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Click Here

Recorded Future News

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.

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  • 39 episodes
  • a few times a week
  • Avg 21 min
  • English
Counted on this page — what you have heard stays on this device, so it is not something the list can be paged by.
  • Friday · 11 min

    Space is getting crowded. And nobody’s in charge

    There’s a new space race underway. And this time, it’s not just about astronauts and moon landings. Companies are launching satellites by the thousands. Militaries are eyeing space as the next battlefield. And now people want to put AI data centers up there, too. So why is everyone suddenly so interested in space? Former astronaut Ed Lu says it has a lot to do with a 60-year-old prediction about computer chips. And there’s just one problem: the rules haven’t kept up. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

  • October 6 · 22 min

    Russia is building the internet Putin always wanted

    Across Russia, the internet keeps going dark. The Kremlin says the blackouts are necessary to stop Ukrainian drones. But critics say it is really helping Vladimir Putin accomplish something he’s been working toward for years: an internet the Kremlin can control — and, when it wants to, cut off from the rest of the world. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

  • October 2 · 19 min

    How AI can debunk a conspiracy theory in 8 minutes

    Once someone believes a conspiracy theory, can anything change their mind? Researchers tried something unexpected: an AI chatbot. After just eight minutes of conversation, some conspiracy theorists were significantly less convinced. What did the bot know about changing minds that we don’t? Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

  • September 29 · 20 min

    How Bellingcat finds the truth in the age of AI

    Eliot Higgins built Bellingcat on a simple idea: give enough people the right tools, and they can figure out what really happened. It’s called open-source intelligence, or OSINT. But AI can now generate convincing fakes in seconds. Higgins tells us what happens when finding the truth becomes a race against the internet itself. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

  • September 25 · 16 min

    Who gets to decide what teens can do online?

    States are passing age-verification laws designed to keep kids safer on social media. But figuring out who’s a kid means finding a way to check everyone’s age. Three decades after the first fights over kids’ rights online, we look at a new question: Could protecting minors end up changing the internet for all of us? Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

  • September 22 · 29 min

    Taser drones in schools: Axon’s plan to stop school shootings

    A Texas company is testing drones designed to stop school shooters using sirens, strobe lights and pepper spray. The idea isn’t new. In 2022, Taser-maker Axon proposed putting drones in schools — a plan that led most of its AI Ethics Board to resign. We revisit our story about the fight over whether drones belong in schools — and what happens when a company’s own ethics advisers say it has gone too far. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

  • September 18 · 30 min

    When AI scrapes your art

    Generative AI can write, compose music and make art. But it learned by training on work made by humans — often without their permission. In this CyberMonday crossover with WAMU and NPR’s 1A, we ask: should we allow AI to train on human work? And if it does… what can we do about it? Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

  • September 15 · 29 min

    How do we keep kids safe on social media? Ask them.

    We’ve tried laws. Parental controls. Age restrictions. And demands that tech companies make social media safer for kids. But there’s one group adults don’t always think to consult: the kids themselves. This week on Click Here, what online safety looks like when teenagers get a say. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

  • September 11 · 25 min

    Arturo Bejar's warning to Meta

    Arturo Bejar was a Meta employee who tried to warn the company that its platforms were harming kids. Eventually, he told a California jury, and a week later, Meta announced its landmark $17 billion settlement. We sat down with the whistleblower who tried to get Meta to listen. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

  • September 8 · 23 min

    How China’s Volt Typhoon hacked a small-town utility

    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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

  • September 4 · 24 min

    He hacked back — and took down North Korea’s internet

    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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

  • September 1 · 23 min

    Iran: Why send a Tomahawk when Starlink will do?

    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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

  • August 28 · 15 min

    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 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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

  • August 25 · 20 min

    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 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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

  • August 21 · 18 min

    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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

  • August 18 · 21 min

    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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

  • August 14 · 13 min

    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 predictable world encounter the real one. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

  • August 11 · 46 min

    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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

  • August 7 · 23 min

    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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

  • August 4 · 21 min

    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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Showing 1–20 of 39 episodes