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.
We’re on our second near-record tornado this year and summer hasn’t even started. Joplin, MO and Birmingham, AL have been especially hard hit, but much of flyover country is set to spend the summer hunkering down to hide from truly horrifying weather. Yet Eric Cantor wants to hold disaster relief hostage to debt hysteria. (h/t […]
The DNC and Midwestern state Democratic Parties are rolling out an extravaganza today, using the occasion of Chrysler paying back some of its federal loans to mock GOP presidential candidates for opposing the auto bailout. The DNC had a press conference with Jennifer Granholm, Ted Strickland, and Bob King to mock people like Mitt, T-Paw, […]
The government appears to hope three time’s a charm. The last two times they subpoenaed James Risen in the case of Jeffrey Sterling, Judge Leonie Brinkema quashed the subpoena. But they’re trying again, this time to get him to testify at Sterling’s trial. It appears likely they planned to do this all along and crafted […]
I’ve been reading the National Academy of Sciences Anthrax Report and noted something odd in follow-up to the McClatchy report of the other day describing unexplained tin and silicon in one of the anthrax samples. (Here’s Jim White’s post on the report.) As McClatchy reported, there’s some weird data about silicon and tin in some […]
I’ve been reviewing the docket on Thomas Drake’s case to see whether it touches on the privacy concerns Drake had about NSA’s post-9/11 activities. It appears it doesn’t, even while there was an ongoing dispute about whether or not Drake will have access to the materials he submitted to the DOD Inspector General in support […]
Thomas Drake, the NSA whistleblower, was on 60 Minutes this evening. I’ll have more to say about his appearance and case going forward, but I just wanted to highlight a critical detail revealed by 60 Minutes: the relative cost of Trailblazer–the SAIC implemented program Michael Hayden championed–and ThinThread–the program Drake and others claim was more […]
I’ll admit, I was merely disgusted when Mickey Mouse tried to trademark Seal Team 6. But Mickey’s seeming embrace of GateGrope is far more disturbing. (h/t Bruce Schneier) In a press release boasting about changes to Walt Disney World’s Star Tour ride, Disney boasts of their imitation TSA checkpoints! The second room of the queue […]
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 […]