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U.S. officials say Iran-linked hackers are targeting water utilities across the country. So we’re revisiting the story of Nick Lawler, who got a call from the FBI one day in 2023. Chinese state hackers, they told him, had somehow found their way inside the small-town utility he ran in Littleton, Massachusetts.

When North Korea targeted security researcher Alejandro Caceres, he did something Americans aren’t supposed to do: he struck back — and knocked the country’s entire internet offline. Now, a new Trump administration memo is raising the possibility that, under special circumstances, Americans could strike back at cybercriminals — legally.

Journalist Jason Rezaian spent a year and a half in an Iranian prison, cut off from the outside world. So when Iran shut down the internet across the country for 88 days during the early weeks of the war, he had some idea of what that kind of isolation felt like. And he saw something else: just how closely the internet and power are now intertwined. Iran understands that. Rezaian thinks the U.S. should too.

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 a reason: China is run by engineers, while America is run by lawyers. That difference explains a surprising amount about how China works — including what happens when you try to engineer a society.

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 Chinese Communist Party. We take an updated look at how China’s booming gaming industry became a powerful way to export culture — without making it feel like an export.

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.

Inside Iran’s viral Lego videos mocking Trump and Netanyahu — and how AI is turning propaganda into entertainment.

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 predictable world encounter the real one.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 then he watched some of his most valuable crypto assets just… disappear.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 truth itself.

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.

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.

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.

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?