addresses, emails dates, pretty much anything that will uniquely identify the life of a person or life of a company.

Jim [9:16]

So a reporter goes and does a bunch of investigation on a certain crime family in a certain country. They do a bunch of interviews. They can dump their interview notes into this system and it will say, we know a whole bunch about cousin Vlad who happens to own a bunch of property in Belarus or something. It’s going to light up and say, oh, there’s so much more here.

Drew [9:40]

Exactly. So you could look at, I want to find, everybody who is in the same proximity as this person based on a physical address and a time. So you could pull up records that have the same physical address and time connected to them. So you might be able to connect people to a particular event that went on.

Jim [10:10]

So you are actually working jointly, I mean, are we talking about the Guardian and the Washington Post?

Drew [10:25]

Yeah, so we do work the Guardian and sometimes the New York Times and others. We have a group of, international organizations that we call member centers that are basically… we act as kind of their infrastructure, on these types of issues. It’s not only data, we help them with fundraising, we help them with organizational sustainability, we help them with safety and security. We have safety trainers, we have digital security people who can help them lock down their computers and their phones and practice best practices. We have a research team, a world class research team with access to hundreds of thousands of dollars-worth of high end commercial databases that might be useful in these investigations. We make that available to them. So we have a lot of different… we’re kind of an infrastructure or a platform that they can do these stories on.

And then we’ll also do it for other organizations. So, Forbidden Stories is another organization kind of similar to ours. They’ll ask us to ingest their data because they don’t have a similar system. And then we’ll give them access to their data and whoever else they want to have access. So we see ourselves as the ecosphere. We’re trying to build ourselves not as an organization so much, but as an ecosphere of collaborative, cross-border investigative reporting.

Jim [11:39]

Well, and I think that’s… one of the things that’s unusual about your organization is you’re building capacity; you’re using the ability that you have to raise money; and yet I believe the majority of the money flows through you to these partner organizations, you guys actually don’t hang on to the majority of the money.

Drew [11:59]

Absolutely. I mean, we are investing in the ecosphere, and that includes the strength and the existence of these partner centers is critical to our survival. Because you’ll never get somebody better than a local person who understands the local context, has the local sources, and has the local knowledge. They’re the ones who do these stories, who start these stories, who make these stories. and so really what we are trying to do is connect them to each other.

Jim [12:27]

How many reporters, how many of these centers are there around the world that are part of your network?

Drew [12:30]

So there’s 55 that we call member centers. And then there are a large number of partner organizations, I would say close to 100 additional. And that would be like the Guardian and the Washington Post and others. And so we work with them on a story by story basis. And we’re also partners with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which did the Panama papers. We do a lot of work on their projects as well. So Forbidden Stories, ICIJ, other organizations, Süddeutsche Zeitung. We worked on the Panama papers with them. And so basically we can bring a large number of reporters to a particular project.

We just did a project recently with Süddeutsche Zeitung on a Swiss Bank, Credit Swisse Bank. And we were the first to ever get a dataset of who had accounts at Credit Suisse. And we were able to demonstrate that, over 20 years, while every year they said, “We’re not dealing with bad people,” that they constantly dealt with dictators and corrupt individuals and organized crime, and continued to allow them to operate through their bank and to launder money through their bank, and they didn’t do anything about it. And so we were able to bring 90 reporters into that project, and help Süddeutsche Zeitung make that possible.

Jim [14:02]

Well, I think that gives, our listeners some idea of the scale of some of these projects, because these data dumps are huge. And I’m sure there’s a lot of dividing and conquering when it comes to, “okay, this is far more than any one small group of reporters can tackle. So who’s going to tackle which angle on this here?”

Drew [14:22]

The thing to keep in mind, Jim, is that this data is offshore data. And the way the offshore industry works is they set up a constellation of offshore companies in many jurisdictions that the money flows through, and it moves around in these various jurisdictions and all these properties. All these companies are owned by one individual, but legally they appear that they’re a series of unrelated companies who are doing business with each other. And this is how people steal.

