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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People who stormed the Capitol were radicalized by what they consumed online and in social media. That should sound familiar: Ten years ago, ISIS used a similar strategy to lure Americans to Syria. -
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security wrote detailed threat assessments before Black Lives Matter demonstrations last summer, but offered only general warnings before the events on Jan. 6. -
As the U.S. prepares for what will likely be the largest vaccination program in its history, the Trump administration plans to loan $590 million to a Connecticut company with a novel technology. -
An unreleased CDC review obtained by NPR shows that lab officials knew an early coronavirus test kit had a high failure rate. They decided not to recall it and sent it to the nation's labs anyway. -
Though new data privacy laws in Europe and California have put the tech industry on the defensive, it's moving to craft federal legislation that would pre-empt state laws. -
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. -
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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Former al-Qaida spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith was captured by U.S. officials in February. His arrest is significant, analysts say, because the Obama administration has decided to try him in a federal court instead of using a military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
