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.
Back when Tony Fratto was arguing that we should shut down post offices because he uses the InterToobz and therefore only ventures into an actual post office once a year, I noted that we would effectively be kicking huge portions of our rural areas out of our country if we presumed everyone could replace the […]
The environmental community is beginning to worry that the Obama Administration is preparing to cave on greenhouse gas emissions, just like it did on ozone emissions. Hard on the heels of the Obama administration’s decision earlier this month to scrap a new rule for ozone emissions, U.S. EPA appears poised to miss another major regulatory […]
Spencer has a must read story on the FBI’s recent training program for counter-terrorism agents on Islam. I’m going to have a few points to make about it. But for the moment I wanted to (in addition to recommending you go read the whole thing) draw attention to this slide on Islamic law, explaining some […]
Amanda Terkel has most of the story of Dick Cheney’s flip flop on the deficit: speaking to Rush Limbaugh today, Cheney expressed “embarrassment” about the debt limit fight. “Now, these last few months have been pretty messy,” said Cheney. “I think like a lot of people I was embarrassed when they lowered our credit rating […]
Al-Haramain has submitted its brief for the appellate review on a number of issues related to the government’s illegal wiretapping of the charity. The questions at issue are: 1. Does FISA waive federal sovereign immunity? 2. Does FISA preempt the state secrets privilege? 3. Was plaintiffs’ non-classified evidence sufficient to prove their warrantless electronic surveillance? […]
POGO has a must-read report showing what actually happens when the Federal government outsources jobs: while the actual workers doing the jobs may make less than government (unionized) workers, the work costs more overall. POGO’s study analyzed the total compensation paid to federal and private sector employees, and annual billing rates for contractor employees across […]
At a hearing on the 9/11 anniversary yesterday, David Petraeus revealed that the CIA’s Inspector General had launched an investigation into its role in the NYPD’s spy program. During his first Congressional testimony as the C.I.A. director, David H. Petraeus said Tuesday that the agency’s inspector general had begun to investigate its work with the […]
Let me just say I do not relish seeing William Welch making precisely the point I have made in one of his filings. When you read this, That Mr. Feldstein’s opinions are unreliable and based on no method at all is underscored by their internal inconsistency. He opines that “all statements in Chapter Nine that […]
The headline news from the Census bureau’s poverty numbers today is that median income continues to fall, a pretty significant 2.3% last year. Real median household income in the United States in 2010 was $49,445, a 2.3 percent decline from the 2009 median. So in addition to the rising commodity prices not counted in inflation, […]
You may have seen discussions about this project around the Toobz. In it, scholars use supercomputers to analyze the tone of news coverage. Their results from Egypt and Tunisia–showing low sentiment right before this year’s revolutions–suggest you can predict volatile events with such analysis. I decided to look further at the study, not least, because […]