In-Depth Archive

Before his arrest, Virgil Griffith had a reputation as a “cult hacker,” a “tech-world enfant terrible.” A 2008 profile in The New York Times Magazine, published when he was 25, called him the “Internet Man of Mystery,” and cast him as “a troublemaker … A twerp. And a magnet for tech-world groupies,” drinking White Russians and “revel[ing] in the attention of his female fans.” Griffith had become notorious the year before, when he launched WikiScanner, a website that used IP address databases to expose the anonymous editors of Wikipedia entries. The site’s release brought on a wave of news coverage, […]

In mid-July, a Russian satellite moved uncommonly close to a U.S. government satellite in low-Earth orbit, before quickly rendezvousing with another Russian satellite nearby. The Kremlin initially insisted that this satellite was part of a routine program to monitor its own assets in space. But a week later, U.S. Space Command, which oversees American military operations in space, deemed Russia’s maneuver a non-destructive test of an anti-satellite weapon—a sophisticated counterspace tool that could threaten U.S. space assets and national security. U.S. officials had raised similar concerns twice before, earlier this year and in 2018, about abnormal Russian satellite behavior in […]

In late April, Luca Esposito was reflecting, like many of us, on how the coronavirus pandemic had upended his family’s life. Esposito wrote in a blog post that his elderly father in southern Italy had turned to WhatsApp to order groceries, because he could no longer visit the store in person; that his children’s school had struggled to adapt to the demands of online learning; and how remote working, once a privilege of senior managers, in his view could become the norm. As the executive director of the World Lottery Association, or WLA, a lobby group that represents national, state […]

When al-Qaida targeted the centers of American financial and military power on 9/11, it believed that most of the world would welcome seeing the United States knocked down from its perch of power. Whether by accident or by design, Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida’s leader and founder, had formulated his strategy based on an interpretation of classical realist theory, predicting that countries seeking to balance against American hegemony would be disinclined to get involved in any conflict that followed the attacks. Instead, while the ruins of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon still smoldered, leaders around the world pledged their […]

On July 24, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan joined thousands of worshippers in the streets around the historic Hagia Sophia in Istanbul for a doubly symbolic moment. Surrounded by a swarm of politicians, soldiers, security forces and imams, the Turkish leader made his way into the giant, former Byzantine cathedral through doors once hammered open by conquering Ottoman soldiers in 1453. Inside, he read out the namaz, or Muslim prayer, formally turning the 1,500-year-old building back into a mosque. In doing so, Erdogan was turning the page on nine decades of recent history, during which this extraordinary structure and UNESCO […]