Loading summary
Transcript137 lines
- [00:03]
Dina Temple Raston
From Recorded Future News and PRX, this is click here. It was just before dawn, August 2015. Nabdu Ali Ayyub sat in the passenger seat of a borrowed car, watching the road disappear behind him. He was anxious, keeping an eye on the rearview Mirro. He hadn't really slept in days. And when he did, he slept with his shoes on, in case the police came to take him away in the middle of the night.
- [00:41]
Abdullah Ali Ayyub
Because, like, if they come directly to arrest me, I should be prepared. Because in the jail it's really cold and nobody will help you. So I slept just like that.
- [00:58]
Dina Temple Raston
He'd already been arrested once for something that didn't sound like much of a crime. He'd tried to open a kindergarten, just a place where children could learn in their own language, the Uyghur language. But in northwest China, even that had become dangerous. Uyghur books were banned, cultural centers shuttered. People were watched and tracked. Even a children's school could be seen as a threat. This wasn't just censorship. It was something deeper. A systematic attack to erase a people. Abdoulaye had been caught in that wave. Arrested, beaten, silenced. When he was finally released more than a year later, he understood prison wasn't the end of his punishment. It was a warning. So he decided to make a break for it.
- [01:57]
Abdullah Ali Ayyub
I just feel like somebody is following us. I was just keep looking at the mirror.
- [02:03]
Dina Temple Raston
The man behind the wheel tried to reassure him.
- [02:06]
Abdullah Ali Ayyub
Nothing will happen. Yeah, no one. No one following us. And I have friends in the police and they will help you.
- [02:20]
Dina Temple Raston
That man was at Parasat in another country. He might have been called a tech visionary or a civic innovator. He was the founder of Bagdash, a kind of Uyghur Facebook, A digital town square for sharing art, music and memories.
- [02:36]
Abdullah Ali Ayyub
Yeah, it was voice for Uyghurs at that time. Like a chance for the Uyghurs to express their feelings. Because the traditional media restricted any contents related to Uyghur history. Uyghur culture. But the Internet is little bit flex.
- [02:58]
Dina Temple Raston
Online, the rules about what Uyghurs could or couldn't say seemed fuzzier. Write something controversial in state media, you could get arrested.
- [03:07]
Abdullah Ali Ayyub
But online, the consequences is just delete the post. Just delete the post.
- [03:15]
Dina Temple Raston
Ekbar knew how to navigate all that, and he mentored others like Abdoulaye, so they could do the same.
- [03:22]
Abdullah Ali Ayyub
He said that, like, if we keep that red line, polices are understandable. We can work with them. He told me we can work with the police.
- [03:32]
Dina Temple Raston
The morning of that anxious ride. Ekbar had arranged everything. The ride, the flight, the COVID story.
- [03:40]
Abdullah Ali Ayyub
I insisted not to do that, but he insisted. He insisted. He said that I want to see you leave safely. Let me do it. He was the only person I have seen. The last day I left China. His face still. His face so innocent.
- [04:05]
Dina Temple Raston
Finally safe in his seat on the plane, Abdoulaye sent Akbar one last message.
- [04:12]
Abdullah Ali Ayyub
I am on the plane. Please take care of yourself. That was my last message. After that, I deleted him from my phone.
- [04:26]
Dina Temple Raston
It was the last time he ever saw Akbar. From recorded Future News in prx. I'm Dina Templewasten and this is Click Here. A podcast about all things cyber and intelligence. We tell true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world. And today, part three of our series on modern authoritarianism. Last week, we told you how the Chinese government had turned Xinjiang province into a laboratory for surveillance. Tracking phones, scanning faces, mapping entire social circles. This week, the story of Akbar Assad, a Uyghur tech visionary who created online what Beijing was trying to erase in real life, a space for his people to connect, to, share and preserve their culture. The government's answer was to take that space and turn it into a weapon. And the tactics they perfected on Akbar and the Uyghur community are no longer just confined to Xinjiang. They're being sold, adopted, and deployed far beyond China's borders. It's a story about technology, yes, but it's also about a sister fighting for the brother who inspired her and for the freedoms that surveillance threatens everywhere. Stay with us. Elon Musk, Doge and Donald Trump are weaving a web of technological corruption. Suddenly, the eyes of the industry are open to things that had been obvious to lots of other people for months. Isn't it a conflict of interest that the President of the United States who regulates crypto has his own coin? I'm Lizzie o', Leary, the host of what Next? Tbd, Slate's podcast about tech, power and the future. What Next? TBD covers the latest on how Silicon Valley is changing our government and our lives. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
- [06:32]
Recorded Future News Announcer
For.
