One of the best of the detail people online,or maybe anywhere, is Marcy Wheeler, also known as emptywheel — I’ve read her shit for years, and she’s got focused eyes to gaze hard back at the NSA.
Newsweek has a most-excellent feature on Wheeler this week.
The money quote high in the piece:

You’ve probably never heard of Wheeler, a Michigan blogger who plies her trade far away from the closed world of Washington, D.C., but her work enables journalists, lawyers, advocates and experts to unmask the government’s secret spying apparatus.
“She’s really a wealth of knowledge,” said Amie Stepanovich, who does policy and litigation work on domestic surveillance for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy group.
As a resource Wheeler’s blog is “just horribly helpful.”

(Illustration: Salvador Dali’s ‘Alice‘ found here.

Sometimes the coupling of unlikely objects/words — both alliterated, too — creates an unique literary pose, like this pairing of ‘horror‘ and ‘help,’ to emphasize not only the assistance being given, but that the help is so useful, horror the consequences if it wasn’t there. Wheeler does that kind of service — I’m a longtime reader, well, not that long, maybe four-five years, maybe even longer. She was at Firedoglake for a long time, now at her own site, emptywheel.
Anything having to with national security and all its terrifying tentacles, Wheeler is the go-to source. I check her site couple of times a day. Especially, if I know some NSA asshole is going to testify at some hearing.
And she appears to understand her cog in the wheel — at the end of the Newsweek piece: “But I just feel like there’s this beat that is there that unless somebody else comes along and picks it up it won’t get done, and I think it’s really important,” she said. “I feel almost compelled to do it.”

And along with being a credit to investigative journalism, Wheeler horribly-helps us dumb-asses keep a watchful eye on Big-Asshole Brother.