The Panama Papers gave us part of the picture, and the Paradise Papers gave us another part of the picture; and the Russian Laundromat gave us another part of the picture. All these big projects that we’ve been involved, you have to piece them all together because on any one thing you’re only getting a small subset of what’s really happening out there. And you have to piece these together patiently. Over time, we’re still, what is it, 8 years since Panama papers, 6 years since Panama papers, we’re still doing Panama Paper stories. we’re still finding stuff in Panama Papers because, when we first saw it, we didn’t understand the importance of it.

Jim [15:36]

The gift that keeps on giving.

Drew [15:38]

Yes [laugh]

Jim [15:38]

So I think you’ve described the need for some strong data capability that any one reporter or even any one newspaper can’t have access to, because it’s just in some ways too expensive and too difficult. But by powering up a network, you’re able to do this. And now in this sort of asymmetric dynamic between the power and money of organized crime and corrupt dictators and the like, and with the power of data on your side, you’re able to actually expose so much of this. This is sort of, you know, the modern way the journalistic field is moving into the future.

Drew [16:20]

It has to, because in the old days, you are… at Kansas City Star, you rarely dealt with anything outside of Kansas City. Everything happened in Kansas City. We’re global now. Everything’s globalized. Crime is globalized, government is globalized, business is globalized. And you have to work in a global environment, and that means a lot of cooperation and a lot of data and a lot of things moving around, and you just have to have the tools to do that. And, from the beginning, we had a very clear idea of what we wanted the system to do.

Jim [16:59]

And this is the Aleph product?

Drew [17:01]

Yes, this is Aleph, and Aleph is open source. We kind of started it with the philosophy that everything should be open source because if we’re trying to help journalists put this together, and it’s now been adopted by about 40, we don’t even know, to be honest, how many people have started an instance, but we know of 40 major news organizations. So the Guardian uses it, Süddeutsche Zeitung uses it, Spiegel uses it. A large number of the people that we work with have started their own instances of this, and so it’s actually become the most adopted software in the news industry.

Jim [17:38]

As other people are trying to follow in your footsteps, whether that’s in investigative journalism or other places, creating data assets and creating technology and analytical assets, what are some of the lessons that you would like to share so that maybe someone gets there faster?

Drew [17:57]

Right. This may seem kind of odd, but the first thing is really understanding what your mission is. A lot of the organizations that we work with are really trying… they’re doing empire building. They want to build an organization that is renowned and is credited for doing great work. But sometimes what their mission really is is to build out something different. So, I mean, I think there is a type of organization that makes sense to build an ecosphere, to build an environment, and it’s a different type of organization, but they’re really valuable, and there’s not enough of them.

So, you know, I was talking to Marina Gorbis at the Institute for the Future, and she really says this is kind of the “post-organizational world” that’s developing, where people are really looking at this not…. you know, looking at it as an organization is the old industrial way. Looking it as a civil mission, a civil society mission, is sometimes the better way of doing it. And it allows us to align the values really closely with the people that we serve. And you have to operate differently, you have to not think of the organization, you have to think of the ecosphere all the time.

So, I think that, if you have one of those missions, you need to recognize it and you need to design for that. And I think we kind of fell into it where we just realized over time we’re not trying to build an organization. We were accused of kind of being a big octopus, of kind of taking over the world, but we were actually kind of laying the track for the world. We were laying the infrastructure, the lattice work that all these things grow on. And that’s really what we were building. And so, our name is not particularly well known compared to our competitors, but that’s not a disadvantage, because who do know us, what we do, is our donors. And it’s really clear what we’re trying to do, and it’s really clear the success. So I think that’s a big part of it, is really getting the mission issue right.

Jim [20:25]

I’ve never heard that expressed in quite that sort of… I mean, if, you look in every Silicon Valley industry, there are standards bodies and open source players that everyone is building on top of that, unless you’re in the industry, you don’t know are there. And yet they’re indispensable. They make that entire ecosystem go, but you have to be willing to let go of having all the credit, because the rest of the system encourages people to say, “me, me, me,” “ours, ours, ours, it’s all us,” even if they couldn’t possibly exist without the ecosystem players that enable them to operate in that top 2%.

Drew [21:06]

Exactly. And the organizations that use our reporters… we help everybody, and if we compete against it and say, “You got to give us credit for everything,” then we lose out on those kind of relationships. So you have to be content with what you’re doing and you have to fight off those who try to privatize those aspects, which happens all the time.

