He is a reporter on the Bloomberg News cybersecurity team, producing stories at the intersection between technology, crime, security, and human rights. Ryan was previously an investigative reporter and editor for The Intercept and before that he was a contributing writer for Slate. His work has appeared in The Guardian, the Financial Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Independent, Ars Technica, the Huffington Post, and New Statesman, among others. He was formerly a Future Tense fellow at the New America Foundation and an associate editor of openDemocracy.net's UK section, OurKingdom.
Much of Ryan's work in recent years has focused on bringing controversial government surveillance programs to public attention. His stories have exposed a top-secret UK initiative to monitor "every visible user on the internet," revealed the existence of a vast US database containing billions of records about people's private communications, and disclosed British and American spies' covert efforts to hack into people's phones and computers. He is one of a handful of reporters to have had access to the largest leak of classified information in history — the trove of documents from the American whistleblower Edward Snowden. And he was part of The Intercept's award-winning Drone Papers team, which published a series of investigative reports about US government assassinations in countries such as Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan.
In 2018, Ryan was selected as a Livingston Award finalist for excellence in international reporting after he published several stories revealing Google's secret plan to launch a censored search engine in China, blacklisting information about human rights, peaceful protest, and democracy at the behest of the country's authoritarian government. The stories triggered worldwide protests, Congressional inquiries in the United States, and led to Google scrapping the multi-billion dollar plan.
Ryan's other projects have included uncovering police mobile phone monitoring systems in London, disclosing the extent of a huge UK law enforcement database storing information about unconvicted citizens, identifying links between Western companies and computer snooping attacks on activists in North Africa, and shining light on legally dubious satellite tracking tactics used by private investigators across the US. He has been threatened by private security companies, reported from inside the world's largest arms fair, covered historic protests in Madrid, revealed levels of toxic chemicals being pumped into a major UK waterway, prompted Hillary Clinton's US state department to condemn sales of spy equipment to repressive regimes, interviewed some of the world's most notorious and elusive hackers, and much more...
Ryan is an NCTJ accredited reporter, a member of the National Union of Journalists, and an alumnus of the University of Edinburgh (MSc) and the University of Abertay, Dundee (BA Hons).
You can contact him directly with story tips, interview requests, comments, or anything else by emailing ryan [at] rjgallagher [dot] co [dot] uk. If you would prefer to use more secure methods of communication and have sensitive information to share — head over to this page.
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