- [06:32]
Dina Temple Raston
Recorded future news, this is Click Here. I'm Dina Temple Rouston. Before Bagdash, before the website, before any of that. Reihan Assad, Akbar's older sister, remembers apples.
- [06:51]
Reihan Assad
Maybe we were like five, six years old. Like, my mom would give me two apples, and one is intentionally bigger than the other. And then she asked me to choose, which one would you want to give it to your brother? And I would choose the small one. For myself and would give the bigger one to my brother.
- [07:11]
Dina Temple Raston
It wasn't just a lesson in generosity. It was something deeper, A way to teach them where their loyalty should lie.
- [07:19]
Reihan Assad
And whenever I have problem, I will come to my parents. And the first thing my mom would say, have you consulted with your brother? I later asked my mom, like, why did you do that? And she had this idea that, you know, parents obviously, like, they're not gonna be with us for a long time, but if she can cultivate this incredibly strong friendship between the two of us, then we could be each other's best friend in this life.
- [07:48]
Dina Temple Raston
And they were like, when Reyhan didn't have a date for a wedding or a school party, Akbar stepped in.
- [07:54]
Reihan Assad
He would be my standing date for whatever fun night that we, you know, would. We could think of. You know, if I'm having a relationship problem, like, he would be somebody that I would be turning to for advice.
- [08:10]
Dina Temple Raston
And when she thinks back on those years, there's one image that always comes to mind. Akbar, barely a teen, sitting in front of a massive, boxy computer monitor, the kind that looks like it belongs in a science museum.
- [08:24]
Reihan Assad
Now, the computer overpowered him. So he's like this. A tiny teenager sitting in front of this chunky computer. This, like, a red tie that is.
- [08:39]
Dina Temple Raston
Like, you know, when you was curious, quiet, focused, and already in love with machines, that made sense to him even when the rest of the world didn't. Rayhan remembers bringing him to a friend's apartment. Her friend had a computer problem no one seemed to be able to fix. She'd taken it to tech shops, asking around. Nothing. So Reihan thought maybe her little brother could take a look.
- [09:07]
Reihan Assad
And she thought that, you know, I'm gonna make this nice tea and, like, gonna make small snacks for us so we get to catch up while he's fixing. But he fixed it in, like, 10 minutes. Like, so quickly. It's something that's so broken. And she's like, this is unbelievable. He was the kind of guy who's interested in understanding how to fix things, right?
- [09:34]
Dina Temple Raston
And over time, the things he wanted to fix got bigger. They had no way of knowing it then, but those afternoons spent huddled around the glitchy computers, those quiet conversations over tea, they were rehearsals for something bigger. Because as Akbar grew older and the world around him shifted, he began to notice something was off. Not just in the machines he loved to fix, but in the larger system around him, the one that crushed the people who tried to question it. Akbar had grown up in Urumqi, a City in China's far northwest, populated mostly by the country's Muslim minority. It's a place where the signs were in his language and the faces looked like his, and where being Uyghur wasn't something you had to explain. But when he went online, it was a different story. The Uyghur language is hard to find. So was Uyghur music or art or news. The digital world was in Mandarin, and the space for Uyghurs to express themselves barely existed. So he did what he always did. He started trying to fix that. It started in college, a simple website, a side project. He called it Bagdash.
- [10:53]
Reihan Assad
So when he started, BagDash.com was sort of like a college passion project. And it started to grow.
