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Body cameras were supposed to watch the police. Now some of them can identify the public, too. In Edmonton, Canada, police tested facial recognition-equipped body cams in a pilot program that raised a bigger question: what happens when anonymity disappears from public life? Zach Hirsch reports on the uneasy future of 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?

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 online goods are priced from consumer to consumer. What happens when technology reshapes the rules of the marketplace?

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 filling up with the things we’ve left behind. And sometimes… those things come back. We return to a story we did on an Australian farmer who had an unexpected visitor from space—a charred piece of metal, dropped from low Earth orbit into his field.

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 ago. We return to a story about  a scrappy lunar lander that nearly didn’t make it.

With digital copies of the human mind, scientists at MIT now have a new kind of testing ground --- a brain they can probe, no surgery required. It's to study how we remember, how we learn, and even how language begins. But if this mind is built—not born— are we studying the brain or engineering a version we can finally control?

We lie with our faces. With our voices. Even with our pauses. Now AI says it can see through all of it. But is it actually detecting the truth…or just telling a very convincing story about how we feel?

To live in the modern world, you have to be online. But in many places, that connection still doesn’t exist. So people aren’t waiting. They’re building their own internet—creating and running their own providers from the ground up. And in the process, redefining who gets to connect… and who gets to decide.

What does it take to get everyone online? More than wires and satellites. We return to a story about a Mississippi farmer searching for a reliable connection—and end up uncovering a problem that stretches back nearly a century. What’s at stake isn’t just internet access, but who gets to be part of what comes next.

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.

In this CyberMonday crossover with WAMU’s 1A, we hear from listener and return to an episode on how satellites, electronic warfare, and a team of American techies MacGyver-ed a way to keep the power flowing in Ukraine.

A cyberattack on a U.S. medical device company didn’t ask for money—it tried to wipe systems clean. It may be the start of a wave of Iran-linked hacks as tensions rise in the Middle East. So this week, we revisit a story about how Iranian hackers wage war from the shadows.

Sky Lakes Medical Center in south-central Oregon never imagined it could become the target of a cyberattack. Then, one day, its computer systems went dark.

Noura Al-Jizawi thought she’d left the repression of the Assad regime behind when she left Syria with her sister. Instead she became the target of an online subversion campaign. 

After Tehran throttled the internet during nationwide protests in 2022, Iranians started preparing a workaround: Starlink. Smugglers brought thousands of satellite terminals into the country. So when war began, and the regime tried to cut its people off from the rest of the world, they still found a signal.

When a new tool starts appearing in places where humans once wrestled with right and wrong, it’s worth asking not just what the technology can do — but what it may be doing to us. Shannon Vallor, a philosopher at the University of Edinburgh, examines the hidden costs of offloading our moral judgment to machines.

Churches are turning to AI to write sermons and reach new congregants. But when faith is filtered through an algorithm, does it change what – or who – we’re actually listening to?

Four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, an air-defense officer named Zhan describes a battlefield dominated by drones and connectivity — and we return to a story about the tech detectives who trace the component parts that keep those weapons flying.

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.

The early Internet was ushered in with this widespread hope about its utopian possibilities. But the founder of The Citizen Lab, Ron Deibert, suspected there was a dark underbelly of government surveillance and censorship lying beneath and he was determined to unmask  it.

As reports grow that Kim Jong-un’s teenage daughter could soon be formally designated as his successor — extending the family’s rule to a fourth generation — we’re revisiting a story about the outsiders who watch North Korea when almost no one else can. In a country closed to inspectors and journalists, open-source “tech detectives” comb through satellite images, videos, and propaganda for tiny clues, trying to piece together what the regime is actually doing — and what it wants the world to believe — as it prepares for what could be a historic handoff of power.

We return to a special Valentine’s Day episode, and look at the evolution of romance scams. They aren’t just about bilking lonely people out of their life savings anymore – scammers have diversified, and they’re making victims accomplices in a roster of cyber crimes from email scams and check fraud to money laundering.

