What the Hack?

Benn Jordan—musician, acoustic scientist, and one of the sharpest minds on surveillance technology—joins 404 Media’s Jason Koebler and the ACLU’s Jay Stanley to trace how surveillance went ambient— and what it means when everyone’s being watched.

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A stranger showed up at Anna Nasset's art gallery with a painting called "Marry Me." She said no. He did not get the message — for 15 years. Now Anna trains law enforcement on stalking, because someone has to explain that "she should be killed" is a red flag.
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Coco Berthmann sold a survival story. Amanda Riley sold a cancer battle. Both were lies that raided communities, wallets, and trust. Journalists Sarah Ganim, Karen Given, and Charlie Webster tell the stories; cognitive scientist Daniel Simons explains why we get taken in.
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Fake screenshots. Burner numbers. Forged emails. A stalker who somehow always knew what a 15-year-old was wearing. Blogger Cathy Holman thought she knew everyone in her tiny Wyoming town—so who's been terrorizing her family?
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Aaron Parnas is the Walter Cronkite of Substack. He has millions of followers who follow him on every platform to get his just-the-facts reporting, but even the most trusted voice on TikTok has some thoughts when it comes to our collective privacy.

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Cybercrime expert Gary Warner joins to discuss Nigerian confraternities, the "campus cults" rooted in idealism that morphed into a multi-billion dollar transnational organized crime network. Learn about the "money blessing," the coded language and insider access, and the elite thug playbook for exploiting trust.
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Ethan Merritt is an WTH alum, but the last time he was on the pod he was the target. This time, he asked for it: Find four flags using only publicly viewable data. Social media posts, podcasts, leaked passwords, a cat-tree video. Listen to hear how we did.
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A teenager rage-hacks a Tetris leaderboard and becomes a millionaire by 18. Now Tal Kollender breaks into companies for a living—and fixes whatever made that possible. We talk about that and Anthropic's Mythos, which is a cyber idyll for our time.
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Marketing visionary Seth Godin explains how the Internet got hijacked by an attention-stealing spam economy that keeps us in an endless loop of badly targeted marketing. Godin's anti-spam playbook: demand companies earn your attention with awesomeness, and break the digital slop loop that broke the Internet.

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A retired Army Colonel becomes the unwitting face of thousands of romance scams. Bryan Denny has been breaking the hearts of people he's never met for years. What do you do when hundreds of crime rings are using your face?

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