Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

A leak of several million emails from the Israeli Ministry of Justice revealed a long-running lawfare operation aimed at shielding Israeli policies toward Palestinians from legal scrutiny in international and European courts, while also seeking to criminalize protest and advocacy against Israeli human rights violations. Spanning nearly 15 years and involving more than a dozen European countries, the emails are written mainly in Hebrew and show how several European countries collaborated with Israel to ensure impunity for its illegal occupation, paving the way to future war crimes. Media in Israel-Palestine are barred from reporting on the leak due to a gag order, making international collaboration essential. The leaked collection of MoJ documents have been indexed and made searchable for the public in the Library of Leaks by the nonprofit whistleblower site Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS).

This session presents how an independent journalist, working with European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) and multiple European newsrooms, analysed and reported on the leak using straightforward, accessible methods. The investigation relied primarily on close reading, systematic memo-writing, manual timeline construction, and country-by-country mapping of key actors and legal strategies, complemented by cross-referencing the emails with publicly available records.

The talk will share practical lessons on making sense of large email leaks in multilingual contexts, combining leaked material with open-source and public-domain data, coordinating cross-border reporting under legal constraints, and maintaining accuracy through repeated verification and collaborative review.

Large language models (LLMs) have become a common tool in most investigative newsrooms. But what do you do when prudish language models refuse to process what you are investigating? Or you have so much sensitive information that it makes your stomach hurt to send it to Big Tech?

Enter local AI models!

Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) has used AI models running on their own machines or leased ones to carry out several projects. Together with Lighthouse Reports, we exposed a hidden class divide in Norwegian courtrooms – revealing that the wealthy receive more lenient sentences than the poor – by analyzing 9,000 verdicts. The NRK team then turned its attention to the adult industry, reviewing over 1,000 films to document a sharp rise in choking incidents.

While the subjects differ vastly, the projects share a common thread: the controlled use of local AIs to process massive datasets. We want to share our methodology, our findings, and insights along the way – but most of all demonstrate how to get you started with using the latest local models for your specific investigative needs.

In the presentation, we will show concrete examples of how to run the latest local models and invite the audience to think with us about how these models can enhance investigative workflows.