Jim [21:34]

Okay, so, clarity of mission helps you stay on the track towards having that kind of an impact, but it takes some other sacrifices along the way.

Drew [21:47]

Right. I think the other aspect of it is, our big mistake was really not understanding the area that we were getting into when we started to get into technology. And I think, you truly need to invest in the right person — the Chief Technology Officer is our position — who has that kind of larger global vision, and can see the big picture and can design your approach to this. You will never have the resources to do what you want to do, but [that person] can help you design it so that you can have a practical solution to your most pressing needs. And that is, I think, a really certain set of skills. That’s again, a different type of person: Tech people for low -budget, austere environments is a skill set in itself. And we were very lucky to have good people who had that kind of knowledge and vision, and that’s what you have to start with. You can’t really start with your classic tech people, building out a software package like you want to. You have to look at it as, this is all about the possible. It’s the art of the possible.

Jim [23:17]

So many nonprofits I’m talking to that dive into technology, they outsource it to consultants, and the job of a consultant is to say, “What do you want to build? Great, I can build it.” And not “Should you build it or how should you build it.” And I think what you’re describing is, I think, increasingly needed for sort of the modern, highly ambitious nonprofit, whether it’s going to be a tech company at its core or highly tech-enabled, is you need a smart tech person on your side who’s got judgment. I think that’s what you’re describing, someone who’s actually thinking about the mission first and not “Can I make $150,000 off of this client next year?”

Drew [24:02]

Exactly. It has to be a pragmatic person who believes in your mission, is involved in your mission… It probably has to be on staff. I don’t know that you can really hire that consultant. I, mean, I’m sure they’re out there and there’s a few magical ones who… the unicorns out there who can do it, but it’s pretty rare. And I think really you have to kind of find a good tech person and indoctrinate them in your mission, and then once they truly understand what you’re trying to do, they’ll have that judgment, to be able to make those important calls.

Because the way it works now, in the news industry at least, is you go out and you get $150,000 grant, and then you build a small part of it, and then you go out and you sell the same software to another donor for $150,000 grant, and you build a little bit more of it. And then you go out and sell the same one to another donor, and you build a little bit more of it. Nobody’s getting what they want because, first of all, nobody acknowledges that it costs $5 million to build a software, not $150,000 — which donors will not recognize. You have to be seeing that larger arc of where this is going and how it’s going to fit together, and how each step is going to be practical and usable immediately to your people. Otherwise you’re not really going to get where you need to go because you end up with these stranded asset software packages that sit there and don’t really get developed far enough or don’t advance quick enough to be really useful. And so it’s hard.

Jim [25:46]

Well, I think you’re making the case for “enterprise beats project,” right? You have a vision that Aleph has been going for more than five years, and has been going for another five or ten years at least. That’s a 15 year vision of a platform that’s going to be delivering value and getting better every year. And that’s not what happens when you raise money for projects, because they never quite work, they’re not sustainable, and they end up getting stranded, which I think describes 90% of the tech work in the social good sector is projects. And the ones that have long term impact are enterprises, things that are going to be around for a decade or more.

Drew [26:25]

Well we’ve got like a 2025-year vision. Where we want to go is much bigger and now we’re talking 100 million dollar piece of software. But where we see we need to go is much farther. And the problem is, Jim, that the world is changing really quickly, and there’s a lot of really bad governments out there, and even good governments don’t want people to have some of the kind of tools that we have. You know, there’s GDPR rules that are restricting access to data and all sorts of things. But the government has these tools and private industry has these tools and increasingly the public has no access to this kind of analysis. And that’s really dangerous. You can say, well, you can buy that kind of access at times, but try to go in and buy the kind of access that you really need to be able to use Palantir and to get the data that you want. It would cost you tens of millions of dollars. And then they probably wouldn’t let you do that.

So it really is important that these tools reside with the public at some level, and they’re not. And so we’re trying to keep this going so that there is an open source tool that will reside with the public that gives you the same ability that large corporations or political parties or governments have.

Jim [28:03]

That’s really one of the best calls to action for technology, for social impact that I’ve heard. Governments, the spy agencies, the political parties with their data operations, the big tech companies from Silicon Valley, they’ve all worked out how to get access to all the data about everyone and using it for their particular purposes. And where is the interest of the public showing up in these tools?

