Mark Nelson took the call in an immigration detention center—a place that, to him, felt just like prison. It had the same prison windows, the same tiny box rooms. By the time the phone rang, he’d already spent 10 days detained there, and he was wracked with worry that he …
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In 2019, a government contractor and technologist named Mike Yeagley began making the rounds in Washington, DC. He had a blunt warning for anyone in the country’s national security establishment who would listen: The US government had a Grindr problem. A popular dating and hookup app, Grindr relied on the …
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Six days before Christmas, the US Department of Justice loudly announced a win in the ongoing fight against the scourge of ransomware: An FBI-led, international operation had targeted the notorious hacking group known as BlackCat or AlphV, releasing decryption keys to foil its ransom attempts against hundreds of victims and …
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The meeting between top US election officials and their cybersecurity partners from the federal government almost went off without a hitch. Then Mac Warner spoke up. Warner, West Virginia’s Republican secretary of state, didn’t have a mundane logistical question for the government representatives, who were speaking at the winter meeting …
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Canada-based University of Waterloo is racing to remove M&M-branded smart vending machines from campus after outraged students discovered the machines were covertly collecting face recognition data without their consent. The scandal started when a student using the alias SquidKid47 posted an image on Reddit showing a campus vending machine error …
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Today marks two years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This week, we detailed the growing crisis in Eastern Ukraine, which is now littered with deadly mines. As it fights back the invading Russian forces, Ukraine’s government is working to develop new mine-clearing technology that could help save …
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The gunshot-detection system ShotSpotter has for years drawn criticism from activists and academics who believe the company behind the system, SoundThinking, places its microphone sensors primarily in low-income communities of color. Now, a WIRED analysis of data leaked from the company reveals the secret locations of ShotSpotter sensors around the …
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A decision by US House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) chair Mike Turner to sound the alarm over space-based Russian military research was far more extraordinary than previously reported. A WIRED review of an internal messaging system used by the United States Congress shows that HPSCI rarely sends members invites to review …
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Apple is launching its first post-quantum protections, one of the biggest deployments of the future-resistant encryption technology to date. Billions of medical records, financial transactions, and messages we send to each other are protected by encryption. It’s fundamental to keeping modern life and the global economy running relatively smoothly. However, …
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When Anne Neuberger stepped into the newly created role of deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology on the White House’s National Security Council at the start of the Biden administration, she was already one of the government’s most experienced cyber veterans. Neuberger spent a decade at the …
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