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.
When I posted on the new guidelines the government has given Gitmo lawyers on how they can use the Gitmo Detainee Assessment Briefs released by WikiLeaks, I had not yet seen the guidelines. Here they are. What’s most interesting to me about the guidelines is the way the government appears to be trying to undercut […]
Time reports that John Durham has sent out recent subpoenas for grand jury testimony pertaining to torture and war crimes, specifically as it relates to Manadel al-Jamadi, the dead Iraqi depicted in one of the most graphic Abu Ghraib photo. It has been nearly a decade since an Iraqi prisoner known as “the Iceman” — […]
Charlie Savage describes changes the FBI is making to its Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide. On its face, the changes he describes are downright bad. The changes allow FBI agents to: Make a database “assessment” search of a group or person “proactively” without making a record of that search Tail people during a “proactive” assessment […]
Usually, the apparent purpose of hacks is fairly banal. To steal defense secrets. To profit organized crime. To embarrass a political opponent. But a reported sophisticated hack on the IMF is far more intriguing. Because the fund has been at the center of economic bailout programs for Portugal, Greece and Ireland — and possesses sensitive […]
I’ve been meaning to return to this Ellen Nakashima story on our cyberwar efforts. As you recall, it lays out the turf war between the CIA and DOD over clandestine cyberops, partly by telling the story a fight over whether or not to disrupt the jihadist online magazine “Inspire.” Last year, for instance, U.S. intelligence […]
Charlie Savage reports on the new “relaxed” standards that will allow Gitmo defense lawyers to glance at the Gitmo Detainee Assessment Briefs released by WikiLeaks. (h/t fatster) In guidance to the lawyers — who have security clearances, and so are required to follow government rules for the handling of classified information — the department’s court […]
There’s an interesting discussion at the end of Josh Gerstein’s article on the Drake plea agreement. He points out that after Judge Bennett ruled that the government needed more descriptive substitutions for some of its exhibits, DOJ did not appeal the decision. Experts said it was unlikely that Bennett’s rulings accounted entirely for the government’s […]
There’s something that’s missing from the coverage of the Thomas Drake plea bargain. Yes, this is a huge victory for Drake. A huge victory for whistleblowers. Yes, it proves that William Welch is an even bigger hack than the failed Ted Stevens case showed him to be. But what about the two other charged documents? […]
National Counterterrorism Center head Michael Leiter resigned yesterday. I’m agnostic about whether that’s a good thing or not. NCTC got most of the blame for missing the UndieBomber, which Leiter exacerbated by going off on a ski vacation just after the attempted attack. But Leiter supposedly made some improvements at NCTC. But I am rather […]
Thomas Drake just signed a plea agreement, admitting to Exceeding Authorized Use of a Computer. (h/t Steven Aftergood) The plea says: The defendant intentionally accessed a computer and exceeded his authorized access; by doing so, the defendant obtained information from any department of agency of the United States. [snip] From in or about February 2006 […]