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.
SCOTUS has just ruled unanimously that John Ashcroft can’t be sued by Abdullah al-Kidd for using a material witness warrant to incarcerate him. The 8 justices (Elena Kagan recused herself) all agree there was no law explicitly prohibiting this kind of abuse of material witness warrants, so Ashcroft has immunity from suit. Where the decision […]
On the first news day after the holiday weekend reporting on Lockheed Martin, WSJ reports that the US is moving towards making cyberattacks an act of war. The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for […]
As first started leaking last week, Lockheed Martin seems to have been hacked. Last weekend was bad for a very large U. S. defense contractor that uses SecureID tokens from RSA to provide two-factor authentication for remote VPN access to their corporate networks. Late on Sunday all remote access to the internal corporate network was […]
Slightly over a week after McClatchy focused new attention on evidence that Bruce Ivins may not have been able to produce the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks, and just days after Jerrold Nadler called attention to the FBI’s obfuscations about the technical data McClatchy used, the LAT has decided to ignore such technical problems […]
I actually wasn’t going to post this video. I haven’t lived in Grand Rapids all that long (so it’s really not my place to criticize this video), but the video misses some of the real funkiness of the art and buildings even in the streets that were filmed. But it’s getting some play on other […]
Steven Aftergood linked to this colloquy on the PATRIOT Act which reveals a lot about Ron Wyden and Mark Udall’s efforts to force the government to admit how it’s suveilling Americans. The colloquy basically puts not just the agreement, but the circumstances that went into the agreement, into the Congressional record. After some Senatorial blathering […]
No wonder the US Army was allegedly bested in the WikiLeaks leak by a Lady Gaga CD. In addition to all the other gaping security problems with the classified network, there were apparently widely accessible SIPRNet computers with passwords written out on sticky notes on the computers. A Guardian investigation focusing on soldiers who worked […]
As I’ve said repeatedly in discussions of the secret interpretations of the PATRIOT Act provisions that Ron Wyden and Mark Udall complained about, those interpretations probably claim the government can collect mass information on geolocation. Julian Sanchez lays out why that is almost certainly the case in this worthwhile post. The three main points (there […]
Chuck Todd tweeted last night: WH announced that POTUS ordered the Patriot Act renewal to be signed by the “autopen”; so, yes, it was robosigned Reason given for robosigning via autopen: Patriot Act expires midnight tonight, so as to not have gap, either robosigned or flown to him Now, Todd was writing in the early […]
The final vote in the Senate opposing yet another sunset of the PATRIOT act was 72-23-5, meaning we’re almost a quarter of the way to regaining some semblance of a Fourth Amendment. Heh. Those voting against the forever PATRIOT? Akaka (D-HI) Baucus (D-MT) Begich (D-AK) Bingaman (D-NM) Brown (D-OH) Cantwell (D-WA) Coons (D-DE) Durbin (D-IL) […]