Spencer Ackerman is a highly regarded journalist, author and podcaster from the United States. He began his writing career in 2002 at The New Republic, before moving on to write for Wired, The Guardian, and The Daily Beast. His primary area of interest is national security.
Ackerman began working at The Washington Independent in December 2007 as a senior fellow covering foreign and domestic politics. In April 2008, after Too Hot for TNR’s publishing came to an end, he launched Attackerman, a second blog on national security, at ThinkProgress. Ackerman relocated the blog to Firedoglake in June 2008. He shared in the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the 2013 worldwide surveillance discoveries and received a 2012 National Magazine Award for his reporting on biased FBI training materials.
In May 2017, Ackerman rejoined The Daily Beast as a senior national security correspondent, reuniting with Noah Shachtman, his old editor from Wired. In 2019, he co-hosted the “Citadel Dropouts” Wired podcast discussing the concluding season of Game of Thrones with Laura Hudson. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Foreign Policy selected his book Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump as one of the best nonfiction books of 2021. In the same year, Ackerman resigned from The Daily Beast and established Forever Wars, a Substack newsletter focused on world affairs via a socialist lens, challenging American militarism and exceptionalism.