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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.

  • Investigators are learning more about the men behind the recent attacks in Paris. They are still looking to see if there are connections to major terrorist groups overseas.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • It isn't just privacy that is at risk in this new era of Big Data collection. Secrecy is a casualty too. It used to be classified documents were kept in a safe and seen by a select view. Now a top secret document can be accessed by hundreds, if not thousands, all with the click of a mouse. Because of that the modalities of spying have changed. Now analysts can take an infinite number of secrets with them by just putting them on a thumb drive, but it's a counter-intelligence nightmare.
  • President Obama discussed America's counter-terrorism strategy — including the use of drones and the prison at Guantanamo Bay — during an address at the National Defense University on Thursday. He rejected the idea that the country can fight an open-ended "global war on terror."
  • A big break for investigators in the Boston Marathon bombing case was a surveillance video.There are some new details of what's on the video.
  • Steve Inskeep talks with NPR's Dina Temple-Raston for the latest on the Boston Marathon bombings investigation.
  • The FBI is taking the lead in the investigation into the bombing at the Boston Marathon on Monday. So far there is no clear lead to indicate what person or group is responsible. But officials are appealing for information, including photos and videos from the public, and also looking at forensic evidence. Melissa Block talks to Dina Temple-Raston about the investigation.
  • Investigators are working to determine who is responsible for the explosions at the Boston Marathon. At least three people were killed. Sources told NPR it could take some time before officials can definitively say who was behind this.