Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist writing about national security and civil liberties. She writes as emptywheel at her eponymous blog, publishes at outlets including Vice, Motherboard, the Nation, the Atlantic, Al Jazeera, and appears frequently on television and radio. She is the author of Anatomy of Deceit, a primer on the CIA leak investigation, and liveblogged the Scooter Libby trial.
Marcy has a PhD from the University of Michigan, where she researched the “feuilleton,” a short conversational newspaper form that has proven important in times of heightened censorship. Before and after her time in academics, Marcy provided documentation consulting for corporations in the auto, tech, and energy industries. She lives with her spouse in Grand Rapids, MI.
Just three days after NYPD’s cops overreacted to First Amendment protests, and two days after NY’s Muslim community protested NYPD’s heavy handed spying, Mike Bloomberg and Ray Kelly decided to roll out a big press conference to announce … A pipe bomb. The person who intended to use the pipe bomb is a “lone wolf” […]
As I noted yesterday, both Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin understand Section 1031 of the Defense Authorization to authorize the indefinite detention of American citizens. Levin says we don’t have to worry about that, though, because Americans would still have access to habeas corpus review. Section 1031 makes no reference to habeas corpus, and places […]
As I noted yesterday, Obama issued a veto threat for the detainee provisions included in the Defense Authorization. Since then, both Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin have given speeches on the floor, arguing against (DiFi) and for (Levin) the provisions. And while I’d be happy to see the provisions in question fail (because the provisions […]
I’ve got a long post mostly written on the debate between two awful positions on the detainee provisions in the Defense Authorization. But let me make something clear. Both sides have already bought off on one principle: that the Administration can indefinitely detain US citizens. Dianne Feinstein made this clear in her comments yesterday in […]
Danger Room reports that our nation’s spooks have moved beyond their concern about Chinese chips and other “counterfeit” (read, sabotaged) parts in war toys to grow concerned about Chinese parts in our telecom system. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), and the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Dutch […]
Robert Mueller addressed the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco today. He repeated a familiar theme: the biggest threats to the United States are terrorists (even aspirational ones), spies, and cyber attacks. Terrorism, espionage, and cyber attacks are the FBI’s top priorities. Terrorists, spies, and hackers are always thinking of new ways to harm us. As […]
The Administration just released its position on the Defense Authorization, including a long passage on the new detainee language SASC devised the other day. That section reads: Detainee Matters: The Administration objects to and has serious legal and policy concerns about many of the detainee provisions in the bill. In their current form, some of […]
The Center for Constitutional Rights is helping former Black Panther, community activist, and Common Ground founder Malik Rahim sue to get the FBI’s records on FBI informant Brandon Darby’s infiltration of Common Ground. Today, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), in collaboration with the Loyola Law School’s Clinic in New Orleans, filed a federal lawsuit […]
This report–or rather the HuffPo piece on it–has gotten a lot of attention. It shows the government as a whole has prosecuted 57.7% fewer financial fraud crimes than they did 10 years ago, when 9/11 changed everything. The report on our government’s growing disinterest in prosecuting banksters should be paired with this FBI report which […]
As Josh Gerstein and Adam Serwer lay out, the Senate Armed Services Committee just passed a new version of the Defense Authorization mandating military detention for terrorists. The language on detention includes the following two paragraphs: Except as provided in paragraph (4) [which is a national security exception], the Armed Forces of the United States […]