Why Emptywheel is so great
by digby
Marcy Wheeler announced a few days ago that she will be working for the new investigative empire of Pierre Omidyar doing what she does best --- plowing through dense, difficult information and figuring out what's really lurking underneath. I'll confess that I assumed from the minute the venture was announced that they would offer her a gig. She's a rare blogger who is perfect --- necessary actually --- for an investigative operation like First Look.
This piece is a perfect example of why:
In this post, I suggested that reports (WSJ, WaPo) that NSA collects only 20 to 30% of US phone records probably don’t account for the records collected under authorities besides Section 215.
So why did WSJ, WaPo, LAT, and NYT all report on this story at once? Why, after 8 months in which the government has taken the heat for collecting all US call records, are anonymous sources suddenly selectively leaking stories claiming they don’t get (any, the stories suggest) cell data?
There’s a tall tale the stories collectively tell that probably explains it.
Read on for the details. You really cannot understand the degree of government obfuscation that's taken place without reading Marcy's blog and I think having the even wider audience she'll have with First Look will be invaluable to anyone who wants to know what's really been going on.
I will just note, in my own pithy way, the amazing irony regarding this story and so many others: the government just leaked classified information to all those media operations.
One wonders when the investigation to root out the culprits will commence.
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