
Click Here
byRecorded Future News
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.
Episodes(40 episodes)
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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Published: Jul 14, 2026Duration: 19m 26s
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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Published: Jul 10, 2026Duration: 19m 43s
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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Published: Jul 7, 2026Duration: 21m 53s
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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Published: Jul 3, 2026Duration: 15m 5s
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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Published: Jun 30, 2026Duration: 25m 17s
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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Published: Jun 26, 2026Duration: 16m 56s
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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Published: Jun 23, 2026Duration: 21m 58s
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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Published: Jun 19, 2026Duration: 17m 25s
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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Published: Jun 16, 2026Duration: 25m 4s
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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Published: Jun 12, 2026Duration: 14m 54s
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 then he watched some of his most valuable crypto assets just… disappear.
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Published: Jun 9, 2026Duration: 39m 47s
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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Published: Jun 5, 2026Duration: 15m 59s
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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Published: Jun 2, 2026Duration: 19m 47s
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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Published: May 29, 2026Duration: 18m 40s
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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Published: May 26, 2026Duration: 32m 23s
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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Published: May 22, 2026Duration: 16m 34s
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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Published: May 19, 2026Duration: 28m 39s
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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Published: May 15, 2026Duration: 19m 25s
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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Published: May 12, 2026Duration: 37m 32s
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 truth itself.
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Published: May 8, 2026Duration: 14m 24s