Who is an animal activist? What do they do? Described as “the most dangerous animal rights organization out there,” Direct Action Everywhere (or DxE) hopes to expose the controversial practices of the factory farm industry. A self-described “global grassroots network of animal rights activists,” DxE engages in non-violent forms of protest as a way of both educating the public and pushing reform. WIRED Senior Writer Andy Greenberg learned more about the people who make up this network of activists and their operations.

In Part I of this two part story, we talk to Wayne Hsuing, co-founder and activist of DxE, as he describes the groups’ origin and his involvement in Operation Deathstar -- a sting operation (with a full Virtual Reality camera rig), in hope of bringing awareness to the practices of industrialized farming.

On this special episode of Get WIRED, WIRED’s Editor-at-large, Steven Levy talks with Bill Gates— philanthropist and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. At the start of the pandemic, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation pledged more than $1 billion to vaccine development, and $100 million of that is specifically for Covid-19 vaccines. Meanwhile, he’s also become the target of conspiracy theories related to the coronavirus. They discuss everything from the US response to the pandemic, to a timeline when things might go back to “normal.” They also cover the recent Big Tech antitrust hearings, and of course, they talk about TikTok!

On the latest episode of the Get WIRED podcast, we attend a Virtual Beings Summit and contemplate what it means to be human. WIRED staff writer Emma Grey Ellis reports on how virtual beings are taking over our timelines—sometimes, without our even noticing.

Facial recognition tech has been critiqued for being inaccurate for a while now. But its problems became pretty clear last month, when the New York Times reported a story about a Black man named Robert Williams who was identified incorrectly as a suspect in a crime. In this episode, WIRED Senior Staff Writer Sidney Fussell, who covers surveillance technology, traces racialized surveillance tech to its origins, as far back as slavery and early prison designs. He draws parallels between the intentional, all-seeing design of the panopticon and the omni-present cameras that surround us today — and explains how these kinds of systems become so flawed in the first place.

The idea behind the Citizen app is that its users upload videos of the things that are going on in the neighborhood in real time — anything from as a gas leak to something potentially a lot more violent. It's an app built on the premise that the more information a community has the better off it is, but it also comes with all of the trappings and problems of a lot of community surveillance — the app has some toxic comments, it can lead to racial profiling, and it has sparked a lot of discussion about who’s benefitting most from all of these neighborhood alerts — the users, law enforcement, or Citizen itself. WIRED's Boone Ashworth has spent months on the Citizen app, trying to better understand exactly what its mission is, and what this kind of hyper-vigilance does to our psyches. But he's also been talking to people who are on the app, who rush to the scene to capture what’s going on in their neighborhoods; and he found one who is particularly interesting, and who agreed to take us behind the scenes.

From our first episode "Citizen and the Bizarre World of Live-Streamed Crime", WIRED's Boone Ashworth introduces us to a surprising superuser of this neighborhood watch app.

This is the trailer for Get WIRED. Subscribe to get new episodes every Monday @ 6AM.

Introducing Get WIRED: the must-listen-to tech podcast that sets the agenda for the week. Hosted by WIRED Senior Writer Lauren Goode, our brand new podcast launches on July 20th. Subscribe to get episodes right when they drop at 6 am EST.

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