Photo Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images Save this story Save this story Six Democratic lawmakers are pressing the nation's top intelligence official to publicly disclose whether Americans who use commercial VPN services risk being treated as foreigners under United States surveillance law—a classification that would strip them of constitutional protections against warrantless government spying. In a letter sent Thursday to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard , the lawmakers say that because VPNs obscure a user's true location, and because intelligence agencies presume that communications of unknown origin are foreign, Americans may be inadvertently waiving the privacy protections they're entitled to under the law.

Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images Save this story Save this story Chinese-language online black markets have become one of the biggest drivers of cybercrime in history, processing tens of billions of dollars of illicit finance every year. Helping the trade in stolen data, money-laundering services, and even at times electrified shackles , these underground marketplaces have fueled scam operations and human trafficking around the world.

Photo-Illustration: WIRED staff; Getty Images Save this story Save this story When technology reporter Alex Heath has a scoop, he sits down at his computer and speaks into a microphone. He’s not talking to a human colleague—Heath went independent on Substack last year—he’s talking to Claude .

A highly enriched uranium billet. Photograph: RHJ; Getty Images Save this story Save this story President Donald Trump and top defense officials are reportedly weighing whether to send ground troops to Iran in order to retrieve the country’s highly enriched uranium.