Jake Hurfurt is an experienced investigator and journalist specialising in technology and human rights reporting. His investigative work has been featured on the front pages of newspapers including the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, and has generated major coverage across major publications from the Guardian and WIRED to the New Statesman and The Times.

Currently Jake is Head of Investigations at the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, and before this he was a reporter for the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday.

At Big Brother Watch he has exposed the government’s abuse of ‘counter disinformation’ teams to conduct political surveillance, uncovered how a Home Office minister secretly lobbied on behalf of private facial recognition companies, discovered secretive trials of cameras programmed to detect passengers’s emotions at National Rail stations and investigated the use of turn-by-turn tracking of mobile phones by advertisers to plan billboards all over the UK.

While at the Mail he verified former Prime Minister Theresa May’s dinner with the wife of a Russian oligarch as part of a front page investigation, as well as unmasking a Dublin slum landlord putting dozens of lives at risk and he fought back against legal threats to name a senior NUS officer accused of misconduct.

Jake also has significant editing and leadership experience. At Big Brother Watch he takes charge of devising investigations and supervising investigations volunteers, and at the Daily Mail he regularly covered as Night News Editor at the Daily Mail, managing late reporters and taking responsibility for the news pages for late editions of the paper.

Work Highlights