Charles Berret
console 

Portfolio / overview

Researcher, Data Journalist & Content Engineer.

A writer who understands computers.

Currently

Senior Content Manager
Enigma · NYC

Working on data journalism, agentic automation, and content strategy for a business-identity (KYB) data company.

Selected work

[ all work → ]
01
Original investigations built directly on the data warehouse — shell-company networks, mass-litigation, and the businesses most exposed to a downturn.
Practice
02
An internal platform the engineering org runs on: Claude Skills for the entity graph, a GraphQL identity client, an LLM-evaluation MCP server, and an autonomous agent fleet.
Platform
03
Multi-session AI agent loops on systemd and cloud scheduling, running competitive scans, market briefs, and editorial cycles on a cadence.
Platform
04
Owned the content stack for major launches and partnership announcements — plus the brand-voice system and SEO knowledge base behind them.
Practice
05
A cultural history of how a set of mathematical techniques became an instrument of war, a civil-liberties cause, and a piece of everyone's infrastructure.
Book
06
Peer-reviewed work on data sensemaking and dirty data; the first study of SecureDrop; the Knight report that shaped curricula at 116 programs.
Research

Book

Cryptographic Amnesia Code, Power, and the Algorithmic Mediation of Everyday Life Cryptographic Amnesia (forthcoming from MIT Press) offers a series of historical and philosophical essays that examine the evolving cultural and political significance of cryptography in everyday life over the course of the twentieth century. MIT Press · Forthcoming

Recent writing

[ all writing → ]
forthcoming Cryptographic Amnesia MIT Press A cultural history of cryptography, from wartime instrument to civil-liberties cause to the ambient infrastructure of digital life. read → 2026 How Much Is a Verification Worth? Enigma What a single identity verification is actually worth, costed from the data. read → 2026 America's Most-Sued Companies Don't Exist Enigma Surfaced 8,747 federal mass-defendant cases from the RECAP archive to show how mass-litigation targets businesses that don't really exist. read → 2024 Iceberg Sensemaking: A Process Model for Critical Data Analysis and Visualization IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (IEEE VIS) A process model for the hidden, below-the-waterline work of critical data analysis, reframed through an interpretivist lens. read → 2023 Dirty Data in the Newsroom: Comparing Data Preparation in Journalism and Data Science ACM CHI An ethnography of how journalists and data scientists actually clean data. read →
cb@charlesberret.net