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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.

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.

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?