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?