Click Here
Click Here is a podcast that tells true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world. It takes listeners into the world of cyber and intelligence without all the techie jargon. Every Tuesday and Friday, former NPR investigations correspondent Dina Temple-Raston and the team draw back the curtain on ransomware attacks, mysterious hackers, and the people who are trying to stop them.
Episodes
Iran’s internet shutdown: keeping people apart is the point
This year, Iran shut down the internet for more than three months, cutting millions of people off from the world — and from each other. We go inside Iran’s internet shutdown and look at why that isolation wasn’t just a consequence. It was the goal.
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Iran’s AI propaganda war, Lego-style
Inside Iran’s viral Lego videos mocking Trump and Netanyahu — and how AI is turning propaganda into entertainment.
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The robot cars are already here and they're not ready
Turns out, driverless cars don’t like fireworks. On the Fourth of July, a hundred thousand people poured out of San Francisco’s fireworks show at once. Robotaxis in the area went haywire. Some froze in intersections. Others drove over live fireworks. And it made us think of an earlier conversation we’d had with NYU professor Gary Marcus about what happens when machines trained on a predic
Out of bounds
AI models are tested in sandboxes — sealed-off environments designed to keep them away from real systems. This summer, two models found a way out. In this Cyber Monday crossover with WAMU and NPR’s 1A, we go back to one of the earliest hackers who understood something we’re still learning about technology: build a system, and someone will inevitably test its limits.
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Hacking water
It was a tiny water authority in rural Pennsylvania. A hack that barely made national news. Today, as suspected Iranian hackers target water systems across the country, we return to that story. What once looked like an isolated incident, now looks like a warning.
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How to save a life
In a mass shooting, doctors have seconds to decide who lives and who dies. Could AI help make those decisions? We return to a story about a DARPA program asking where medicine ends and technology begins.
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Proof of life
Technology promised us better evidence. Sharper pictures. Clearer video. Perfect copies of the world around us. But what happens when all that evidence stops convincing us? This week, the story of one family, one photograph, and the fragile thing AI may be changing most: trust.
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The drone whisperer
Shahed drones have become one of the defining weapons of the war in Ukraine. Today, we return to the story of a man who’s spent years taking them apart. He says every drone has a history. If you know where to look, it can tell you where it came from, how it was built, and how the war itself is evolving.
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The surveillance trap
Today, we return to a story about a technology that began in the fields, tracking cattle, and is now on the ankles of immigrants. It’s supposed to keep people out of detention. For some, it’s doing something else.
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Hearing things
For most of cinema’s history, movies have assumed their audience can see. Now, a group of artists is asking what happens when you stop making that assumption.
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Inside out
Andrew Leland has spent years thinking about blindness, technology, and adaptation. And he’s noticed something: again and again, people with disabilities don’t just adapt to technology. They show the rest of us what it can do.
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Calling JoyBubbles
As a blind kid growing up in the 1950s, Joe Engressia spent hours listening to the telephone. Then one day, he whistled into the receiver… and the telephone did something strange.
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Forecast, interrupted
Artificial intelligence is making weather forecasts faster and more precise. But the technology depends on something decidedly less futuristic: a vast government system for collecting data. We return to our story with veteran meteorologist John Morales, and he takes us inside the green screens and satellite feeds to show what happens when an old system starts to fray.
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Internet kids go to war
Olaf Hichwa spent his teenage years doing something that did not seem especially important: racing drones through cornfields. He got very good at it. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and suddenly people cared very much about what Olaf knew how to do. This week, a story of the internet kids who are changing the way wars are fought.
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Watching the next war
Emil Kastehelmi has spent years studying Ukraine’s battlefield from hundreds of miles away, using satellite imagery and public data to track a war in constant motion. What he’s seeing isn’t just the story of Ukraine. It’s a glimpse of how warfare itself is changing.
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The soundtrack of a new war
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Eugene Lesin was a poet. Today, he commands a unit that intercepts Russian drones. At first, this sounds like the story of one man whose life was transformed by battle. But it turns into something else: a story about how conflict itself is changing. And about who notices those changes first.
