Founded in 1850 by Allan Pinkerton, a Scottish immigrant that went on to become the first detective in the history of Chicago, the Pinkerton Detective Agency became synonymous in American life with conspiracy theories and violent clandestine activities—and with good reason. Though Pinkerton himself was one of the Union’s first spymasters during the Civil War and foiled an assassination plot on President Lincoln in 1861, he did what every ex-intelligence community type does after wars nowadays: U...
Dec 03, 2020•27 min•Ep 102•Transcript available on Metacast In the second and final episode in a series for CYBER on neo-Nazi terror group the Base, we dive into its origins: The online brainchild of its leader Rinaldo Nazzaro, an ex-Pentagon contractor with alleged links to the Kremlin (which he denies) who began his project for “race war” as a WordPress site that evolved into a secretive, encrypted chat group, then into paramilitary training in the fall of 2018. But shortly after, VICE News broke the first story on the group and authorities began ...
Nov 26, 2020•34 min•Ep 101•Transcript available on Metacast For us, the story of the Base all began in the spring of 2018 when we spotted the Twitter profile picture of a shadowy neo-Nazi who went by the alias ‘Norman Spear.’ The photo was eye catching: He looked severe, with a strong brow and a bushy beard, and tweeted about guerilla warfare and the tactics of insurgency. At the time, Spear also had the attention of some serious operators in the domestic terror space: On Twitter he was followed by and following an assortment of well known, online,...
Nov 19, 2020•23 min•Ep 100•Transcript available on Metacast The last time Phineas Fisher agreed to an interview with Motherboard, they made us recreate the whole thing with a puppet . This time around, Phineas Fisher—one of the world’s most wanted hackers—wanted to make a statement on CYBER to deny he’s an agent of the Kremlin. Phineas Fisher is the hacker’s hacker that nobody knows. In fact, nobody even knows if they are just one person, or several people. All we know is Phineas Fisher has hacked, embarrassed, and exposed so...
Nov 12, 2020•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast What is going on? Why is it going on? Is this actually real? Disinformation in the election was always going to be a thing, and well, it was. Today on Cyber, Ben Makuch and Jason Koebler discuss the state of play and why we're here, Iranian hackers, and mass conspiracies on twitter. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Nov 05, 2020•22 min•Ep 99•Transcript available on Metacast Is Antifa even a thing? Ahead of an election positioned as “us” versus “them,” the specter of “Antifa” has become an easy boogeyman to either accept or reject out of hand. VICE News takes a serious look at what it is and what it is not. VICE News Correspondent Alzo Slade reports from across the country. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Nov 04, 2020•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast You know, if you haven’t heard, in the last few years there’s been a lot of discussion around America’s problems with systemic white supremacism and well, white nationalists. Everybody remembers that day in Charlottesville and the problems with the far-right we’ve seen since. Especially during this 2020 election season. In her new book Culture Warlords , journalist Talia Lavin goes undercover to expose the underworld of online fascists, Nazis, and Trump trolls alike. Hosted on Acast. See acast.c...
Oct 29, 2020•35 min•Ep 98•Transcript available on Metacast Vince Ramos wanted Phantom Secure to be the Uber of privacy-focused, luxury-branded phones—flood the market with devices, and sort out the law later. Then the FBI investigated him. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Oct 22, 2020•35 min•Ep 97•Transcript available on Metacast This week, we talk to Jek, a physical penetration tester whose job is to infiltrate offices, data centers, store stockrooms, and other supposedly "secure" locations and either steal information or install a tool so that other hackers can exfiltrate data. She relies on the most reliable vulnerability of all: human weakness. Jek tells host Ben Makuch how she does it, some of her most memorable operations, and why other hackers think that what she does is "witchcraft." Hosted on Acast. See acast.co...
Oct 15, 2020•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this age of social collapse and modern plague it’s easy to forget that the 2016 Presidential Election was a clusterfuck of gargantuan proportions. Never before (then) had an election campaign for the highest office in the country become not only a drama, but a media spectacle with a shocking finale. Russian spies. Secret payoffs. Wikileaks. Guccifer 2.0 . War in Ukraine. Election interference. All spelling (maybe?), the first chapter in the ending to the American Experiment? HBO has released ...
