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.
In a press briefing on the situation in Egypt (and probably his last briefing ever), Robert Gibbs made a stunning, but important statement. We believe in the basket of individual freedoms includes the freedom to access the Internet and the freedom to use social networking sites. Gibbs did not say (and none of the reporters […]
As Siun noted yesterday, Mohamed el Baradei issued a statement critical of US support for Hosni Mubarak in advance of returning to Egypt (and, as of now, being put under house arrest). Of course, you in the West have been sold the idea that the only options in the Arab world are between authoritarian regimes […]
Since Ron Bloom–IMO, the most effective member of the Auto bailout team–got named the special advisor for manufacturing in September 2009, those of us insisting the country has to reinvest in manufacturing have argued Bloom should get more power to make that happen. At least in theory, his imminent promotion to Assistant to the President […]
I keep trying to immerse myself in the FCIC Report, but keep getting distracted–I guess I’ll have to read it this weekend. But it’s high time I put up a working thread for the rest of you. The report itself is here. Lambert Strether has made 1147 of the backup documents released by the FCIC […]
The NYT has a sanitized version of the story of a “US Consular employee” who has been charged with shooting two Pakistanis. An American official, Raymond A. Davis, 36, appeared in court here on Friday on charges of murdering two Pakistanis after police officials alleged Mr. Davis shot the men during a possible roadside robbery […]
Something is badly amiss in DOD’s efforts to tell its side of how it is treating Bradley Manning. It started on Monday when NBC’s Chief Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski (that is, not a hippie) published an article with two big scoops. First, that investigators have been unable to tie Manning directly to Julian Assange. U.S. […]
As more and more people talk about how inequality threatens our economic system and just in time for Davos, the January 22-28 edition of the the Economist had a special report on “The Global Elite.” While the edition has been out there for a while, I was struck by the degree to which it seems […]
I laughed yesterday when I first saw the SOTU excerpts with Obama’s description of a Sputnik moment. Mind you, he had already used–or rather, cribbed–the language before. So the language itself wasn’t funny. Rather, it was that he planned to use it as an urgent call to action on the day that Carol Browner announced […]
The NYT has a very long profile on their interactions with Wikileaks, about which I will have more to say. But I wanted to point to this meeting, which Bill Keller describes as the NYT’s effort to give the government a “heads up” on the diplomatic cables. Because of the range of the material and […]
The AP reports that a Swedish company Visa Europe hired to study whether WikiLeaks was breaking the law or Visa’s own rules has “found no proof the group’s fundraising arm is breaking the law in its home base of Iceland.” But, the AP goes on, Visa will not accept WikiLeaks donations until it completes its […]