As Marcy and bmaz leave and Jeff Kaye and I step in to take up the responsibility of chronicling the growing bipartisan consensus among the American corporate and political class that civil rights and civil liberties are disposable and expendable, I would like to share my own memories of Marcy and my appreciation for her work.

Marcy endorsed me for a Democracy for America Netroots Nation 2011 scholarship (that I ended up earning). I don’t know when she started to pay attention to what I was doing, but I went to see who was supporting my scholarship and her name was listed. It was an honor to have someone, who was doing exactly what I could see myself doing, covering WikiLeaks, torture, national security issues, etc, support me. (I thought she kept up a great Twitter account too.)

At the National Conference for Media Reform 2011 in Boston, I met her as an intern with The Nation magazine. I planned to interview and WikiLeaks live blogger extraordinaire Greg Mitchell (who I was interning for). I arranged to do a video interview with Marcy.

I came to hear her speak during a panel on investigative journalism. After she spoke, she asked me if I wanted to eat lunch. Eating together and finally being introduced to the person behind the great snarky tweeting was such a great experience. Not only could Marcy write but she could also talk in detail, off-the-cuff, on these issues.

We talked about some of the topics, which were raised in this interview posted below.


In my final weeks with The Nation, I interviewed Marcy again for a podcast I started up in January called, “This Week in WikiLeaks.” This weekly podcast, which I hope to continue at The Dissenter, was started to give people, who don’t have the time to follow all the issues and storylines related to WikiLeaks, a way to stay up to date on the latest developments. It was designed to provide the kind of discussion of WikiLeaks that the corporate or establishment media refuses to schedule and entertain. And, it was launched because I believed WikiLeaks provided a great lens for looking at many issues especially civil liberties, national security and journalism and the media.

I knew Marcy would be a good guest to get on the show. She came on and talked for a little over a half hour. We talked about cybersecurity and whether the US was working to create legal justification to take out sites like WikiLeaks with DDoS or DNS attacks and more. [Here is a link to the podcast with Marcy: @Emptywheel Talks About Cybersecurity ]

Marcy is one of the writers that I regularly read and has been a key influence in the past months. I appreciate how she can get at some very dark and heavy topics and bring out the key points concisely in her blog posts (which are always much shorter than my posts). She has done amazing work (along with bmaz) and has placed a great amount of responsibility on Jeff Kaye and I.

I wish her the best of luck with the new site and hope that she’ll let Jeff and I feature some content from the new site every now and then at The Dissenter in the future.