Experienced journalist & digital investigator currently working as Head of Research & Investigations at the civil liberties campaign group, Big Brother Watch. Previously a national newspaper reporter at the Daily Mail & Mail on Sunday, and occasional freelance across the UK press.
Led high-impact public interest long-form investigations at Big Brother Watch across privacy, civil liberties, tech & digital rights, including:
- Ministry of Truth – exposing the government’s misuse of ‘counter-disinformation’ teams in Whitehall and the military during the pandemic to conduct political surveillance and censor lawful speech, with extensive media coverage including exclusive placements in the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Telegraph, along with multiple mentions in Parliament, particularly during Prime Minister’s Questions.
- Poverty Panopticon – a groundbreaking look into the role algorithms & automation play in the UK’s welfare state, based on 100s of FOI requests, uncovering the use of shadowy algorithms to profile millions of people receiving benefits. Findings were covered by the BBC, the New Statesman, the Daily Mail & the Guardian, among others.
- Who’s Watching You – laid out the dominance companies linked to atrocities in Xinjiang have in the UK’s CCTV market – with 3,500+ FOI requests proving that a majority of public bodies use Hikvision & Dahua, and corporate digging showing that Hikvision was marketing ethnicity profiling in the UK. The report was covered across the press, including in the Times, and the issue was repeatedly raised in the House of Commons.
- The Streets Are Watching revealed how secretive mobile phone tracking is being used to influence the adverts people see on high street billboards. Found that millions of mobile phones in the UK are being tracked to build detailed heatmaps of what kind of people are in which areas and when – so brands can target tiny demographic groups with their adverts, with the findings picked up by Motherboard.
Other investigations leading to significant newspaper exclusives include then-Policing Minister Chris Philp’s clandestine lobbying of an independent regulator on behalf of a private facial recognition firm placed in the Observer, data analysis showing the Metropolitan Police’s disproportionate use of stop and search at protests covered in the Guardian, the police’s ongoing recording on frivolous non-crime hate incidents despite instructions from the government to stop doing so published by the Daily Mail, repeated examples of the government misleading the public about developing vaccine passports given to the Telegraph, and Network Rail’s deployment of emotion-recognition AI first placed with WIRED & picked up across the press.
My portfolio of newspaper bylines centres on stories rooted in open-source and social media verification techniques. They include a front page on Theresa May’s dinner with the wife of a Russian oligarch, exclusives on Instagram drug dealers and defying legal pressure to reveal the sexual misconduct allegations behind a NUS officer’s suspension.
Other front-page bylines include an expose of a Dublin slum landlord illegally renting a single home to dozens of foreign students, coverage of Donald Trump’s refusal to pay for ‘Megxit‘ and reporting on the tragedy of a child thrown off the top of the Tate Modern art gallery.
Responsible for exclusives ranging from Labour candidate being investigated for errors on electoral forms, to the secret online sex work of a dead teenage aristocrat with more colourful work including an extensive travel feature from southern Florida.
I also have editing and leadership experience, from the six months where I regularly covered as Night News Editor at the Daily Mail, managing a team of late reporters, finding stories for the late edition and making decisions on which should be in the final edition of the newspaper.
