[6] His grandfather was theater impresario Lee Guber, and his father and stepmother worked at CBS News.

[13] Shachtman has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Slate, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

[18][19] Shachtman has spoken before audiences at West Point, the Army Command and General Staff College,[20] the Aspen Security Forum,[21] the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference,[22] Harvard Law School,[23] Yale Law School,[24] National Defense University and the Center for a New American Security Conference.

[25] Shachtman has reported from Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, Russia, the Pentagon, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

[28] In October 2022, Rolling Stone broke the news that the FBI had raided the home of ABC News producer James Gordon Meek, but left out the detail that the raid was carried out because of child pornography, instead suggesting that "Meek appears to be on the wrong side of the national-security apparatus" and that the raid had been instigated by the government because of Meek's reporting on national security issues.