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When ransomware went corporate
This week, we’re revisiting one of the stories that changed how we think about ransomware. It starts with an attack on a group of small towns in Texas and ends with the realization that cybercrime had become organized, scalable, and startlingly corporate.
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The leak
Most ransomware gangs are known only by what they leave behind. Conti was different. Thanks to one extraordinary leak, we can see the conversations that usually stay hidden: arguments, anxieties, plans, and mistakes. This week, we return to a story we did about a cybercriminal empire—and what happened when someone turned on the lights.
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Alternate realities
For decades, we've treated the open internet as a fact of life. But what if it was just a phase? As governments, platforms, and algorithms carve the web into smaller and smaller realities, we ask internet activist Ethan Zuckerman whether the internet can still be saved—or whether we're already living through its replacement.
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The other internet
What if the most interesting thing about China’s internet isn’t what it keeps out... but what grew within it? This week, how a parallel online world took shape—and how AI may be changing it.
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The ego exploit
The people most vulnerable to a scam aren’t always the least informed. Sometimes they’re the most confident. We revisit a conversation with cybersecurity researcher Dan Guido about Zoom, social engineering, and the dangerous assumption that cyberattacks only happen to other people.
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The magic trick
When people get hacked, security researcher Nick Bax says, it’s a lot like watching a magic trick. Your attention goes one way while something important happens somewhere else. In this CyberMonday crossover with WAMU and NPR’s 1A, we talk about the latest online scams and meet Jake Gallen. He didn’t click a suspicious link. He didn’t download malware. He just agreed to an interview. And t
Under new management
For years, Hansa was one of Europe’s biggest dark web drug markets. Then Dutch investigators pulled off an audacious undercover operation—and instead of shutting it down, they ran it. This week, we revisit the story of one of the most successful cybercrime stings ever.
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The job that wasn't
The ad seemed straightforward. The recruiter seemed legitimate. The opportunity seemed real. A story about what happens when all three turn out to be something else.
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No face to hide
A missing daughter. An unidentified body. A single photograph uploaded into a machine. Facial recognition is helping authorities solve cases that once seemed impossible. But the technology doesn’t stop working after the missing are found. And that’s where the story gets complicated.
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Shaping the record
Police reports often become the first official account of what happened during an encounter. Now AI is helping write them. In this CyberMonday crossover with WAMU and NPR’s 1A news magazine, we look at what changes when that account starts with a machine.
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Miracles and wonder
Somewhere right now, a camera is scanning a face. A license plate reader is logging a car. And most of us barely notice anymore. We sit down with NYU law professor Barry Friedman to talk about how surveillance became the background noise of modern life — and what it’s doing to democracy.
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Faces in the crowd
In Edmonton, police tested facial-recognition-equipped body cameras in the first pilot program of its kind in Canada. The experiment raised a deeper question: what happens when anonymity disappears from public life? Zach Hirsch reports on the uneasy future of always being seen.
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Drowning out the truth
China's propaganda machine doesn't argue with the story. It buries it. From flooding Xinjiang hashtags to bot networks testing their reach during a U.S. Senate race, Beijing has turned information warfare into a numbers game. Now it's exporting that playbook — with teams working nine-to-five shifts to drown out anything China doesn't want you to see.
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The people we sent away
America became a scientific superpower by attracting talent from around the world. But sometimes fear gets in the way. Qian Xuesen — a Chinese rocket scientist forced out during the Cold War — went on to help build China’s missile program. In partnership with 1A, Click Here looks at whether America is repeating its mistakes.
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The firehose of falsehoods
Ahead of Hungary’s recent parliamentary elections, fake social media accounts began warning of political violence. But what caught researcher Antibot4Navalny’s attention was this: the Kremlin-linked campaign wasn’t reacting to events. It was trying to create them. We look at how these operations work, and why the goal may not be to make you believe a lie... but to doubt the possibility of
It didn’t look like propaganda
Propaganda works best when it disappears—into morning assemblies, lesson plans, even the alphabet on the wall. That’s what Pavel “Pasha” Talankin saw inside his classroom in Russia. So he started filming it all and what he captured became not just an Oscar-winning movie — but a record of how control settles in, one school day at a time.
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Access, denied.