- [11:02]
Dina Temple Raston
The name itself was a kind of message. Bagdash is a type of tree.
- [11:06]
Reihan Assad
Bagdash is known as this kind of like a tree is known for its endurance of all sorts of seasons in life, right? Just like embodiment of different history, historical periods in which people's resilience really comes through.
- [11:27]
Dina Temple Raston
And that's what this was. A project about endurance, about building something strong enough to survive. Bagdash wasn't designed to go viral. It was designed to hold memory, to give people a place to see their culture reflected back at them. It started essentially as a blog and then grew from there.
- [11:48]
Reihan Assad
You write about different things, but there's another section. He would publish Uyghur music so that people get to know the rich culture in Uyghur music. So he started off just doing some something as simple as that. But he realized that, what if we connect people?
- [12:14]
Dina Temple Raston
It was a kind of home, one that lived online just outside Beijing's grasp. Bagdash welcomes you.
- [12:23]
Reihan Assad
We hope you enjoy your time on Bagdash.
- [12:27]
Dina Temple Raston
And it caught on. Eckhar knew that if he wanted Bagdash to survive, he had to grow it into something sustainable. But his parents didn't quite see it that way.
- [12:39]
Reihan Assad
In China, like parents would think that, especially if you're from a Uyghur family, what is the most conservative but also solid job that you don't get into trouble?
- [12:50]
Dina Temple Raston
To them, a government job was safe, predictable. Bagdash wasn't. But Reihan knew what her brother was building and more importantly, who he was becoming.
- [13:02]
Reihan Assad
He's a leader in his own right. He already has very loyal followers, people who want to contribute to the vision that he has.
- [13:11]
Dina Temple Raston
So she sat down with her parents and made the case. Let him do this, she told them, or risk watching him walk away from the One thing that gave him purpose.
- [13:21]
Reihan Assad
You need to let him pursue his passion. Otherwise, like, you know, he won't be committed to what he's doing.
- [13:28]
Dina Temple Raston
Eventually, they agreed, but there was a catch.
- [13:33]
Reihan Assad
And my parents finally came around. Under one condition. Which is? There's no financial support for him to do what he wants to do.
- [13:42]
Dina Temple Raston
No money, no safety net, just permission. So at 22, Akbar set out on his own. No investors, no incubator, just an idea and a mattress on the floor. He rented a small apartment, barely more.
- [13:57]
Reihan Assad
Than four concrete walls, completely unfurnished to the point that the walls are still like a cement. Like, you know, it's not even painted walls.
- [14:08]
Dina Temple Raston
He cooked in a makeshift kitchen, slept beside his modem and coated Bagdash at all hours. A dreamer, yes, but practical enough to know that if Bagdash was going to survive, it needed funding, not venture capital. He wasn't chasing money. He was building something for his community. So he turned to that community. He went to Uyghur businesses, restaurants, tailors, bookstores. People building something of their own.
- [14:34]
Reihan Assad
He would reach out to this small, medium sized company and say, like, you know, you obviously doing a wonderful job, but your product is not known until it's seen on the Internet.
- [14:48]
Dina Temple Raston
It was grassroots, One pitch at a time. He'd cold call business owners, walk into storefronts, demo the site right there on his phone. He even left blank space on the homepage, rows of empty rectangles that simply read, your ad could go here. It was a kind of silent invitation. A bet. If I build it, maybe you'll come. And slowly, they did. Restaurants bought banners, schools ran promos. Bagdash started earning enough to cover hosting fees, a faster connection, better equipment. It wasn't flashy, but it was working. Soon, Bagdash outgrew that cold cinder block apartment, and Ekbar moved into proper office space. He hired nearly a dozen people. He even signed up interns.
- [15:38]
Reihan Assad
There's a lot of years of grinding, just growing the platform to what it became known in the Uyghur homeland. The leading platform in terms of social media.
