• 195. Mic Drop: A return to the NSA's Cryptologic Museum - a spycatcher's dream
    Dec 27 2024

    Just a stone's throw from the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, the National Cryptologic Museum displays dozens of rarely seen code breaking machines that, quite literally, changed the course of history. We re-visit our tour and chat with the museum's director, Vince Houghton.

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    12 mins
  • 194. A return to the musicians who came in from the cold
    Dec 24 2024

    At a time when Vladimir Putin is attempting to redraw the Iron Curtain, we revisit an earlier episode in which we take a trip back to the Soviet Union circa 1985 when four American musicians smuggled messages in and out of the Soviet Union — with music.

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    22 mins
  • 193. Mic Drop: For researcher Allison Nixon, young cybercriminals are ‘objectively interesting’
    Dec 20 2024

    We return to a conversation we had over the summer with Unit 221B’s Allison Nixon about young cybercriminals, radicalization, and the search for self in the virtual world.

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    14 mins
  • 192. Return to the leak that unmasked China’s hackers-for-hire
    Dec 17 2024

    Recently, the US sanctioned a Chinese cybersecurity company and one of its employees who compromised tens of thousands of firewalls worldwide, with potentially deadly consequences. All of this could sound a little familiar to regular listeners. Earlier this year, CLICK HERE reported on a huge leak of internal documents from a private cybersecurity company that pulled back the curtain on the secret world of China’s hacker-for-hire network.

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    23 mins
  • 191. SPECIAL FEATURE: ‘(Ai)ding Cybercrime’ from SHIFT
    Dec 13 2024

    An episode of ‘SHIFT’ from PRX:

    AI is being integrated into our technologies at warp speed, but we are only starting to consider how it could be weaponized in the future. The SHIFT podcast talks to Lee Klarich, the chief product officer at Palo Alto Networks, about how AI is both helping and hurting cybersecurity.

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    13 mins
  • 190. Return to the curious case of the disappearing TikTok videos
    Dec 10 2024

    TikTok took down Esma Memtimin’s posts for allegedly violating the platform’s community rules, even though her videos were about little more than stickers and some current events. Just days after TikTok’s Chinese parent company asked a federal court to put a temporary hold on a law that would require ByteDance to sell the app or face a ban in this country, we go back to an episode we did this fall about a mysterious dearth of TikTok posts about subjects Beijing doesn’t like.

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    27 mins
  • 189. Mic Drop: Return to Wazawaka
    Dec 6 2024

    We return to an earlier interview we had with Wazawaka, a Russian hacker who, in late 2023, was added to the FBI’s Cyber Most Wanted List. Russian authorities allegedly jailed him late last week — though we saw he was back online a short time later.

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    19 mins
  • 188. SPECIAL FEATURE: ‘The Right-Wing Plan for Trump-Friendly Spies’ from In the Room with Peter Bergen
    Dec 3 2024

    An episode from In the Room with Peter Bergen.

    Longtime national security analyst Peter Bergen looks at what President-elect Trump’s return to the White House will likely mean for intelligence gathering as we know it – and whether the conservative Project 2025 will turn out to be the new intelligence gathering playbook.

    This story was originally released before the November election.

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    43 mins