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.
Canada has just discovered how much corporations own our legal system, how our legal system criminalizes whistleblowers, and our utter and total disdain for the rule of law. At issue is the apparent conspiracy between Cisco and the US government to respond to an anti-trust lawsuit launched by Peter Alfred Adekeye, a former Cisco employee. […]
The Guardian uses an eye-popping stat from a hacker journalist–that a quarter of all hackers are FBI moles–to cement a a story about the FBI infiltrating hacker groups. The underground world of computer hackers has been so thoroughly infiltrated in the US by the FBI and secret service that it is now riddled with paranoia […]
As Josh Gerstein just reported, the government has decided to withdraw some evidence against Thomas Drake rather than come up with CIPA substitutions that would give Drake the ability to defend himself. At issue is “NSA’s targeting of a particular telecommunications technology,” which the government wants to hide. To avoid mentioning it, they are now […]
Only in America could the head of the public prison system who retired in shame for breaking the law himself move onto a sinecure in the private prison industry. But that appears to be what Harley Lappin has done. Mind you, both Lappin and the Bureau of Prisons claim that Lappin’s arrest for DUI had […]
DDay already noted Peter Diamond’s op-ed withdrawing his nomination as a Fed Governor. But I wanted to emphasize one thing: It is time for me to withdraw, as I plan to inform the White House. It appears that this very public complaint was how Diamond informed the White House he was withdrawing–not a discrete phone […]
As fatster noted, Judge Kenneth Marra has allowed the suit against Chiquita for its support of Colombian terrorists to go forward. But the ruling is fascinating, because it holds that the plaintiffs can sue for Chiquita’s involvement in torture, but not for its involvement in terrorism. Relying in part on a 1984 Robert Bork opinion […]
WSJ reveals that some folks within the Obama Administration have finally started to weigh the possibility that our drone strikes in Pakistan do more harm than good. Unfortunately, in the fight over whether the US should rein drone strikes in, those folks appear to have lost the debate … for now. The White House National […]
I had been predicting for weeks before Obama went to Poland that the Poles would move to quash their investigation into the black site at which KSM and others were tortured. And sure enough, that appears to be what happened. The first move actually happened before Obama arrived in Poland: three days before Obama got […]
Former Gitmo prosecutor Morris Davis makes, in really powerful fashion, a point I’ve been contemplating: how does Hillary Clinton get off criticizing the torture of Syrian teenager Hamza Ali al-Khateeb or Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad when we have done nothing to hold those who tortured Mohammed al-Qahtani accountable? (h/t Michelle Shephard) In the fall […]
A number of people have commented on the Obama Administration’s statement of opposition to a ban on Department of Homeland Security funding for Gitmo detainee transfers. Here’s Benjamin Wittes: The administration just issued a Statement of Administration Policy on a DHS appropriations bill (H.R. 2017), which contains a spending restriction similar to one of the […]