- [15:52]
Dina Temple Raston
A social network built from scratch for a people quietly being erased. An achievement in any context, but especially in this one. Because building something like Bagdash in a place like Xinjiang wasn't just ambitious, it was dangerous. Every new feature, every post, every piece of code had to walk a line. Say too much and the government might shut you down. Say too little, and your own community might wonder whether you'd already given in. The first test came from a city called Guja, a Teacher there had filed a complaint. She said she had been sexually harassed by the principal of her school. She took the case to court, and she lost and then lost her job. So she turned to the only place that might still listen, the platform Ekbar had built. She logged onto Bagdash and told her story. The post spread. People saw it, and instead of staying silent, they spoke up, too.
- [16:57]
Reihan Assad
People were saying, like they were actually commanding her for her courage to speak up, her vulnerability. And also, like just speaking truth to power.
- [17:08]
Dina Temple Raston
More and more people joined in, not just with likes or emojis, but with real words, real names, A kind of digital rallying cry in a place where even quiet dissent is seen as defiance. And Reyhan felt it, the way a single pose could shift everything. She was studying in Canada by then, keeping an eye on Ekbar from afar. She watched the comments stacking up, the silence from authorities stretching on just a little too long, and she started to worry.
- [17:41]
Reihan Assad
I got really scared. I called him and I said, are you okay?
- [17:46]
Dina Temple Raston
Because she knew her brother. She knew how much he believed in giving people a voice, but she also knew what it might cost him. But when she reached out, he wasn't panicked. He was thinking about her, actually.
- [18:00]
Reihan Assad
And he said, like, if this, God forbid, if this happened to you, I want you to be able to share this and get the kind of support that you need. And this is what she did, so I'm going to support her no matter what.
- [18:17]
Dina Temple Raston
So he left the post up, and then he just waited. Then something unexpected. The principal was fired, and the teacher got her job back.
- [18:28]
Reihan Assad
It also sparked a conversation around these kind of sensitive issues. And, you know, the government officials even ended up visiting my brother and kind of commended him for doing the right thing.
- [18:39]
Dina Temple Raston
They applauded him for not letting it become something more incendiary, for walking that.
- [18:44]
Reihan Assad
Fine line to navigate the system in a way that keeps helping people while at the same time, protecting himself.
- [18:54]
Dina Temple Raston
It looked like Akbar had found a way to make it work. He hadn't just built a platform. He'd built trust. With his users, with his community, and even, it seemed, with the state. But in Xinjiang, balance is fleeting. In silence doesn't always mean safety. That's when we come back. Stay with us.
- [19:32]
Recorded Future News Announcer
In cybersecurity, your greatest fear isn't the threats you see. It's the critical signals lost in the noise. And every day, security teams sort through millions of potential threats. That's why recorded future exists, to give you precision, intelligence tuned to your needs. Our advanced AI detects patterns humans might miss While our threat intelligence experts, veterans of military and intelligence services provide crucial context with recorded future, you gain the confidence to identify critical threats and the precision to act before they become attacks. Learn why 1900 + customers, including 45 + sovereign governments, trust us to detect threats faster and achieve 350% plus ROI within a year.
- [20:35]
Dina Temple Raston
The trouble began, as it so often does, with a news report. Word got around that two Uyghur men, thousands of miles from home had been killed at a toy factory in southern China. And on July 5, 2009, that rumor reached Urumqi. Thousands of Uyghurs took to the streets. They wanted answers. They wanted justice. And in the beginning, the marches were peaceful. But then something cracked. Stones were thrown. Police responded with a brutal crackdown. And by nightfall, Urumqi was no longer a city. It was a scream. Official reports would later say nearly 200 people were killed. Half were Han Chinese and the other half were Uyghur. Beijing called it ethnic violence, Uyghur against Han Chinese. And then came this silence. The government shut everything down. The Internet, the phone lines, the digital heartbeat of the region. And with it, Bagdash disappeared too. Not because it had caused the protests. It didn't. But because social media had carried the spark.
- [21:43]
Reihan Assad
How that uprising happened in the first place is also through like, sort of like a social media mobilization. People got to learn that there is a protest taking place in Urumqi.
