Heather Brooke is an award-winning journalist, professor, author, and freedom of information advocate based in England. Her dogged investigative work uncovered one of the biggest British Parliament scandals of the last decade. Brooke’s journalism career began in Seattle, long before she moved to the United Kingdom. Her first journalism job was at UW’s The Daily, where she acted as the student paper’s sex columnist with a feminist slant. After graduation, Brooke worked at The Spokesman-Review in Olympia and the Spartanburg Herald-Journal in South Carolina, which gave her a taste of political and crime reporting, respectively. Brooke moved to England and soon began working as a BBC copywriter. In 2004, she began the multi-year legal pursuit to disclose Members’ of Parliament (MPs) expense accounts under the Freedom of Information Act. She would win the battle five years later, exposing political abuses, causing national outrage, and leading to the hasty retirement of multiple MPs. Her unyielding pursuit of the truth was reenacted on a BBC Four TV drama, titled “On Expenses.” A year later, Brooke obtained 251,287 US diplomatic cables from a WikiLeaks insider and published a month-long exposé of global diplomatic relations with The Guardian. Brooke won numerous awards for her investigative work, including the Judges’ Prize at the 2010 British Press Awards, the FOI Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors, a Freedom of Expression Award from Index on Censorship, and a Key Award from the Washington Coalition for Open Government. She’s written three books about her freedom of information passion and journalistic work: “Your Right to Know” (2004, 2006), “The Silent State” (2010) and “The Revolution Will Be Digitised” (2011). Brooke is also a professor of journalism at the City University in London.