Oct 08, 2020•48 min•Ep 96•Transcript available on Metacast Audio deepfakes are getting more convincing than ever. To test this out, we’ve replaced our host Ben Makuch with a robotic clone of himself. Sponsored by NeXt. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Oct 01, 2020•43 min•Ep 95•Transcript available on Metacast A thriller about a Silicon Valley pioneer who joins forces with a Special Agent to stop the A.I. he created from destroying humanity. Starting October 6th, NEXT airs every Tuesday at 9/8c on FOX. On this episode of Cyber, in partnership with FOX, we sit down with the show’s creator Manny Coto to talk about the inspiration for this thriller A.I. Coto’s history as a horror and science fiction writer is on display in NEXT. He got the idea for his show about a rogue AI when a smart device in hi...
Sep 24, 2020•24 min•Ep 94•Transcript available on Metacast It’s been a pretty bad PR year for the world’s most popular ride-share app… And unsurprisingly it has poured money into good news stories, to kick up warm fuzzy feelings about a company that has been found, time and again, to not care very much about its drivers. Enter a CNBC paid partnership story about an UberEats driver who is about to make 100k a year. The American Dream, right? Not so, says Motherboard reporter Edward Ongweso who broke down the falsities of this rather suspect piece of news...
Sep 17, 2020•29 min•Ep 93•Transcript available on Metacast Since the War on Terror kicked off, the military and spy industrial complex has boomed. That also includes a growth in the literal number of spies from agencies like the NSA and CIA, all serving tours, then often entering the private sector. Since then, we’ve seen how things like corporate espionage and the techniques multibillion dollar entities deploy in their interests, have seriously taken off from the trickle down of said veterans entering the workforce Now, we’re in a situation where every...
Sep 10, 2020•40 min•Ep 92•Transcript available on Metacast It almost reads like a dystopian plot from a sci-fi novel, playing out in the not-so-distant future. A major world government relies on a defective and cruel algorithm for debt collection, to extort money out of its most vulnerable citizens who were already on social assistance. Or to put it more succinctly: state-sponsored shakedowns via Artificial Intelligence, that ends up being so flawed it results in the country taking hundreds of millions of dollars from its own people. Sounds unreal...
Sep 03, 2020•36 min•Ep 91•Transcript available on Metacast The tale started with an encrypted phone company, Morroccan gangsters, the Scottish mafia, and a blogger. It ended with an assassination outside of a sex club in Amsterdam. Last week, Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox broke the news that MPC—a Scottish company that hawked special encrypted phones that could evade police surveillance—had been connected to the murder of crime blogger Martin Kok. Kok was a former criminal himself who had previously served a jail sentence for two murders. Kok’s c...
Aug 27, 2020•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Content Warning: Descriptions of Sexually Explicit Acts Introducing VENT Documentaries from VICE UK: Young people from London, telling you the stories they care about. In this episode, Khalil grew up with homophobic parents, so he had to learn about being gay on his own. From making Sims characters have gay sex to signing up to online sexting forums, Khalil tells the sometimes hilarious, sometimes graphic and sometimes painful story of what it’s like to come into your queerness on the ...
Aug 26, 2020•18 min•Transcript available on Metacast By the year 2000 people started believing, in the advent of widespread email culture, that the United States Postal Service was doomed. Conservatives and business types argued that it was a bloated institution.But it’s not. In fact, it’s a vital, robust network that is literally a failsafe in the doomsday plans of the federal government. These days, while people may not be sending many letters or postcards, the USPS is an essential service helping us vote, get our medicine and deliver us package...
Aug 20, 2020•41 min•Ep 90•Transcript available on Metacast Some people think they’re just a vestige of a bygone era, but they’re not. In fact, nuclear weapons remain the everlasting threat they were when we first introduced them to planet earth: An existential nightmare wherein we possess the ability to obliterate our own planet, many times over, with the push of a button. So this week we have friend of the show and Motherboard contributor Matthew Gault to talk nukes. America’s arsenal is being updated; Russia has (probably) hypersonic missiles; an...
