Drones promised progress — as lifesavers in floods, storytellers in newsrooms, even assistants to archaeologists. But somewhere along the way, they took a darker turn. Now they hover over protests, shadow 911 calls and surveil our neighborhoods from above. Researcher Faine Greenwood discusses how we normalized the hum of surveillance — and why all this is starting to resemble something much more authoritarian.

Today: A story about a technology that began in the fields — tracking cattle — and is now on the ankles of immigrants. It’s part of a program called “alternatives to detention.” And these ankle monitors, smartphone apps, GPS check-ins have changed. They’re not just tools to monitor. Increasingly, they’re being used to entrap. And for some immigrants, complying with the system means walking straight into ICE detention.

A Chinese hacking group walked right into a trap. Not a firewall. Not a filter. A honeypot. This week, Amazon CSO Steve Schmidt explains how a digital decoy called MadPot helped expose Volt Typhoon—and why, in the age of AI, the real vulnerability isn’t software. It’s people.

The Trump memecoin dinner looked like a political stunt. Maybe even a scam. But inside the crypto community, some saw something else: legitimacy. Today, we hear from one of crypto’s most thoughtful defenders.

Memecoins were born as Internet pranks — worthless by design, traded for laughs. But now they are buying real power, and a digital joke just slipped past the velvet rope straight into the Oval Office.

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. This week, a rare conversation with one of them—a defector—about the regime’s digital underworld, and the personal toll of escaping it.

North Korea has built an artificial intelligence research center to supercharge its cyber operations, Unit 227. It’s a move that some experts say has been years in the making — and others say should scare us senseless.

When Richard Hunter heard about Kentucky'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. We spent four days driving across the state and it became clear that things like crypto mining and AI data centers may not offer a break with history – just a continuation of it.

Earlier this month, a photo of former national security advisor Mike Waltz sneaking a peek at his phone during a Cabinet meeting went viral. Micah Lee explains how that moment exposed a massive security flaw – and a possible backdoor into government chats.

Our first installment in a five-part series we're calling CyberMonday. As part of a show for 1A, we dive into one of our Click Here episodes and take calls from listeners. This week: DOGE is vacuuming up federal data and using it in ways that no one ever has before, with very little oversight.

Radio Free Asia has broken news on everything from a mystery illness in Wuhan to Uyghur detentions in northwest China. Now it is in the Trump administration’s crosshairs. We speak with Bay Fang, RFA’s president, about its battle to survive.