Episode notes
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.
Click Here
by Recorded Future News · English · Tech & Science
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…
More from Click Here
-
7 Jul 2026 · 22 min
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.
-
3 Jul 2026 · 15 min
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.
-
30 Jun 2026 · 25 min
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.
-
6 Oct 2026 · 22 minNew
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.
-
2 Oct 2026 · 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?
-
29 Sep 2026 · 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.
-
25 Sep 2026 · 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?
-
22 Sep 2026 · 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.
-
18 Sep 2026 · 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?
-
15 Sep 2026 · 30 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.
Take it with you
The Melo app keeps playing with the screen off, works in the car and on your watch, wakes you to your station, and browses the whole catalogue offline. Free, no ads, no account.
