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.
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Focusing on Iraq's fight may be missing the point. Under the surface is a more fundamental war between al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. -
ISIS issues annual reports and launched a Twitter app, and its financiers track money flows on spreadsheets. It's professionalized its operations while inflicting more casualties than al-Qaida. -
A remote-controlled bomb costs as much as an iPhone. Car bombs can cost up to $20,000. So for a cash-rich group like ISIS, the only limit to attacks is the number of people willing to carry them out. -
The Bowe Bergdahl exchange video released by the Taliban is the latest propaganda coup for jihadis on social media. Social media benefits jihadi groups because it is all about immediacy, not accuracy. Social media is changing the nature of jihad for young fighters as well. Some jihadis boast thousands of Twitter followers and are broadcasting their jihad for all to see.
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Yousef al-Khattab was born Jewish but became a Muslim and put extremist propaganda on the Web. On the eve of sentencing for terrorism charges, he tells NPR his actions were "stupid" and "wrong."
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The State Department on Tuesday advised all U.S. citizens to leave Yemen because of "extremely high" danger there. This comes as 19 U.S. embassies and consulates remain closed across much of the Middle East and Africa because of a security threat. Al-Qaida chatter picked up by intelligence sources suggested a major attack was in the works.
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The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA court, is the legal body that decides whether wiretaps and other surveillance methods used by the intelligence community are legal. Officials seem to agree that the procedures need to be more transparent, but how that would happen is anything but clear.
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Two documents provide new details about the procedures the National Security Agency follows when sifting huge volumes of email. The Justice Department documents were made public by The Guardian newspaper. They help explain the steps the NSA must follow when it inadvertently comes across the communications of Americans.
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The man who leaked secret National Security Agency documents, Edward Snowden, defended his decision to reveal details of U.S. surveillance programs in a web chat on Monday. Snowden said he's still in Hong Kong and claims he wouldn't get a fair trial in the U.S. He also said he has not been in contact with the Chinese government and that there are more disclosures to come.
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The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has been under fire since one of its classified orders was leaked by a former National Security Agency analyst. Detractors have focused on the fact that nearly all the warrant applications brought before its judges have been approved.