- [21:55]
Dina Temple Raston
For a brief moment, Bagdash had been a bridge, a town square, a respite, one that the Chinese government tolerated. Until it didn't. The crackdown began with police pouring into Uyghur neighborhoods and rounding up more than 1,400 men. Checkpoints appeared like weeds. Facial recognition cameras perched like hawks from every lamppost. And they sharpened the algorithms, clocking things that used to be just life as a beards, headscarves, overseas calls, deleted apps, born travel. Now all of that was considered evidence. And in the middle of this tightening came an unexpected reprieve. An invitation. In 2016, the US State Department offered Ekbar a spot in a leadership program. Three weeks in America to study civil society journalism, the open Internet. It seemed impossible that Beijing would allow him to go. But somehow they did.
- [22:56]
Reihan Assad
My brother had to navigate the incredibly difficult world of getting a passport. As a Uyghur person, you have to get a stamp from 18 different government organizations, and you have to pledge that your religion is only the Communist Party. All these sort of things.
- [23:13]
Dina Temple Raston
And then, like something out of a dream, he was on a plane landing in America. He squeezed into a Formula One race car in Florida. He cheered at an NBA game in Indiana.
- [23:23]
Recorded Future News Announcer
Here comes Indiana.
- [23:26]
Dina Temple Raston
He took a selfie under the CNN logo in Atlanta, grinning like a kid.
- [23:31]
Reihan Assad
This is cnn.
- [23:35]
Dina Temple Raston
Ray Hun was finishing her final year at Harvard Law School. By then, she was knee deep in finals. But she dropped everything and caught a late bus to New York just to see him.
- [23:45]
Reihan Assad
And by the time I got to, his hotel was really, really late. And so we got something from a deli. I bought some ice cream, just like, you know.
- [23:55]
Dina Temple Raston
They sat on the bed, talked and laughed, passing the spoon back and forth like kids. She was happy to see him, excited to catch up. But she was also there on a mission. She had been watching the crackdown from afar, and she wanted to warn him about the red lines that were moving from beneath his feet, about the storm she saw coming.
- [24:16]
Reihan Assad
I told him, because I'm in overseas, the kind of information that I have access to is very different than the kind of information he would have access to.
- [24:25]
Dina Temple Raston
He waved it off.
- [24:27]
Reihan Assad
He talked about, like, you know, how economically China is very prosperous, so there are a lot of opportunities for individuals like him, uyghur entrepreneurs, Uyghur CEOs.
- [24:41]
Dina Temple Raston
Where she saw a noose tightening, he saw a path forward. Where she saw risk, he saw possibility. She wasn't sure he appreciated just how dangerous things had become. Don't let your guard down while you're here. She said, they have spies everywhere. And he nodded and said he would. They'd waited so long to see each other, and now they were finally in the same room, talking. It felt so easy, so familiar. Rayhan didn't want the night to end.
- [25:11]
Reihan Assad
And I told him I want to stay. I'm like, I don't want to leave, but what should I do? And he's like, no, no, no, no. Go, go, go, go. You know, school is very important.
- [25:23]
Dina Temple Raston
Besides, he said, we'll see each other again in just a couple of months. He'd bring their parents. They don't watch her walk across the Harvard Law stage together.
- [25:32]
Reihan Assad
So we're gonna visit, like, California, go on this road trip. Like, he'll be driving. And, you know, we had this, like, a very, very. Just a vision for the next few months, right? Like, it's a beautiful vision, us as a family together.
- [25:50]
Dina Temple Raston
Early the next morning, he walked her to the bus station. And then just before they said goodbye, he pulled something from his bag and a copy of his State Department itinerary.
- [25:59]
Reihan Assad
And he had an extra copy. And he's like, why don't you keep this as a souvenir.
- [26:06]
Dina Temple Raston
It was a list of his stops across the country and the officials he'd met, with phone numbers and emails and names. She tucked it into her bag without thinking, waved goodbye, and boarded a bus back to Boston. Three weeks later, after he returned to China, Akbar vanished. His phone calls went unanswered. His messages stopped. It was like he'd been erased.
- [26:33]
Reihan Assad
Then it took me a bit of time to realize, like, what happened to him. My parents were too scared to even tell me.
