Speaker Profile: Declan McCullagh

Declan McCullagh
(self portrait)
Declan McCullagh is the chief political correspondent for CNET, which is part of CBS Corporation. Previously he was a senior correspondent for CBS News' Web site. He became the chief political correspondent for CNET News in 2002 and lives in the San Francisco area after spending over a decade in Washington, DC.

An award-winning journalist, McCullagh writes and speaks frequently about technology, law, and politics. From 1998 to 2002, he was Wired's Washington bureau chief. Previously he was a reporter for Time Magazine, Time Digital Daily, and The Netly News, as well as a correspondent for HotWired. McCullagh previously wrote for the Taking Liberties section of CBS News' Web site, the successor to a weekly column he started in October 2008 titled Other People's Money.

McCullagh's articles have appeared in scores of publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, Playboy magazine, George magazine, The New Republic, Communications of the ACM, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. He has appeared on NPR's All Things Considered, ABC News' Good Morning America, NBC Evening News, Court TV, and CNN. He has taught as an Adjunct Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He also has been a lecturer at American University in Washington, DC where he has taught a graduate journalism class (COMM-710).

McCullagh moderates Politech, a well-known mailing list looking broadly at politics and technology that he founded in 1994, and has been online since 1988. He was the first online reporter to join the National Press Club; he participated in the first White House dot com press pool; and was one of the first online journalists to receive credentials from the press gallery of the U.S. Congress. McCullagh has spoken at schools including Stanford University, MIT, Harvard University, Georgetown University, the University of Chicago, and Duke University, and has testified twice before the Federal Trade Commission.

In addition to tinkering with his classic NeXT cube, McCullagh programs in C and Perl, and maintains a Linux server that supports about seven web sites, some with a MySQL backend. He rides a Honda 919 motorcycle, is a licensed private pilot who flies a Diamond Katana and Cessna 172s, and lives with his wife and family in the San Francisco area. The mccullagh.org photo database is his own design.