Five for Fighting 8/27/07

To escape the chaos of her Russian childhood, Lili Infante became an American law enforcement prodigy. She pioneered the DEA’s investigations of the dark web—never suspecting who she’d find hiding there.

Five hauntings from the other side of technology.

The US government’s Tradewinds initiative has made it easier to throw millions of dollars at “nontraditional” defense contractors, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

Two US senators say the Trump administration is breaking the law by withholding the FISA court decision while it presses Congress to renew America’s most sweeping surveillance program.

Tropical Storm Isaias is set to become the basin’s first hurricane of the season, bringing life-threatening rain and storm surge to the Gulf Coast.

Despite the agency's human resources department saying he hadn’t even been onboarded, Jeremy Lewin oversaw the destruction of USAID. It’s not clear he had the legal authority to do so.

As the White House contemplates losing Congress, there has been an unusually early effort to find a Republican scapegoat.

Warhound came out of stealth on Wednesday with $200 million in funding and a mission to create “elite working dogs” equipped with "advanced body armor."

Castelion—a next-generation defense tech company—is building a facility in Rio Rancho Estates that documents show could pose a major fire and chemical hazard to neighboring communities.

Bluesky tells WIRED it blocked links to a leaked archive of information on 41,000 ICE, CBP, and other DHS workers because it contains people’s contact information, shared without their authorization.

Seven of 16 planetary vital signs are in their most extreme state ever recorded, and El Niño is here to make matters even worse.

“There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft,” Vice President JD Vance said on Thursday.