So do you think you’ll get donors to ante up a fraction of the amount of money that’s getting invested by governments, political parties or the tech industry?

Drew [28:41]

Well, so far we’ve been able to do that. They don’t often have the big picture of what we’re trying to do. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes we should let them know, sometimes they don’t want to know. They want a discrete project that they can fund, and they’re going to fund it for two years and then they’re going to drop you.

We think that we can keep doing this, and as we grow and the impact shows… we think we can make the case that, long term, this is a good investment. I think as people realize that this pays value back — and it certainly does — then the money can continue to increase. OCCRP right now has a 50,000% return on just money to donors, which means that it’s close to $8 billion seized or taken away or fines levied against organized crime and the corrupt. We could survive on the interest of the interest of that as an organization, which gives you some idea. And that’s not counting the intangible public good that this kind of work does, which is estimated to be $100 return for every dollar invested in investigative reporting. It’s a significant… if you want to just fund your government, you should start investigative reporting. You should pay for investigative reporting. It’s such a slam dunk value — it’s not seen that way, unfortunately — but I think as that becomes more and more clear, there will be better funding for these kind of organizations.

Jim [30:36]

So, Drew, are there any final thoughts that you wanted to share with our listeners about being in the place you are of leading this kind of an organization?

Drew [30:46]

Well, I think listeners have to understand that the world is far more corrupt than they realize. It’s much worse than they think. That’s because most people are honest and they don’t really see the deep level of corruption. But there are whole countries, whole regions where everything is controlled and everything is corrupt. And the problem is that these increasingly autocratic governments are “coming to your town soon.” And this is an effort that can’t just be made by investigative reporters and activists. It really has to be a public issue.

And we see ourselves, at OCCRP we have a concept called the “journalism commons,” which is where we survive with the public. I think the model of the commercial media is not sustainable in these more difficult governmental environments. You see in places like Hungary where the media is just gone, it’s just almost overnight it’s gone. And other countries as well, Russia shut down the very last of their independent medias this year. And that’s going to happen to any place where you have autocratic governments.

And so we are a service to the public. We help the public understand what’s going on, and the public has to work more closely with investigative reporters, and that’s really the next generation. We really have to figure out a way to do that many to many relationship, where the public helps, and we go out and do the work that they need to do. My staff inside calls this “DrewAnon”. [laugh] So it’s kind of the concept of QAnon, only done with truth and, not conspiracy. And I think, that’s where we’re really going. And that’s going to mean a lot more software, and that’s going to mean tools like bots that communicate, that improve the communication between journalists and the public, and other really more exotic software. So this is only going to continue to grow. And we hope more and more people from the tech industry who may be listening to podcasts like this make a point to say, “I’m going to support this, or I’m going to develop in this area, or I’m going to work in this area, because it’s really critical.”

Jim [33:23]

I think you’ve just described the call to action of the Tech Matters podcast.

Drew [33:28]

Perfect. [laugh] I’m in the right place. 

Jim [33:31]

Well, thank you. I think this is all about using technology for social good. There’s so many people in the tech industry who are tired of what they’ve been doing, not happy working on advertising or happy that they’ve made a lot of money, but now want to make a difference. And I think I can’t imagine, a better place to do it than by supporting OCCRP and the DrewAnon vision.

Drew [33:59]

[laugh] I agree with you, Jim.

Jim [34:01]

Thank you very much, Drew. Really appreciate your time today.

Drew [34:02]

Thank you, Jim. Take care.

Jim [34:07]

We’ve just heard from Drew Sullivan about how a small data group of roughly half a dozen people have changed the world by building the best ever global corruption database. If we don’t want to live in countries which lack a free press, OCCRP is a great example of how a small amount of technology can deliver immense public benefits for society.

To hear more interviews like this one, be sure to follow the tech Matters podcast on Spotify. Apple Podcasts, your favorite platform, where we’ll be publishing new episodes every two weeks. And is there something that you found particularly insightful about this episode? Be sure to let us know by sending an email to [email protected] we want to hear your thoughts and of course, feel free to leave us a rating.

Thank you so much for listening, and see you next time.