- [26:43]
Dina Temple Raston
Eventually, word came he'd been arrested. There was no evidence, no trial, no real explanation. He was just gone. When we reached out to the Chinese Embassy about his case, they said they'd never even heard of Akbar. But our sources told us the government did charge him, and that charge was inciting ethnic hatred. Reihan felt helpless. She was thousands of miles away, a lowly law student with no title or influence, with no idea what to do next. Until she remembered that souvenir. The State Department itinerary Akbar had handed her when he was in the States.
- [27:25]
Reihan Assad
Like maybe God was trying to tell me something. I just didn't listen.
- [27:29]
Dina Temple Raston
Whether souvenir or sign, it was strategic. It gave her a place to start.
- [27:35]
Reihan Assad
That brochure has everything.
- [27:37]
Dina Temple Raston
It was like he left you a map.
- [27:39]
Reihan Assad
Exactly. Exactly.
- [27:41]
Dina Temple Raston
Because inside were the names and numbers of people at the State Department. Ngo. Staffers, organizers. So Rahan began desperately cold, calling every name on the list.
- [27:53]
Reihan Assad
I met with the State Department officials, told them what happened. I asked them, I said, can you privately advocate for him?
- [27:59]
Dina Temple Raston
They told her, in situations like this, it's often better not to be too loud. That can harden the captor's position, their recommendation to just wait it out.
- [28:11]
Reihan Assad
You know, they might release him in the next few months or a year. Like you don't know what's going on. They might just make sure that he, like, you know, just like a few months of discussion, they would let him go, right?
- [28:24]
Dina Temple Raston
So she waited, dreading what might come. She knew how the system worked in China, how arbitrary it could be. And on the long list of reasons the Chinese government targets people. Ekbar had checked one of the boxes. Foreign travel.
- [28:40]
Reihan Assad
There are 48 ways that people can be sent into the camps or in prison or targeted. And people who have traveled abroad. You know, they said, you're being infiltrated with certain ideology.
- [28:55]
Dina Temple Raston
As if you could catch freedom the way you catch a cold. Scraps of information trickled in now and then. Rumors and shadows, but nothing changed. Months stretched into a year, then two, then four. The silence itself became a kind of torture.
- [29:16]
Reihan Assad
My biggest worry has been like, oh, like he thinks that I forgot about him or the world has forgotten about him. I just wish he knows that I haven't forgotten about him.
- [29:28]
Dina Temple Raston
After years of carrying that guilt and fear, she couldn't keep it in any longer. Reyhan made a decision. Four years after he was arrested, she decided it was time to tell the world what had happened to Ekbar.
- [29:41]
Reihan Assad
So I started contact the media outlets, and media was hugely interested in this story, especially with the connection with the State Department and what happened to him.
- [29:50]
Dina Temple Raston
She told the New York Times everything, all about Akbar, the visit to America, the charges, the silencing of the Uyghur Internet. And they ran a major story. It was a turning point. For the first time in years, people were saying Akbar's name out loud. And others began to listen. There were op eds, diplomatic inquiries, meetings at the un, two visits to the Trump White House.
- [30:15]
Reihan Assad
I hope, as the US and China continue to engage and find some sort of common ground, he would become part of some sort of exchange deal and they would secure his release.
- [30:30]
Dina Temple Raston
And there was reason to hope. Just this spring, the Trump administration freed 15 political prisoners in Belarus. And it proved that deals like that could happen. A few months ago, something unexpected happened. Her parents were granted a visit with Ekbar. It had been more than a year since they'd seen their son, more than a year since anyone had. And the visit took place at Aksu Prison, one of the most notorious facilities in Xinjiang. Not just because of its isolation, but because of what happens inside. There are allegations of torture, political indoctrination, forced confessions. It took them 12 hours by train.
- [31:21]
Reihan Assad
Ladies and gentlemen, we welcome you aboard the high speed rail EMU trains.
