He has 35 years experience breaking major reports on communications intelligence on press and television. He revealed the Echelon satellite intereception system in 1988 and wrote the European Parliament reports on Echelon in 2000. He advised the UK civil rights organisation Liberty in a successful 2008 European Court of Human Rights challenge to the legality of communications trawling (Liberty v United Kingdom). Since 2002, he has been employed to examine terrorism suspects' computers in the UK's major terrorism cases. He is a Visiting Fellow at Bournemouth University, UK. He was formerly a senior research fellow at at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Washington DC (EPIC).