Hackers On Planet Earth

The Accountability Toolkit: OCCRP and MuckRock

Ezana, Sanjin

In a world increasingly shaped by secrecy, corruption, and misinformation, truth requires infrastructure. Built entirely for the public interest, both the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and MuckRock provide vital, public-good resources designed to help investigators uncover what powerful actors want to keep hidden. This two-hour, hands-on workshop brings together two essential tools for transparency: OCCRP Aleph Pro and MuckRock’s DocumentCloud. Aleph Pro is a massive investigative data platform holding more than four billion documents - ranging from corporate registries to leaked datasets - designed to help users follow the money and map complex networks. DocumentCloud is a public platform with over seven million primary source documents, allowing anyone to search, analyze, and organize materials through either the user interface or the API, serving as a trusted resource for public records and research on public figures, government activities, corporate practices, and other matters of public interest. You will be walked through real-life examples of how these platforms are used in high-stakes investigations, and learn about the global impact they ’ve generated and how new users can get started. Whether your goal is to make sense of chaotic leaked data, navigate massive FOIA dumps, or map hidden assets, this workshop gives you the tools and hands-on experience to do it. What will you uncover?

Friday 1230 Sutton Place / Workshop A

Ezana is a product manager focused on building investigative data platforms that support cross-border journalism and civic accountability. At the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, she leads the product strategy for tools like Aleph Pro - used by tens of thousands of journalists to uncover corruption and follow the money. Her work spans UX, stakeholder engagement, and roadmap development across technical and editorial teams. Ezana holds degrees in information systems and IT, and has been recognized as a Grace Hopper Scholar and a Forbes 30 Under 30 Scholar.

Sanjin is MuckRock’s developer experience engineer, and works at the intersection of technology, transparency, and public accountability. With a background in researching surveillance technologies in the police accountability movement, he is focused on inverting the traditional top-down surveillance relationship through the right to know and the power of public records. He helps build tools like DocumentCloud, a platform for analyzing and publishing primary source documents visited by millions monthly, and MuckRock Requests, which helps journalists, researchers, and everyday citizens file, track, and share government public records requests. He graduated cum laude in computer science from the Illinois Institute of Technology.