- [31:27]
Dina Temple Raston
Then came the layers of security. Three checkpoints in all, and finally, just a few minutes face to face. They smiled, told him they were fine, and he smiled back and said he was fine too. But they could see it. Even for someone as relentlessly optimistic as their son, the prison was wearing on him.
- [31:48]
Reihan Assad
I think that that was really painful for my parents. What did he do to deserve like, this level of cruelty?
- [31:56]
Dina Temple Raston
Partway through their short conversation, he asked about Rehan.
- [32:02]
Reihan Assad
He said to my parents, is that I know my sister. She put her life on hold for me and I don't want her to do that.
- [32:09]
Dina Temple Raston
It's advice her friends had given her too, that she has to move on and, and reclaim her life.
- [32:15]
Reihan Assad
And my friends told me that if I don't, then I'm allowing the Chinese government to imprison both of us. But it's incredibly hard because you know what they're going through, like, so much worse than we can ever imagine. And it's so much easier said than done.
- [32:37]
Dina Temple Raston
Psychologists have a term for what Reyhan is living through when someone is still alive but unreachable. They call it ambiguous loss.
- [32:47]
Reihan Assad
Like, you know, you're navigating this whole world while there is another person in prison. It's not like somebody died and you can just move on ultimately. Except this is part of the life. Like, you know, when somebody's in prison, it's ongoing struggle, ongoing pain. It's. It just never stops. The horror never stops. I think, I guess the best thing that can capture my feeling and what I'm doing is that perhaps it would have been less painful for me to fight for him and do the kind of things that I'm doing. Maybe, you know, there are a lot of siblings are not this close. I remember one time I told my mom, I said, like, why did you raise us in a way that we love each other so much?
- [33:39]
Dina Temple Raston
Her mother paused and then answered, what is the meaning of life then? Love, she said, is everything we live for now. This isn't just Ekbar's story. It isn't just Rahat's. It's the story of more than a million other Uyghurs who have been detained, surveilled and silenced since 2020 16. If it feels far away, look again. Because authoritarianism never starts with camps. It tiptoes in, starts with something smaller, easy to dismiss a book that's quietly removed from a syllabus, a website that gets taken down, or a diversity policy that's suddenly under review. The pattern doesn't shout, it whispers. At first, it's framed as protection, a matter of national security. Just a little less access, just a little more surveillance. Then someone is called unpatriotic, then accused of being a threat. Until finally, one day, the voices are gone, not with a bang, but with a quiet click. And by the time you realize the line has been crossed, the line has vanished. This is Click here.
- [35:19]
Recorded Future News Cyber Daily Host
If you're looking for a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up today's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication the Record, and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to the Record Media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox.
- [35:48]
Dina Temple Raston
Here are some of the top cyber and intelligence stories from the past week. It's Tuesday, August 19th. Last month, President Trump signed the Bipartisan Genius Act. And with today's signing, we're pushing even.
- [36:03]
Reihan Assad
Further into the exciting new frontier.
- [36:06]
Dina Temple Raston
For the first time, it laid out federal rules for stablecoins, a kind of cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar. And suddenly, banks that had once sworn off crypto are lining up to mint their own coins. The promise? Faster transactions and lower fees. The catch? No more interest on your stablecoin savings and no federal insurance if things go south. But some bankers are calling it a throwback to the wildcat banking era of the 1800s, when states issued competing currencies, which spiraled into chaos until the government finally stepped in. And now we wait to see if history rhymes. Just days before President Trump was scheduled to sit down with Russian President Vladimir Putin, US Officials warned of a breach that may be one of the most sensitive yet. U.S. officials believe Russian hackers were behind a massive breach of the federal court filing system. The system manages federal court documents, including highly sensitive records that contain everything from the identities of confidential informants to details about national security investigations. Officials haven't said which branch of the Russian government played a hand in the hack, but they did say that forensics showed that the hackers were looking for criminal cases involving people with Russian and Eastern European surnames. For years, U.S. officials say Russian operatives have been trying to get federal court files from a roster of jurisdictions. Last month, chief judges in district courts across the country were quietly told to remove sensitive documents from the online system. Trump seemed to shrug it off.
