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.
Jon Tester is, to the best of my knowledge, the first member of Congress to complain about FBI’s new investigative guidelines allowing agents to–among other thing–search potential informants’ trash. As a strong believer in government accountability and person privacy rights, I find it unacceptable that you would lower the threshold further for engaging in surveillance […]
This exchange last Thursday between Senator Al Franken and FBI Director Robert Mueller was frustrating enough–Senator Franken’s questions were the only ones on civil liberties Mueller faced, and the Director seemed pretty miffed to be questioned on the subject in the first place. But I’m even more troubled by the exchange now that we’ve learned […]
The Senate Armed Services Committee is trying to investigate how allegedly counterfeit parts get into the military supply chain. But China won’t give visas–or promise freedom of movement without minders–to its investigators. Two key US senators on Tuesday accused China of hampering a congressional probe into how counterfeit electronics end up in the US military […]
The AP reports that, in addition to the grand jury investigation of Manadel al-Janabi’s death, the CIA Inspector General has reopened its investigation of Khalid el-Masri’s abduction. Forgive me for my cynicism, but this investigation–and its public announcement–seems like yet another attempt to stave off European pressure on this front. The EU Parliament just called […]
Some weeks back, I posted on a Disney ride that offers riders the opportunity to be “verbally accosted by a security droid.” Now, kids can play at being a TSA-worker themselves with a security wand: There’s nothing cooler than being a TSA agent for Homeland Security and now the Spy Gear Security Scanner lets kids […]
Over the weekend, I expressed some curiosity over who hacked the IMF. They at least say it was a state actor. Security experts said the source seemed to be a “nation state” aiming to gain a “digital insider presence” on the network of the IMF, the inter-governmental group that oversees the global financial system and […]
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 […]