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 Senate's "torture report" finds that the CIA conducted brutal interrogations of detainees in the years after 9/11, misled elected leaders, and got little useful information from the harsh tactics.
-
The U.S. says that evidence suggests the missile that brought down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was fired from separatist-held territory in eastern Ukraine. NPR's Dina Temple-Raston reports what is now known about the crash.
-
In combating militants, one weapon is cutting off the groups' funding from charities or outside donors. But the "Islamic State" gets its money from other means and may be immune to U.S. techniques.
-
On the first night of Ramadan, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria announced it would change its name to, simply, the Islamic State, declaring that the land it had captured in Syria and Iraq constituted a new caliphate. The group's leader is trying to use this new narrative to wrest control of the global jihad from 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.
-
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.
-
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.