- [37:53]
Reihan Assad
Are you surprised?
- [37:54]
Dina Temple Raston
You know, he's surprised. They hack in. That's what they do. They're good at it. We're good at it. Chief Justice Roberts voiced his own concern about hackers cracking into the federal court system in 2022 in his year end report. What's unclear is whether the hack came up in Trump's meeting with Putin last week. Defcon 2025 is now done and dusted. And on the hacking village floor was a discussion about something that came up last year, the vulnerability of water utilities.
- [38:27]
Recorded Future News Announcer
But recently, as I'm sure people in this room know, other parts of critical infrastructure that are just as deeply important to us are now being hacked at levels we never saw before, like water utilities and K12 school districts.
- [38:41]
Dina Temple Raston
Last year, a man named Jake Braun came to the conference with a simple request. Help us secure the country's water utilities and 350 white hat hackers. Volunteered. And Jake, who was President Biden's Deputy National Cyber director, says he could have had a thousand more. Out of that came something called DEFCON Franklin.
- [39:03]
Recorded Future News Announcer
We named it Franklin after, as you can tell by the sign, Benjamin Franklin, because he started the first volunteer fire department in the United States in philly. In the 1700s, four states ran a.
- [39:16]
Dina Temple Raston
Pilot with white hat hackers teaming up with local utilities to run vulnerability assessments. The group was like a volunteer fire brigade, but for cyber. What the experiment made clear is that when Chinese and Iranian hackers target small utilities, and There are about 50,000 of them in the U.S. they neither have the budget nor the staff to fight back. Next up, DEFCON Franklin plans to release a Hacker's Almanac. It'll be a field guide for people trying to defend the weakest links in America. His digital plumbing and finally, hi YouTube.
- [39:51]
Recorded Future News Announcer
How are you doing?
- [39:51]
Sean Powers
And welcome to Dead. Take. This game completely surprised me.
- [39:55]
Dina Temple Raston
I personally had not When House of Dragons star Abu Bakr Saleem got fed up with Hollywood's dark side, he didn't write a memoir, he made a video game. It's called Dead Take One. Part horror, one part psychological thriller, it's a complete takedown of Hollywood's toxic power. The main character is Chase, who is, you guessed it, a struggling actor.
- [40:17]
Recorded Future News Announcer
Hi, my name is Chase Lowry, 6 foot 3, Los Angeles. Just want to say I'm really excited.
- [40:24]
Dina Temple Raston
To get to audition for the part.
- [40:26]
Recorded Future News Announcer
Of Willie in your upcoming project.
- [40:28]
Dina Temple Raston
Then Chase's friend goes missing and players search a director's mansion for clues, solving puzzles, unlocking rooms littered with secrets about abuse and manipulation. The project uses real footage of voice actors and Salim calls it an exorcism of the Hollywood machine.
- [41:00]
Sean Powers
Today's episode was written and produced by Dina Temple Raston, Megan Dietre, Erica Gaeda, Zach Hirsch, and the lead producer was me, Sean Powers. It was edited by Karen Duffin, Fact Checked by Darren Ankrum and contains original music from Amir Kalich, Hiru Nisa Yinomas and Ben Levington. We had other music from Blue Dot sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley and our illustrator is Megan Gough. Our sound designer and mixer for this episode was Jake Cooke. Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News and prx. Tune in on Friday for Mic Drop, where we talk to a man who is trying to save the Uyghur Internet one website at a time.
- [41:45]
Abdullah Ali Ayyub
Uyghur websites are a treasure trove of knowledge.
- [41:48]
Dina Temple Raston
They depict the homes and dreams of.
- [41:51]
Abdullah Ali Ayyub
Uyghurs, and that's exactly what the Chinese authorities are trying to destroy.
- [41:56]
Sean Powers
That's next time on Click Here. We'll see.
- [41:59]
Dina Temple Raston
Events.
- [42:04]
Recorded Future News Cyber Daily Host
If you're looking for a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up the day's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication the Record, and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to TheRecord Media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox.