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.
As part of what they bill as a “military training program,” the Air Force National Guard will deploy a bunch of MQ-9 Reaper drones over the Adirondacks park in Northern NY. (h/t Tim Shorrock) The Air Force Air National Guard will fly remotely piloted planes over the Adirondacks starting next June. Crews at ground control […]
Update: BBC and al-Jazeera report that Ben Ali has left the country and security forces have arrested family members at the airport. The simultaneous (and related) unfolding of the uprising in Tunisia and the latest Wikileaks events reveals a great deal about our own country’s support for democracy. If you aren’t already, I recommend you […]
The AP noticed something troubling in Michael Vickers’ response to the Senate Armed Services Committee questions on his nomination to be Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence: the government did not include descriptions of its cyberwar activities in the quarterly report on clandestine activities. The Senate Armed Services Committee voiced concerns that cyber activities were not […]
As a number of people are reporting, Julian Assange told John Pilger Wednesday that WikiLeaks has files on some media companies. Thanks to a PDF link made available by The Nation (see 12:05 update), here’s the exact quote from the New Statesman article in question. If something happens to me or to WikiLeaks, ‘insurance’ files […]
The U.S. Department of Justice just announced that Assistant Attorney General David Kris just resigned, effective March 4. “David Kris led the National Security Division (NSD) with great distinction through a period when the department confronted a number of threats to the nation’s security, and there is no doubt that his tireless work helped keep […]
Given the past history of how newspapers have redacted (or not) Wikileaks dumps, I was very interested in an article that reveals what the Guardian (or one of its media partners) redacted in a cable on Kazakh corruption. The Guardian summarizes the cable this way: Top Kazakh energy official reveals the four principal gate-keepers around […]
The Third Way has just released a response to the US Bank v. Ibanez decision that purports to offer a solution to the foreclosure problem. I’m sure others will point out other problems with this document: its embrace of the “strategic default” myth, its focus on the Uniform Commercial Code rather than the Pooling and […]
In Colombia, apparently, you get arrested when you oversee illegal domestic wiretapping. Colombia’s Prosecutor General ordered the arrest of Jorge Noguera, a former director of Colombia’s state intelligence agency DAS, for the his alleged involvement in the illegal spying on government opponents. Noguera, who was director of the DAS between 2002 and 2006, is suspected […]
Joe Biden finally endorsed yesterday what the imperialists in DC have long been backing: an open-ended presence in Afghanistan. “It is not our intention to govern or to nation-build,” Mr Biden said. “As President Karzai often points out, this is the responsibility of the Afghan people, and they are fully capable of it.” But he […]
There are two new minor details in the UndieBomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s, case. He was scheduled for a pre-trial hearing tomorrow, but his lawyer, Anthony Chambers, just submitted a waiver of Abdulmutallab’s presence at the hearing, and the judge rescheduled the hearing for two weeks later. This is significant only insofar as it’ll prevent him […]