Aug 13, 2020•48 min•Ep 89•Transcript available on Metacast He’s a vigilante that goes by the alias Gamerdoc. He infiltrates secret online chatrooms to hunt down wrongdoing and the dishonest who prey upon and exploit the system. His target you might ask? The many cheating gamers out there who are using flawed code to be really good at titles like Valorant and Overwatch .here’s a huge underbelly of cheating gamers out there who trade and sell gaming cheat codes, the zero-days of the video gaming world, to get to God Mode without the hours of practice...
Aug 06, 2020•37 min•Ep 88•Transcript available on Metacast The US has accused Russia and China of trying to hack research groups that are working on a coronavirus vaccine. Is that a bad thing? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jul 30, 2020•18 min•Ep 87•Transcript available on Metacast Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai hosts this special episode of Cyber. He's joined by Joseph Cox, who reported on the Twitter hack that had the accounts of Elon Musk, Joe Biden, and Apple amongst others tweet out a cryptocurrency scam. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jul 23, 2020•36 min•Ep 86•Transcript available on Metacast It’s a tale as old as our digital era: Tech enthusiasts wanting to repair their devices without the authorization of the company that makes them. Apple, for example, is notoriously awful at allowing users access to easy fixes of iPhones or Macbooks and instead offers expensive options with one of its “geniuses.” And like everything in our society, the current pandemic has exposed these right to repairs practises for what they are: Ridiculous. Our Motherboard EIC Jason Koebler is here to tel...
Jul 16, 2020•46 min•Ep 85•Transcript available on Metacast It’s straight out of a hacking thriller: drug dealers. Murderers. Extortionists. Traffickers. Hit men. All using an encrypted network to openly talk about their illicit trades, amassing millions in messages. Then, like the magical hacks of a CSI cyber episode, the cops were in the network and went on the offensive. In one of his wildest stories to date, and that’s saying something, we have the great Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox on the show this week to tell us all about his wild cybercr...
Jul 09, 2020•29 min•Ep 84•Transcript available on Metacast It used to be that American hackers and the NSA were the unquestionable world’s best. Following the many revelations from the Snowden leaks, it became clear the U.S. government had not only violated the civil liberties of American citizens, but the NSA had done an excellent job hacking, well, everything. It hacked the phones of world leaders ( including key allies ) and made major geopolitical rivals China and Russia very nervous. But, like everything else in the world, American hegemony in cybe...
Jul 02, 2020•39 min•Ep 83•Transcript available on Metacast The US government is in a race with China to provide the world with 5G networks. Some call it the new arms race, as both Washington and Beijing go from country to country trying to negotiate for its companies to provide the future of the internet’s architecture. Part of that has been Trump himself slagging Huawei and undermining the Chinese company as national security risk: The allegation being the company would give the Chinese government a mainline into spying on countries across the world. W...
Jun 25, 2020•50 min•Ep 82•Transcript available on Metacast On CYBER this week, we’re talking about a novel that frightfully depicts a not-so-distant future where FBI agents work with robot partners and terrorists meet up inside video games. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jun 18, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Ep 81•Transcript available on Metacast Back in 2011 during Occupy Wall Street protests, a certain hacktivist collective truly came into its own. The years since Anonymous exploded in popularity and even became the constant pop culture reference point to all hacktivism or even, just hackers. But as we’ve discussed on the show, lately, it kind of seems to have disappeared. Until the latest Black Lives Matter protests seems to have kicked it back into the headlines. I got Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Francheschi Bicchierrai on the ...
Jun 11, 2020•32 min•Ep 80•Transcript available on Metacast Well, it’s a hell of a time to be alive. After a brutalizing pandemic, fit with stay at home orders and government indecision, something else happened. The cold blooded murder of unarmed black man George Floyd by a white cop in Minneapolis has set off unprecedent protests demanding racial equality and an end to police violence against people of color. But instead of quelling these protests with actionable change, it appears the government is just spying on them. We’ve got evidence that now the i...
Jun 04, 2020•23 min•Ep 79•Transcript available on Metacast If you’ve been listening to the news, chances are you’ve heard about it incessantly: contact tracing. But what is it exactly? And what are the surveillance and privacy issues surrounding it? Will yet another app that tracks your movements really be the key to ending the pandemic? Today we got Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Francheschi Bicchierai on the show to tell you everything you need to know about contact tracing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
May 28, 2020•37 min•Ep 78•Transcript available on Metacast 
