At a time when Vladimir Putin is attempting to redraw the Iron Curtain, we revisit an earlier episode in which we take a trip back to the Soviet Union circa 1985 when four American musicians smuggled messages in and out of the Soviet Union — with music.

We return to a conversation we had over the summer with Unit 221B’s Allison Nixon about young cybercriminals, radicalization, and the search for self in the virtual world.

Recently, the US sanctioned a Chinese cybersecurity company and one of its employees who compromised tens of thousands of firewalls worldwide, with potentially deadly consequences. All of this could sound a little familiar to regular listeners. Earlier this year, CLICK HERE reported on a huge leak of internal documents from a private cybersecurity company that pulled back the curtain on the secret world of China’s hacker-for-hire network.

An episode of ‘SHIFT’ from PRX:

AI is being integrated into our technologies at warp speed, but we are only starting to consider how it could be weaponized in the future. The SHIFT podcast talks to Lee Klarich, the chief product officer at Palo Alto Networks, about how AI is both helping and hurting cybersecurity. 

TikTok took down Esma Memtimin’s posts for allegedly violating the platform’s community rules, even though her videos were about little more than stickers and some current events. Just days after TikTok’s Chinese parent company asked a federal court to put a temporary hold on a law that would require ByteDance to sell the app or face a ban in this country, we go back to an episode we did this fall about a mysterious dearth of TikTok posts about subjects Beijing doesn’t like.

We return to an earlier interview we had with Wazawaka, a Russian hacker who, in late 2023, was added to the FBI’s Cyber Most Wanted List. Russian authorities allegedly jailed him late last week — though we saw he was back online a short time later.

An episode from In the Room with Peter Bergen. 

Longtime national security analyst Peter Bergen looks at what President-elect Trump’s return to the White House will likely mean for intelligence gathering as we know it – and whether the conservative Project 2025 will turn out to be the new intelligence gathering playbook. 

This story was originally released before the November election.

Crypto was envisioned as the ultimate democratic currency, the thing that allowed you to buy things without “the man.” But, now the president-elect’s newfound interest means “the man" may be adding bitcoin to the federal reserve. We ask DePaul University professor and former Fed economist Lamont Black what will the digital currency do now?

More from our interview:

https://therecord.media/trump-cryptocurrency-reserve-depaul-lamont-black

Before the invasion of Ukraine, Serhii Zenin was the host of one of the nation’s most popular hard rock radio shows on Radio ROKS 103.6. Some three years later, Serhii is a soldier and Radio ROKS has taken on a whole new role, too.

As Vladimir Putin says the Ukraine war is about to go global, we sat down with former Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Evelyn Farkas. She's now at the McCain Institute. Farkas tells us about the mood in Ukraine during her recent trip, President-elect Trump's claim he could end the Ukraine war in 24 hours, and what's next for the world's first truly hybrid war.

Back in February, Dylan went to the Philippines for what he thought would be a great Chinese Lunar New Year vacation. Then he found himself held hostage in a gang-run scamming compound. We tell one man’s story about getting out and what the Philippines is doing to shut these operations down.