As ever, the NSA often applied the brakes. The Snowden leaks had exposed many of its secret programs and capabilities, forcing the agency to painstakingly rebuild its exploits and infrastructure around the world. Now, Cyber Command risked revealing its surviving programs and new infrastructure. There were frequent debates about the trade-offs of using, and therefore […]
Mike Postle, a 42-year-old poker pro who has been widely accused of cheating on livestreamed games at a Sacramento casino, has never wavered in his claims of innocence. From the moment in late September 2019 when Veronica Brill, a fellow player, tweeted out her suspicion that Postle’s winning streak at Stones Gambling Hall was too […]
Mike Postle was on another tear. The moonfaced 42-year-old was deep into a marathon poker session at Stones Gambling Hall, a boxy glass-and-steel casino wedged between Interstate 80 and a Popeye’s in suburban Sacramento. The September 21, 2019, game, which Stones was broadcasting to audiences via YouTube and Twitch, had attracted several top players to […]
Late last October—before health officials in central China began racing to contain a mysterious outbreak of viral pneumonia, before DIY hand sanitizer tutorials flooded YouTube, before nearly 200,000 people in the US had died of Covid-19—legislators in Pennsylvania came together for a rare moment of bipartisan collaboration. For the first time since 1937, Republicans and […]
One day in early June 2018, Sara-Jayne Terp, a British data scientist, flew from her home in Oregon to Tampa, Florida, to take part in an exercise that the US military was hosting. On the anniversary of D-Day, the US Special Operations Command was gathering a bunch of experts and soldiers for a thought experiment: […]
In the winter of 2017, shortly after STAR-Vote was declared a loss, Josh Benaloh was sitting in his office at Microsoft when he received an email from unusually high up in the chain of command. A team from the company’s Legal and Policy Division wanted Benaloh’s advice on a sensitive idea, which hadn’t been made […]
Three months before Election Day, James Barnes teleconferenced into a strategy meeting about how, exactly, to persuade people not to vote for Donald Trump. The 32-year-old wore his hair loosely gathered in a man bun and had the sober expression of someone who, as a hazard of his occupation, thinks about the president nearly all […]
Weird things happen in and around New York City nearly every day, so the appearance of a suspicious package at George Soros’ residence in Westchester County didn’t initially raise many eyebrows at the FBI‘s hulking New York field office. Late on the evening of Monday, October 22, 2018, the office received an alert known as […]
At around 2:30 on that Friday afternoon, Marcus Hutchins returned from picking up lunch at his local fish-and-chips shop in Ilfracombe, sat down in front of his computer, and discovered that the internet was on fire. “I picked a hell of a fucking week to take off work,” Hutchins wrote on Twitter. Within minutes, a […]
In mid-November, as his House colleagues on Capitol Hill were consumed with questions about Ukraine and impeachment, Senator Mark Warner took to CNBC’s Squawk Box to discuss what he saw as one of the most important problems facing the country: Fitbit. Or, more specifically, the danger of allowing Google to swallow up the personal fitness […]