Dina Temple-Raston
Dina Temple-Raston is a correspondent on NPR's Investigations team focusing on breaking news stories and national security, technology and social justice.
Previously, Temple-Raston worked in NPR's programming department to create and host I'll Be Seeing You, a four-part series of radio specials for the network that focused on the technologies that watch us. Before that, she served as NPR's counter-terrorism correspondent for more than a decade, reporting from all over the world to cover deadly terror attacks, the evolution of ISIS and radicalization. While on leave from NPR in 2018, she independently executive produced and hosted a non-NPR podcast called What Were You Thinking, which looked at what the latest neuroscience can reveal about the adolescent decision-making process.
In 2014, she completed a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University where, as the first Murrey Marder Nieman Fellow in Watchdog Journalism, she studied the intersection of Big Data and intelligence.
Prior to joining NPR in 2007, Temple-Raston was a longtime foreign correspondent for Bloomberg News in China and served as Bloomberg's White House correspondent during the Clinton Administration. She has written four books, including The Jihad Next Door: Rough Justice in the Age of Terror, about the Lackawanna Six terrorism case, and A Death in Texas: A Story About Race, Murder and a Small Town's Struggle for Redemption, about the racially-motivated murder of James Byrd, Jr. in Jasper, Texas, which won the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers prize. She is a regular reviewer of national security books for the Washington Post Book World, and also contributes to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, Radiolab, the TLS and the Columbia Journalism Review, among others.
She is a graduate of Northwestern University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, and she has an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Manhattanville College.
Temple-Raston was born in Belgium and her first language is French. She also speaks Mandarin and a smattering of Arabic.
-
The trip that changed Tigran Gambaryan's life forever was supposed to be short — just a few days. When he flew to Nigeria in February of 2024, he didn't even check a bag. Tigran is a former IRS Special Agent. He made his name investigating high-profile dark web and cryptocurrency cases. Some colleagues called him the 'Crypto Wizard' because of his pioneering work tracing crypto transactions for law enforcement. Since 2021, he's worked at the world's largest crypto exchange, Binance. Tigran was in Nigeria as a sort of envoy. He was supposed to meet with government officials and show them that Binance – and crypto itself – was safe, reliable, and law-abiding. One of the most important meetings was at the headquarters of the Office of the National Security Advisor. He says officials there made him wait hours. And when officials finally came into the room, they accused Binance of a host of crimes and of tanking the Nigerian economy. They then told Tigran that they weren't going to let him leave Nigeria until they were satisfied that Binance was going to remedy the situation. On today's show, in a collaboration with Click Here from Recorded Future News, we hear about Tigran's eight month detention in Nigeria. In his first recorded interview after his release, he shares details about his captivity, how he survived one of Nigeria's most infamous prisons, and how he got out. Support our show and hear bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or on npr.org. -
China broke into tens of thousands of email accounts in January. Now officials fear the breach wasn't just about spying. It was to build the next generation of artificial intelligence. -
After the U.S. Capitol riot, there was a sense that the Jan. 6 cases would be straightforward. But defense attorneys describe prosecutors as overwhelmed by evidence and struggling to build cases. -
Experts blame Russian hackers for the latest attack — this one targeting humanitarian agencies. What can the Biden administration do to protect U.S. agencies from these supply chain hacks?
-
The Russian group that attacked SolarWinds focused on another government supplier in its latest hack: an email marketing company used by the U.S. Agency for International Development, Microsoft said. -
Screenshots of the malicious email show that it purports to be a special alert from the government. "Donald Trump has published new documents on election fraud," the message declares.
-
An internal CDC report obtained by NPR shows the CDC's original coronavirus test kits didn't just have a fundamental design flaw, but instructions sent to labs to run the test were problematic, too. -
A forthcoming report says DHS officials had the intelligence they needed to predict that the pro-Trump rally would become violent. What was missing was DHS telling the people who needed to know. -
Six months after one of the largest cyberattacks in history, the White House will set up formal cyber investigations, require companies to report breaches and set software development standards. -
Russian hackers exploited gaps in U.S. defenses and spent months in government and corporate networks in one of the most effective cyber-espionage campaigns of all time. This is how they did it.