You buy a phone. A car. A tractor. But what do you actually own? We talk to legal scholar Aaron Perzanowski about how software and contracts are reshaping ownership — and why the right-to-repair movement is gaining traction.
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Not quite yours
You buy something. A phone. A car. A tractor. It feels like it’s yours. But, it turns out, the software inside sets the terms—controlling how it works, how it’s fixed, even whether it runs at all. This week: how code is redefining ownership.
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Rage against the machine
AI learns by scraping our work — often without asking. Now people are fighting back. Not just in court, but raging against the machine itself — quietly corrupting the data it depends on. Which raises a question: If AI learns from us, what happens if we start teaching it the wrong lessons?
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The price tag of you
In this CyberMonday crossover with WAMU’s 1A, we hear from listeners and return to an episode on how companies are using our data to customize how online goods are priced from consumer to consumer. What happens when technology reshapes the rules of the marketplace?
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The space debris strikes back
Last week, Artemis II returned from the Moon. For a moment, it all felt clean. Simple. But space isn’t empty anymore. It’s crowded. It’s noisy. It’s filling up with the things we’ve left behind. And sometimes… those things come back. We return to a story we did on an Australian farmer who had an unexpected visitor from space—a charred piece of metal, dropped from low Earth orbit into his
Defying gravity
The Artemis II mission that made its trip around the Moon didn’t happen in a vacuum. It was built in part on a mission that happened a couple of years ago. We return to a story about a scrappy lunar lander that nearly didn’t make it.
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Reverse engineering us
With digital copies of the human mind, scientists at MIT now have a new kind of testing ground --- a brain they can probe, no surgery required. It's to study how we remember, how we learn, and even how language begins. But if this mind is built—not born— are we studying the brain or engineering a version we can finally control?
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Every breath you fake
We lie with our faces. With our voices. Even with our pauses. Now AI says it can see through all of it. But is it actually detecting the truth…or just telling a very convincing story about how we feel?
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The Village that built the internet
To live in the modern world, you have to be online. But in many places, that connection still doesn’t exist. So people aren’t waiting. They’re building their own internet—creating and running their own providers from the ground up. And in the process, redefining who gets to connect… and who gets to decide.
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Almost heaven, no reception
What does it take to get everyone online? More than wires and satellites. We return to a story about a Mississippi farmer searching for a reliable connection—and end up uncovering a problem that stretches back nearly a century. What’s at stake isn’t just internet access, but who gets to be part of what comes next.
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Internet at the speed of light
We usually think of getting online as something that requires cables—strung under oceans or buried beneath our feet. Mahesh Krishnaswamy of Taara thinks the future may lie in beams of light pointed at the sky.
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A wrinkle in time: GPS jamming in Ukraine
In this CyberMonday crossover with WAMU’s 1A, we hear from listener and return to an episode on how satellites, electronic warfare, and a team of American techies MacGyver-ed a way to keep the power flowing in Ukraine.
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The other battlefield
A cyberattack on a U.S. medical device company didn’t ask for money—it tried to wipe systems clean. It may be the start of a wave of Iran-linked hacks as tensions rise in the Middle East. So this week, we revisit a story about how Iranian hackers wage war from the shadows.
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Return to code red: hacking the halls of medicine
Sky Lakes Medical Center in south-central Oregon never imagined it could become the target of a cyberattack. Then, one day, its computer systems went dark.
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The rise of high-tech despotism
Noura Al-Jizawi thought she’d left the repression of the Assad regime behind when she left Syria with her sister. Instead she became the target of an online subversion campaign.
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Smuggling signals out of Iran
After Tehran throttled the internet during nationwide protests in 2022, Iranians started preparing a workaround: Starlink. Smugglers brought thousands of satellite terminals into the country. So when war began, and the regime tried to cut its people off from the rest of the world, they still found a signal.
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When morality meets the machine
When a new tool starts appearing in places where humans once wrestled with right and wrong, it’s worth asking not just what the technology can do — but what it may be doing to us. Shannon Vallor, a philosopher at the University of Edinburgh, examines the hidden costs of offloading our moral judgment to machines.