Former astronaut Ed Lu once worried about asteroids. Now he’s turning his attention to space debris —and a new question it raises: could adversaries turn it into a weapon? Some officials are beginning to worry the answer may be yes.

A Cold War story about musicians, dissidents, and the quiet ways people push back when a system decides who gets to exist — and who doesn’t.

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 that small towns all over the US are asking: What happens when the cloud touches ground?

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.

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.

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.

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.

The A.I. boom is reshaping our world—and quietly guzzling power. This week, sustainable code advocate Stuart Clark explains how the race to build smarter machines is heating up our planet—and how we can code our way to a cleaner future.

What happens when you cross a marine biologist with a machine-learning engineer? You get someone who thinks humpback whales might be saying something meaningful—and that artificial intelligence could help us finally understand it.

We return to a story about bitcoin mining in Kentucky. When Richard Hunter heard about the state's generous crypto incentives, he packed up his bitcoin machines and pointed them south. He imagined a booming business, jobs for locals, and maybe — just maybe — a shot at redemption. But what he got … was a buzzkill.

Since the collapse of coal, Eastern Kentucky has lived through a procession of supposed revivals. Each new idea was treated as something close to salvation. But things like cryptocurrency and AI data centers may not offer a break with history – just a continuation of it. We return to a story we did last year about Kentucky's crypto mining industry.

Tech giants say artificial intelligence can outsmart the storm, predicting tomorrow’s weather faster than ever. We return to a conversation we had with Paris Perdikaris of the University of Pennsylvania. He tells us about a new tension: forecasts are only as good as the public data that fuels them – and now even that is in doubt.

Artificial intelligence is rewriting the rules of weather forecasting — spotting storms sooner, warning us faster, and increasing the potential to save lives. But cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service threaten the very data that makes it possible. In this CyberMonday crossover with WAMU’s 1A, we hear from listeners as we return to an episode that takes us inside the green screens and satellite feeds to show what’s at stake.

China’s surveillance of Uyghurs has leapt from the physical world to the digital one. No longer just QR codes on doorways, it’s now hidden in cloud services and software updates. This week on Click Here’s Mic Drop, we return to a story on how digital tools meant to protect identity are being used to erase it.

ERASED is a four-part investigation into how China is wiping Uyghur culture from existence — one law, one app, one person, one website at a time. From shuttered schools to vanishing websites, ERASED uncovers an authoritarian regime’s campaign to delete a culture — and the unlikely rebels racing to stop it.

In a small classroom in western China, children once learned to sing and count in the language of their ancestors — Uyghur. Then the doors were locked, and founder Abduweli Ayup went from teacher to enemy of the state. We return to the first episode in our series, ERASED.

ERASED is a four-part investigation into how China is wiping Uyghur culture from existence — one law, one app, one person, one website at a time. From shuttered schools to vanishing websites, ERASED uncovers an authoritarian regime’s campaign to delete a culture — and the unlikely rebels racing to stop it.

Zoom was built for speed. But in its rush to connect us, it may have left a few doors open. We return to a conversation with Dan Guido, the CEO of the cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits. He walks us through how one of Zoom's most mundane features became a hacker's best friend — and why the weakest link in crypto isn't the blockchain … it's the person who thinks they're too smart to get scammed.

An episode from kill switch:

On October 20, an Amazon Web Services outage knocked out big swaths of the internet — from Snapchat and Reddit to smart beds and government services. On the series kill switch, host Dexter Thomas talks with Dr. Corinne Cath, a cultural anthropologist and tech researcher, about how three companies — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — came to dominate the cloud, why that’s risky for democracy, and what we can do about it.

We return to a conversation we had with Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and retired Army brigadier general. He's has always had an open mind when it comes to cutting-edge technology. Now he’s looking at AI to see if it can help doctors treat veterans struggling with mental health.

An episode from The Homework Machine:

Three years after ChatGPT landed in classrooms, schools are still sorting out what comes next. What counts as cheating when AI can do your homework? How should teachers use it, or not? And how do students feel about learning alongside a machine? The Homework Machine explores the promises and pitfalls of AI in education through the people living it – teachers, students, and the communities caught in-between. 

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.

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.

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.