James Ball is the special projects editor of The Guardian, and the organization's former data editor. Ball was one of the reporters on the paper's groundbreaking reporting of the NSA Files, based on top-secret documents disclosed by the former contractor Edward Snowden. He was a core journalist on several of the newspaper's data-driven investigations, including the Reading the Riots project, its reporting on the WikiLeaks' Guantanamo Bay files, and the Offshore Secrets series.

Ball joined the Bureau of Investigative Journalism where he worked on Panorama, Al Jazeera and Dispatches, and was on the key team behind iraqwarlogs.com, which won the 2011 Amnesty International digital journalism award.

Ball joined The Guardian in February 2011 following a brief spell at WikiLeaks, where he aided in the publishing of the US embassy cables, worked with UK media outlets and made the cables accessible to journalists. He was awarded the Laurence Stern fellowship at the Washington Post in 2012.