Snapshot

Now

A short page in the /now-page tradition. What I'm focused on right now, rather than what I do in general.

Last updated: 10 May 2026. Rewritten roughly every four to six weeks.

Working on

  • Active vCISO and Non-Executive Director engagements across regulated industries — financial services, professional services, and a couple of mid-size technology firms.
  • Detection-engineering work in the Wazuh + EmilyAI stack: extending the open ruleset and improving the signal-to-noise on cloud audit logs.
  • The Covert Cyber Deck hardware project — slowly, carefully, in evenings.
  • The Windows Workstation Audit tool — adding more compliance-framework mappings and improving the fleet-audit dashboards.
  • This site itself — backfilling the blog archive (1998 onwards), publishing the privacy resources you can see linked from the privacy hub, and starting the Privacy on a Tuesday series.

Reading

  • Dark Wire — Joseph Cox's account of the Anom operation. A masterclass in covert telemetry and the ethics of "lawful" mass interception.
  • The latest UK government consultations on the Investigatory Powers Act amendments — required reading for anyone who still thinks "the snooper's charter" is a finished story.
  • The CCC and DEF CON conference back-catalogues — picking off talks I missed during the year.

Thinking about

  • How to make personal threat-modelling actually accessible to non-technical people without dumbing it down to the point of uselessness.
  • The collision course between mandatory client-side scanning ("chat control" in EU language, the Online Safety Act's spirit in UK language) and end-to-end encryption.
  • What a UK-specific equivalent of the EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense looks like, and whether the privacy hub on this site is the start of one.

Available for

  • vCISO engagements — typically 1-3 days a month, 6-12 month minimum term.
  • Non-Executive Director appointments where the board needs a named cyber voice.
  • Speaking — keynotes, panels, podcasts. Yes to anything where I'd learn something I didn't know going in.
  • Briefings for journalists and editors covering UK-specific cyber, privacy, or surveillance stories.

If something there matches what you need, the contact form is the right place to start. For sensitive topics, encrypted contact options are listed separately.

Inspired by Derek Sivers' /now. Want one of your own? nownownow.com has the manifesto.