Authenticating Hacked and Leaked Data

The UCL Institute of Innovation Law is delighted to welcome
Micah Lee, author of Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations
to deliver the 2026 Privacy Lecture

Chair: Professor Amanda Harcourt, UCL IBIL

About this talk

Citizens’ relations with governments and corporations are characterised by diminishing transparency and an increasing asymmetry of access to information. Yet the world today is swamped by data. Much of it is disinformation, whether from parties posing as state actors or emanating from “freelance” hackers. Barely a day goes by without news of yet another data leak or hack. We are truly drowning in data.

So, how does one know whether a data dump is important information in the public interest? Does it emanate from a concerned and well-informed whistleblower? Or from a malevolent distraction? Is it simply AI slop?

The question for journalists, policymakers, academics, authors, concerned citizens has to be: “Is the data authentic?” How does one handle the data safely, protect genuine sources and tease out the newsworthy threads?

Micah Lee, author of Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations provides the tools to enable journalists and researchers to excavate, and safely make sense of rich data sources.

About the speaker

Micah Lee is an information security engineer, a software engineer, an investigative data journalist, and author. He has worked with some of the most respected digital rights organizations in the US. He founded the Lockdown Systems Collective where he helped to develop an open source app called Cyd that helps people claw back their data from Big Tech. He developed open source security tools like OnionShare and Dangerzone.

For a decade he was Director of Information Security at The Intercept and was staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He also co-founded the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

While Edward Snowden was making his revelations of the astonishing NSA documents, Micah was doing opsec for those journalists following the story.

He is the author of Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations: The Art of Analyzing Hacked and Leaked Data, a hands-on book that teaches journalists, researchers, and activists how download, research, analyze, and report on datasets.

Tickets
£20 standard ticket
£5 Concessions

Concession tickets are for students, academics, NGOs, the unwaged and public sector workers.

Schedule:
17:30 Registration opens
18:00 Event begins
19:15 Q&A
19:30 Reception
20:15 Event ends

Check out our related two-day course in this series on 16 & 17 February 2026:
Privacy, Data and Surveillance: Law and Practice (2026)
A two-day course with a cross-disciplinary approach to privacy, data protection and surveillance.