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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 curtai...
Recent Episodes
370 episodes
China is run by engineers, America is run by lawyers
China builds bridges, high-speed rail and cities at a pace the United States can barely imagine. Economist Dan Wang, author of Breakneck, says there’s...
The hidden power of China’s video games
Millions of people around the world fell in love with Genshin Impact. The Chinese video game was fun. It was beautiful. And it was approved by the Chi...
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 I...
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.
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...
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...
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 a...
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 prog...
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 evidenc...
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 apar...
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 kee...
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 ass...
Inside out
Andrew Leland has spent years thinking about blindness, technology, and adaptation. And he’s noticed something: again and again, people with disabilit...
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 tel...
Forecast, interrupted
Artificial intelligence is making weather forecasts faster and more precise. But the technology depends on something decidedly less futuristic: a vast...
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....
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...
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,...
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...
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 th...
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 w...
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 t...
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 cybersecur...
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 importa...
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...
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...
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...
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 crossov...
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...
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 q...
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....
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...
The firehose of falsehoods
Ahead of Hungary’s recent parliamentary elections, fake social media accounts began warning of political violence. But what caught researcher Antibot4...
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...
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 resha...
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...
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 — quietl...
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 onl...
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 f...
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...