Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and the author of Now the Hell Will Start and Piano Demon. He is currently working on a book about a spectacular 1970s heist and its decades-long aftermath, and he blogs daily at Microkhan. *** I’m a thousand percent certain that I’ll wake up in a […]
Search results
Posted inUncategorized
On the death of Tyler Clementi, a gay Rutgers student, and the charges against his roommate, Dharun Ravi, who used a webcam to spy on him. Clementi took his own life shortly after the incident: An online video chat, using an application like iChat or Skype, starts like a phone call: one person requests a […]
Posted inUncategorized
The evolution of how we recruit and train spies—starting with the OSS in the 1940s—and our changing expectations of what the job entails and what motivates those who sign up: I remember him saying something like: “This is the only thing in the Army that you can volunteer for and then get out of if […]
Posted inUncategorized
How Quentin Rowan (aka Q.R. Markham) went from aspiring writer to serial plagiarist—and how everything unraveled after the publication of his spy novel, Assassin of Secrets: By then, the mystery about whether Rowan was, so to speak, an authentic plagiarist had been solved. Two days earlier, he’d sent a series of apologetic e-mails to Jeremy […]
Posted inUncategorized
The National Security Agency is building a “spy center” in Utah with the purpose of gaining intelligence by breaking codes. But the center will also collect massive amounts of private domestic data, including phone calls, emails and Google searches: The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. […]
Posted inUncategorized
When your wedding doubles as a covert operation. A look at the complications of CIA marriages, and how secrets often lead to separation: The Fredericksburg woman divorcing her husband laid out all the messy details, including the most secret of them all. Her husband, she wrote in now-sealed court documents, is a covert operations officer […]
Posted inUncategorized
The story of an astrologer who claimed in a 1941 keynote address that the stars indicated Hitler would invade the United States from Brazil and eventually be defeated. The astrologer, Louis de Wohl, was actually an agent for the British government: What no one realized was that de Wohl’s lecture was pure propaganda from the […]
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story, Uncategorized
Forever Young
A group of Hungarian game developers spent more than 20 years developing a game for the Commodore 64.
