Spencer Ackerman

Spencer Ackerman is an American national security reporter and blogger. He began his career at The New Republic and wrote for Wired magazine's national security blog, Danger Room. He is now the national security editor for the Guardian US.

Life and career

Ackerman graduated from Rutgers University where he was an editor for the Daily Targum student paper. In 2002, he moved to Washington D.C. to become an intern and later an associate editor at The New Republic magazine. He initially supported the Iraq War, but became disillusioned and in 2004 started a blog on The New Republic website called Iraq'd which chronicled the dilemma of pro-war liberals. He also wrote, with John B. Judis, an article that started the chain of events that led to the Plame affair.

In 2006 Ackerman was fired from TNR for "insubordination" (in TNR editor Franklin Foer's account) or "irreconciliable ideological differences" (in Ackerman's). He subsequently wrote for The American Prospect (which offered him a job within a day of his firing) and Talking Points Memo. Ackerman blogged and reported on national security issues at the Washington Independent from the paper's creation in 2008 until 2010, when he left for Wired.