Neo4j Desktop Download of Paradise Papers
Not for the first time, Neo4j marketing raises false hopes among potential users.
When you or I read “Paradise Papers,” we quite naturally think of the reputed cache of:
…13.4 million leaked files from a combination of offshore service providers and the company registries of some of the world’s most secretive countries.
Well, you aren’t going to find those “Paradise Papers” in the Neo4j Desktop download.
What you will find is highly processed data summarized as:
…
Data contained in the Paradise Papers:
- Officer: a person or company who plays a role in an offshore entity.
- Intermediary: go-between for someone seeking an offshore corporation and an offshore service provider — usually a law-firm or a middleman that asks an offshore service provider to create an offshore firm for a client.
- Entity: a company, trust or fund created in a low-tax, offshore jurisdiction by an agent.
- Address: postal address as it appears in the original databases obtained by ICIJ.
- Other: additional information items.
…
Make no mistake, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) does vital work that isn’t being done by anyone else. For that they merit full marks. Not to mention the quality of their data mining and reporting on the data they collect.
However, their hoarding of primary source materials deprives other journalists and indeed the general public of the ability to judge the accuracy and fairness of their reporting.
Using data derived from those hoarded materials to create a teaser database such as the “Paradise Papers” distributed by Neo4j only adds insult to injury. A journalist or member of the public can learn who is mentioned but is denied access to the primary materials that would make that mention meaningful.
You can learn a lot of about Neo4j from the “Paradise Papers,” but about the people and transactions mentioned in the actual Paradise Papers, not so much.
Imagine this as a public resource for citizens and law enforcement around the world, with links back to the primary documents.
That could make a difference for the citizens of entire countries, instead of for the insiders journalists managing the access to and use of the Paradise Papers.
PS: Have you thought about how you would extract the graph data from the .AppImage file?