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.
I’ll probably have several things to say about the James Risen filings of the past week. But for the moment, I wanted to focus on his assertions about the government’s access of his phone records. Remember, these assertions are not new: Josh Gerstein reported them in February. Risen said the government never notified him that […]
Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself. The central thesis of this Boston Globe article is not, in fact, that RomneyCare effected a wealth transfer from consumers to big health care. Rather, the article proclaims that RomneyCare “achieved its main goals.” But nowhere in the 4,600+ word article does it treat “ensuring MA residents get access […]
Remember the Polish prosecutor who got fired as he was preparing to charge top members of the Democratic Left Alliance party for their complicity in America’s torture site? The same newspaper that broke that story–Gazeta Wyborcza–just reported former President Aleksander Kwasniewski’s purported explanation of his role in the torture site: complete ignorance. “Aleksander Kwasniewski did […]
If you haven’t already figured this out, after Netroots Nation I dragged bmaz up to northern Minnesota to count lakes, counting backwards from 10,000. We only got down to 9,976, but I understand there are actually far more than 10,000 lakes in MN. The picture–photo credit: the NSA–is me and McCaffrey walking across the headwaters […]
Sorry to be AWOL for most of Netroots Nation. bmaz says I’ve been offline for the last few days because we’ve been drunk and busy, but it seems to me I’ve just been incredibly busy for five days straight. There were a lot of conversations, but the overall theme seemed like a desperate conversation on […]
Ellen Nakashima reports on a partnership between the NSA, defense contractors, and their Internet service providers to find hackers before they hack. The National Security Agency is working with Internet service providers to deploy a new generation of tools to scan e-mail and other digital traffic with the goal of thwarting cyberattacks against defense firms […]
No matter how you look at this attempt to suppress and ignore the WikiLeaks material, it is bizarre and somewhat comical. The WikiLeaks Gitmo Detainee files genie is out of the bottle; it would behoove the US government to join the battle and arguments on the merits and facts instead of trying to cram the genie back in and play hide the bottle.
James Risen reports that Glen Carle, a former CIA officer, says the Bush Administration was looking for dirt on Juan Cole in 2005. In one incident, Carle’s supervisor asked whether the CIA had anything on Cole. Mr. Carle said that sometime that year, he was approached by his supervisor, David Low, about Professor Cole. Mr. […]
Adam Goldman significantly fleshes out the story of what happened to Hassan Ghul after he was picked up in Iraq in 2004. It appears that Ghul may have been freed by the Pakistanis sometime after January 2007 because of his ties to Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has close ties to the ISI. The whole article is worthwhile […]