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The podcast that tells true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world. We take 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.
294 Episodes
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 Espionage Act was written more than a century ago to stop spies and saboteurs. But over time, its reach has quietly expanded — from enemy agents to insiders, and now, possibly, to the press itself. Georgetown Law’s Stephen Vladeck explains how a law built for wartime secrecy could become one of the most powerful tools in Washington’s arsenal.
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In 2017, NSA contractor Reality Winner mailed a five-page classified document to “The Intercept.” What happened next – a botched verification, an FBI knock at her door, and a prison sentence under the Espionage Act – raised big questions about how journalists handle secrets and how the government punishes those who share them. We talk to Reality about all that and her new memoir.
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Big Tech’s data centers are changing the landscape of small-town America, bringing new kinds of jobs and economic opportunity. This week, we hear from Shannon Wait, a data technician in South Carolina whose experience led to a rare labor settlement — offering a window into what life inside these facilities is really like.
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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 small towns all over the US are asking: what happens when the cloud touches ground?
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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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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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Polish developer Kuba Gretzky wanted to prove that multi-factor authentication wasn’t foolproof. He succeeded—maybe too well. What happens when a cybersecurity warning becomes the threat itself?
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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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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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What does it take to get everyone online? A maze of cables, satellites — and politics. We meet one farmer in Mississippi chasing a signal, and discover that what’s really at stake isn’t just access to the internet — it’s access to the future itself.
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In Tuesday’s episode, novelist Bruce Holsinger imagined the moral fallout of an autonomous car crash in his new book Culpability. Today, we leave fiction behind and ask a more urgent question: Can we really trust driverless cars on the road? Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and AI ethicist at NYU, cuts through the hype.
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What happens when an algorithm doesn’t just crunch data, but reshapes morality? In his new novel Culpability — an Oprah Book Club pick — Bruce Holsinger explores how AI collides with family, justice, and blame. We talk with him about where responsibility lies when machines make the choices… and what that means for all of us.
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