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Panama Papers scandal

What Edward Snowden thinks about the explosive Panama Papers leak

Jessica Durando
USA TODAY
Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron speaks during a question and answer session on the forthcoming European Union referendum with staff of PricewaterhouseCoopers in Birmingham, England, on April 5, 2016.

Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistle-blower, has been quite vocal on social media about the Panama Papers leak and the international fallout from the millions of documents released.

He's commented on global leaders involved with the documents, mocking British Prime Minister David Cameron and Iceland Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, who stepped aside amid the fallout.

"If you're in charge of a country, keep your money in it," Snowden tweeted Tuesday,

Cameron was dragged into the scandal about offshore tax havens this week over his late father's connections to an investment fund that avoided paying tax in the United Kingdom by having its directors hold board meetings in Switzerland and the Bahamas rather than in London.

Ian Cameron, a stock broker who died in 2010, was named in the documents stolen from the Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca. The company set up for Ian Cameron was called Blairmore.

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Downing Street initially called the discovery a "private matter."

On Monday, Snowden tweeted a snarky response after David Cameron's spokeswoman called family investments private.

Downing Street later confirmed the prime minister does not hold any shares in the company. Cameron released another statement, saying, "In terms of my own financial affairs, I own no shares. I have a salary as prime minister and I have some savings, which I get interest from and I have a house, which we used to live in, which we now let out while we are living in Downing Street and that's all I have."

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Cameron added: "I have no shares, no offshore trusts, no offshore funds, nothing like that. And, so that, I think, is a very clear description." His office added that Cameron, his wife and children do not benefit from any offshore funds.

Former National Security Agency systems analyst Edward Snowden

On Tuesday, Snowden tweeted that the "resignation of Iceland's PM may explain why the U.K. PM is so insistent public has no right to know a PM's 'private' finances."

According to German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung,  which first shared news of the Panama Papers, the leak consisted of 11.5 million documents, including 4.8 million emails.

That compares to about 1.7 million documents leaked by Snowden, a former NSA contractor, in 2013 about the agency's surveillance efforts. The NSA release amounted to just 15% of the number of documents with the Panama Papers investigation.

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Snowden noted on Twitter that the Panama Papers represent "the biggest leak in the history of data journalism."

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