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AI’s divine intervention
Churches are turning to AI to write sermons and reach new congregants. But when faith is filtered through an algorithm, does it change what – or who – we’re actually listening to?
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Dispatches from the Ukrainian front
Four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, an air-defense officer named Zhan describes a battlefield dominated by drones and connectivity — and we return to a story about the tech detectives who trace the component parts that keep those weapons flying.
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Your data, commodified
You’ve likely received a scam call or text at some point. Some of these messages come from elaborate compounds found mostly in Southeast Asia. These compounds look like call centers but operate more like prisons. In this CyberMonday crossover with WAMU’s 1A, we return to an episode and hear from listeners — on how these centers cropped up and what’s being done to stop them.
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Chasing shadows with The Citizen Lab
The early Internet was ushered in with this widespread hope about its utopian possibilities. But the founder of The Citizen Lab, Ron Deibert, suspected there was a dark underbelly of government surveillance and censorship lying beneath and he was determined to unmask it.
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Reading North Korea
As reports grow that Kim Jong-un’s teenage daughter could soon be formally designated as his successor — extending the family’s rule to a fourth generation — we’re revisiting a story about the outsiders who watch North Korea when almost no one else can. In a country closed to inspectors and journalists, open-source “tech detectives” comb through satellite images, videos, and propaganda fo
Miss Lonelyhearts and the money mules
We return to a special Valentine’s Day episode, and look at the evolution of romance scams. They aren’t just about bilking lonely people out of their life savings anymore – scammers have diversified, and they’re making victims accomplices in a roster of cyber crimes from email scams and check fraud to money laundering.
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Defying Gravity
Former astronaut Ed Lu once worried about asteroids. Now he’s turning his attention to space debris —and a new question it raises: could adversaries turn it into a weapon? Some officials are beginning to worry the answer may be yes.
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Coded music
A Cold War story about musicians, dissidents, and the quiet ways people push back when a system decides who gets to exist — and who doesn’t.
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The people vs. the cloud
When Big Tech brought plans for a giant data center to St. Charles, Missouri, one college student decided to fight back. And it raises a question that small towns all over the US are asking: What happens when the cloud touches ground?
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Gone in 60 hacks
Car theft has gone digital. We talk to a white-hat hacker about how cars became computers on wheels—and why, in the race for smarter tech, safety is still trying to catch up.
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Move fast and brake things
Volvo built its reputation on safety. Then a software update nearly sent one driver off a cliff. We look at what happens when car companies start acting like tech companies — and discover the danger of “move fast and break things” on the open road.
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The neighborhood patrol
As the Trump administration pressures Apple and Google to remove apps that track ICE activity from their stores, locals are going old-school. Francisco Chavo Romero, an LA-based activist, explains how it works.
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Watching the watchers
When the Trump administration began rounding up immigrants, a new kind of resistance took shape — digital, crowdsourced, and built for the smartphone era. Activists used apps and social media to keep watch on the government. But before long, the government started watching back.
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Can AI fix its own energy problem?
The A.I. boom is reshaping our world—and quietly guzzling power. This week, sustainable code advocate Stuart Clark explains how the race to build smarter machines is heating up our planet—and how we can code our way to a cleaner future.
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AI and the secret lives of whales
What happens when you cross a marine biologist with a machine-learning engineer? You get someone who thinks humpback whales might be saying something meaningful—and that artificial intelligence could help us finally understand it.
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Blockchain buzzkill — one miner’s lament.
We return to a story about bitcoin mining in Kentucky. When Richard Hunter heard about the state's generous crypto incentives, he packed up his bitcoin machines and pointed them south. He imagined a booming business, jobs for locals, and maybe — just maybe — a shot at redemption. But what he got … was a buzzkill.
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Crypto in Kentucky: The next extraction
Since the collapse of coal, Eastern Kentucky has lived through a procession of supposed revivals. Each new idea was treated as something close to salvation. But things like cryptocurrency and AI data centers may not offer a break with history – just a continuation of it. We return to a story we did last year about Kentucky's crypto mining industry.
