Silkie is the Director of Big Brother Watch, a non-profit, non-partisan UK privacy and civil liberties campaign group. She is an expert campaigner on the protection of human rights, particularly in the context of new and emerging technologies. She works to uphold rights in the fields of state surveillance, policing technologies, big data, artificial intelligence, and free expression using parliamentary lobbying, strategic litigation, investigations and public campaigns to successfully change policies and laws.

She has spearheaded several national campaigns including against live facial recognition surveillance, on which her work was featured in the Sundance-nominated documentary Coded Bias (streaming on Netflix). She is regularly invited to give expert evidence on civil liberties matters to UK Parliament and has also given oral evidence on technology and human rights issues to European Parliament and the Bundestag.

Silkie is a recognised media spokesperson on human rights issues, including on flagship political programmes such as BBC Any Questions and Politics Live, and regularly writes opinion pieces in the Telegraph, with bylines also in the Guardian and Mail among other papers.

Before joining Big Brother Watch, she was the Senior Advocacy Officer at the UK’s oldest human rights organisation Liberty where she led a programme on Technology and Human Rights and launched a legal challenge against mass surveillance powers. She previously worked for Edward Snowden’s official legal defence fund.

Silkie is the co-author of Information Security for Journalists (2014), which was downloaded over 300,000 times and translated into four languages.