Popehat twitter legal11/4/2023 ![]() ![]() Like, even in the coverage in the last couple of weeks people are still, Are you a blogger? Are you a journalist? A lot of people call me an “analyst.” I think there is still a real difficulty-people still don’t know what to call me. Had The Intercept been what it maybe could have been, it would have been the ideal place for me. Well, I’ve written publicly about why I left The Intercept. Why don’t you work for an organization like The Washington Post now? I mean, my work covering the Russia thing is something people are a lot more willing to support than the kind of weedy surveillance analysis that I otherwise do, but yes. I could not do what I do in New York or DC. I like living in a place where expenses are low, and I’m married and have no children. Well, I live in Grand Rapids, Michigan and my mortgage payment is less than I’ll pay for my hotel bill this week. I joke that I am not a coder, but my brothers are, because I didn’t go to the IBM nursery school and they did. That sounds like working the system a little bit. One of the ways they convinced John Akers that any child could use a computer was to show my brother actually coding on an Apple II. We’d set it up in the dining room, and we’d tell dad what we thought about it. This was during a period where for a while, every couple of weeks, we’d get a new personal computer. When I was 11, around the age when I wanted a sister because I had two older brothers, my dad kept talking about this “baby” and I didn’t know what it was. Mom was a coder in the old days, as was dad. Everywhere there’s an IBM, I’ve lived there. You live in Grand Rapids but originally are from New York, right? Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length. She is interested in absolutes, and in details, and over the course of a long lunch at Boqueria in Manhattan, where she had flown in for a hackers’ conference, she shared her insights about journalism, politics, and the state of technology. In person, Wheeler, 50, is friendly and frank, her mannerisms and habits of speech more like an academic’s (she has a PhD in literature) or an engineer’s (her entire immediate family works or worked in computers) than a newsroom veteran’s. ICYMI: Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer drop a Kavanaugh bombshell Wheeler herself made news this summer when she told her readers she had revealed one of her sources to the FBI because she “believed he was doing serious harm to innocent people.” More recently, she has convincingly marshalled the public record to argue that CIA director Gina Haspel likely edited herself out of tapes documenting the prolonged torture of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and written with precision about the corruption of many in and around the Trump administration by foreign interests, especially Russia. Wheeler came to prominence as one of the most tenacious reporters writing about the outing of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame by the Bush administration she covered the trial of Scooter Libby, indicted for leaking Plame’s name to DC reporter Robert Novak, for Daily Kos and the now-defunct FireDogLake from inside the courtroom-a position accorded very few reporters covering the case. ![]() The longtime blogger’s site Emptywheel focuses on beats like information warfare and surveillance, traditionally the purview of large institutional newsrooms, where accuracy can sometimes mean the difference between a scoop and a prison sentence. Wheeler’s insights, gleaned from tireless, detailed reading of declassified documents, are unique because they rely on public information, rather than access, and because Wheeler takes great pains to show her work. In the sometimes murky world of national security reporters, few people are wrong less often than Marcy Wheeler. ![]()
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