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Cloudy with a chance of Algorithms
Tech giants say artificial intelligence can outsmart the storm, predicting tomorrow’s weather faster than ever. We return to a conversation we had with Paris Perdikaris of the University of Pennsylvania. He tells us about a new tension: forecasts are only as good as the public data that fuels them – and now even that is in doubt.
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AI and the weather forecast
Artificial intelligence is rewriting the rules of weather forecasting — spotting storms sooner, warning us faster, and increasing the potential to save lives. But cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service threaten the very data that makes it possible. In this CyberMonday crossover with WAMU’s 1A, we hear from listeners as we return to an episode that takes us inside the green screens
Erased: The curious case of UyghurEdit++
China’s surveillance of Uyghurs has leapt from the physical world to the digital one. No longer just QR codes on doorways, it’s now hidden in cloud services and software updates. This week on Click Here’s Mic Drop, we return to a story on how digital tools meant to protect identity are being used to erase it.ERASED is a four-part investigation into how China is wiping Uyghur culture from
Erased: Silencing a kindergarten
In a small classroom in western China, children once learned to sing and count in the language of their ancestors — Uyghur. Then the doors were locked, and founder Abduweli Ayup went from teacher to enemy of the state. We return to the first episode in our series, ERASED.ERASED is a four-part investigation into how China is wiping Uyghur culture from existence — one law, one app, one pers
The ego exploit
Zoom was built for speed. But in its rush to connect us, it may have left a few doors open. We return to a conversation with Dan Guido, the CEO of the cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits. He walks us through how one of Zoom's most mundane features became a hacker's best friend — and why the weakest link in crypto isn't the blockchain … it's the person who thinks they're too smart to get scam
Introducing kill switch
An episode from kill switch:On October 20, an Amazon Web Services outage knocked out big swaths of the internet — from Snapchat and Reddit to smart beds and government services. On the series kill switch, host Dexter Thomas talks with Dr. Corinne Cath, a cultural anthropologist and tech researcher, about how three companies — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — came to dominate the cloud, why
The algorithm will see you now - AI and psychiatry
We return to a conversation we had with Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and retired Army brigadier general. He's has always had an open mind when it comes to cutting-edge technology. Now he’s looking at AI to see if it can help doctors treat veterans struggling with mental health.
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Introducing The Homework Machine
An episode from The Homework Machine:Three years after ChatGPT landed in classrooms, schools are still sorting out what comes next. What counts as cheating when AI can do your homework? How should teachers use it, or not? And how do students feel about learning alongside a machine? The Homework Machine explores the promises and pitfalls of AI in education through the people living it – te
A former North Korean hacker speaks out
For years, North Korea has quietly dispatched an army of IT workers overseas—not to innovate, but to infiltrate. Disguised as freelancers, they apply for jobs, breach systems, and wire stolen funds back to Pyongyang. We return to a rare conversation with one of them—a defector—about the regime’s digital underworld, and the personal toll of escaping it.
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Knights of Old and a ransomware joust
We return to a story on the Akira ransomware group. For 150 years Knights of Old, a U.K. logistics company, survived everything from two world wars to Brexit. Then Akira stormed the company's networks. In just a blink of an eye, everything changed.
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Former Deputy DNI Sue Gordon: ‘it is conceivable that the world order has already been broken’
Washington is trimming budgets… and bleeding digital expertise. So what happens when national security is run by agencies living in the past? Sue Gordon, former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, helps us break it down.
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When big cyberattacks hit small towns
We tend to picture cyberattacks as distant battles—state hackers, big targets, glowing maps of global chaos. But often, the frontlines are more local: a water plant, a 911 system, the power lines outside your window. In this CyberMonday crossover with WAMU’s 1A, we examine a small-town breach, the fragility of our digital infrastructure—and what it means for all of us.
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A new playbook for online extremism
Milo Comerford has been studying online extremism for more than a decade. He’s watched ideologies rise and fall, platforms shift, and tactics mutate. Now, as kids fall into violent online communities with no ideology at all, Milo says we’re overdue for a new playbook. Today: the solutions he thinks might actually work.
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Violence for the sake of violence
Across the internet, groups like 764 are redefining extremism: less about beliefs, more about chaos. We look at how the movement works, who it attracts, and why stopping it is so challenging.
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