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.
While Jane Mayer’s profile on NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake has generated a lot of attention for the way Obama’s DOJ is senselessly prosecuting him, there has been less focus on the key revelation that Drake and others went on the record to reveal in Mayer’s story: that the NSA chose not to integrate the privacy […]
There are a number of oddly coinciding legal issues that I wanted to pull together into one post. The Administration Fudges the War Powers Act First and most obviously, today is the day the 60-day grace period for Libya under the War Powers Act expires. Obama should, by law, have to go to Congress to […]
I’m not surprised that Karl Rove has weighed in on the foreclosure fraud scandal with an erroneous op-ed in the WSJ. I’m just a bit baffled why he did so now. The overall gist of the op-ed is that a $20 billion settlement of the robosigning scandal would represent “a money grab in search of […]
I’m in the process of reading all the Siobhan Gorman stories for which Thomas Drake might have served as an anonymous source. And one of the ten or so articles for which he’s a possible source exposes the NSA’s failure on an issue at the heart of Bradley Manning’s ability to allegedly leak three major […]
This is the disrespect in which our Congress holds our Constitution: they will continue to chip away at the Fourth Amendment, by passing yet another extension of the PATRIOT Act without addressing the clear abuses identified since the last extension. US Congress leaders have agreed to extend for four years an array of counter-terrorism surveillance […]
Obama gave an inspirational speech advocating for change in MENA–“Prosperity also requires tearing down walls that stand in the way of progress – the corruption of elites who steal from their people”–that I wish he’d advocate in the US. And after comparing the uprisings in the Middle East to the Civil Rights movement, I found […]
The AP has a interesting–and interestingly timed–story on the help we’re giving Saudi Arabia to build a “facilities security force” to protect, among other things, its oil fields and planned civilian nuclear sites. The story is based, in part, on this WikiLeaks cable. Note the date of the cable: October 29, 2008, less than a […]
I rarely post solely to recommend you follow a blog or twitter feed. But I am here. You see, Joe Biden’s economic advisor, Jared Bernstein, was recently liberated from the White House. And, as part of that liberation process, it seems, he got himself a blog and twitter feed. His inaugural post explained he could […]
We’ve been writing a bit about Mohamed Osman Mohamud, the young Oregon man charged on WMD charges for allegedly trying to detonate an inert bomb the FBI helped him get. His attorneys are preparing an aggressive entrapment defense (those defenses almost never work, but there are some interesting factors in his case), arguing that Mohamud […]
As Marc Ambinder reports, the top cybersecurity guy at DHS, Phil Reitinger, announced his resignation today. Which is pretty odd, given that Obama just rolled out his cybersecurity strategy a few days ago. Though that’s the excuse that Reitinger offered for the timing of his departure. With significant progress having been made in activities across […]