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.
Sheldon Whitehouse had a hearing on terrorist finance the other day. There was an interesting exchange that I think bears notice. The hearing focused, in part, on hawalas, not least because DOJ recently prosecuted Mohammad Younis, the guy whose hawala Faisal Shahzad used to fund his terrorist attempt. Richard Blumenthal suggested (around 75:50 and following) […]
The AP has another installment of their series on the NYPD intelligence department’s mapping of ethnic neighborhoods in New York. As always, you should read the whole thing, as well as the documents showing the spooks’ data collection on innocent Moroccans and Moroccan-Americans. One question I came away with, though, was how this program interacted […]
As Charlie Savage reports, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have written Eric Holder scolding him for mischaracterizations DOJ has made about how the government is using the Patriot Act, in part to collect information on people’s location. They cite two examples of such mischaracterizations: First, when a number of Justice Department officials claimed, that the […]
Between 2002 and 2008, USAID spent $408 million on schools in Afghanistan. A significant chunk of $857 went to Iraqi education in the first several years after invasion. Yet as American service men and women have been overseas protecting these school building projects, their own children’s schools have been neglected. The Pentagon has placed 39 […]
The claim that the Federal Reserve is insulated from politics has always been a farce. Greenspan did a number of ideologically inconsistent things that just happened to help Republicans. And given that the banks run the Fed, it would be impossible to say it is isolated from the politics of the MOTUs (which is increasingly […]
Some of the more amazing stories about China’s domination of manufacturing these days pertain to the cities in China that make most of just one of the world’s consumer goods, like socks. But a new study from the Economic Policy Institute makes it clear we haven’t just lost textile jobs to China, we’ve lost high […]
Here’s how an 11th Circuit panel of Judges Joel Dubina, William Pryor, and Rosemary Barkett dismissed Jose Padilla’s objection to his conviction because of the abuse he suffered while in government custody in the South Carolina brig in the years leading up to his indictment. Although we have never acknowledged the existence of the outrageous […]
In addition to green-lighting debt collection calls to cell phones, another of the deficit plans Obama rolled out today is basically claiming credit for military withdrawals. The plan also realizes more than $1 trillion in savings over the next 10 years from our drawdowns in Afghanistan and Iraq. As DDay notes, these “cuts” are scheduled […]
A number of people are talking about the spectacle of Representative John Fleming complaining about tax cuts on the wealthy him, suggesting that it will lead him to cut jobs. [my transcription] Chris Jansing: With all due respect, Congressman, the WSJ estimated that your businesses, which I believe are a [sic] Subway sandwich shops and […]
As part of the President’s deficit reduction plan, he proposes changing the rules to allow debt collectors to call people on their cell phones. Allow agencies to contact delinquent debtors via their cellular phones. The Administration also proposes to amend the Communications Act of 1934 to facilitate collection of debts owed to or guaranteed by […]