It’s 10pm and bitterly cold in Hanle.

Strong winds sweep across this remote village in India’s Himalayan Ladakh region, but no one seems to mind. Dinner is over, yet, instead of bed, many people are gathering outside.

The reason is above them.

At 14,764ft (4,500m) above sea level, Hanle is known for its exceptionally clear, dark skies. Wrapped in thick jackets, woollen caps and gloves, tourists and visitors gather to see the Milky Way and look through telescopes at planets, the Moon and distant stars.

Among them are four young women: Palzes Angmo, Tsering Dolker, Tsering Yangdol and Padma Chamchot.

They are Hanle’s astro-ambassadors, trained to guide visitors through the night sky.

By day, they cook meals, clean rooms and look after guests at their family-run homestays. By night, they set up telescopes, trace constellations with laser pointers and explain what visitors are seeing in the dark skies.

These women – all in their late 20s – grew up watching these stars, but it was only a few years ago that they learnt to study them through a telescope.

“The sky here has always been twinkling like this,” 28-year-old Dolker says.

The difference today is that people travel hundreds of kilometres to see what locals have long regarded as an ordinary part of life.

BBC Marathi

Hanle’s remote, high-altitude location, dry air and lack of light pollution make its skies prized by astronomers. The cold desert offers suitable observing conditions on around 260 nights a year.

Hanle is also home to the Indian Astronomical Observatory, run by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, and is a major centre for astronomical research. In 2022, it became India’s first Dark Sky Reserve, helping protect its pristine skies from artificial light and putting Hanle on the astronomy tourism map.

Visitor numbers have since surged: from about 3,000 a year five years ago to nearly 30,000 in 2024-25, according to government figures.

As visitors grew, so did opportunities for locals.

In 2022, the Ladakh administration and Indian Institute of Astrophysics trained 24 young people from Hanle and nearby villages in astronomy. These four women were among them.

Over 15 days, they learnt to identify stars, planets and constellations, navigate the night sky, operate telescopes and photograph the Milky Way on their phones.

Becoming astronomy guides was never part of their plans. They were nervous when they first handled the equipment, fearing they might break something. Gradually, they learnt how it worked and grew confident using it.

Angchuk Dorje

Four years on, they are confident astronomers, with evenings beginning around 9pm.

They position telescopes for the night’s planets and constellations before guiding visitors from local homestays.

They show them the Moon’s craters, Saturn’s rings, Vega – the brightest star in the night sky – and other planets, using laser pointers to trace constellations and objects visible to the naked eye.

Then comes the Milky Way. At 11pm each night, the village switches off its lights, plunging Hanle into darkness as visitors scramble to photograph the now-brilliant galaxy.

“When people look through the telescope and capture a photo alongside the Milky Way, they experience immense joy. We also help them with their mobile phone settings so they can capture the Milky Way,” Padma Chamchot says.

It often starts with helping one visitor take a picture and ends with a long queue. The women take pictures for their own social media too, comparing notes on the stars and other sights they captured that night.

BBC Marathi

But by day, life is more ordinary.

Hanle has few hotels and no resorts, so visitors mostly stay in family-run homestays, often extensions of their homes. Chamchot’s family runs one too.

“Taking care of guests, cooking meals, cleaning rooms, and managing household chores fills our day,” she says.

“From nine in the evening, we begin setting up the telescopes for the night’s stargazing sessions.”

Their families’ homestays remain the main income source, but the women earn about 25,000 rupees ($260; £193) a month from astronomy, charging 200 rupees a session. Income dips during the harsh winter, when few tourists visit, but the earnings have given them greater financial independence: they no longer need to ask their parents for money.

“We can save our earnings and spend them on things we want – including new phones,” Padma says.

For the astro-ambassadors, the transformation has been personal as much as financial.

“Before taking on this work, we lacked confidence,” they say.

However, the growing popularity of Hanle comes with risks. The same tourism that supports local livelihoods could also threaten the darkness that makes Hanle unique.

BBC Marathi

Visitor numbers have surged, fuelled partly by social media posts about Hanle’s night skies and its location on the route to Umling La, which is among the world’s highest motorable mountain passes. But more tourists also mean more traffic, construction and artificial light – all threats to the darkness they come to see.

Sonam Jorphail, a senior engineer and head of outreach at the IAO, says tourism is creating jobs and driving development in Hanle, but growth must be managed to protect its dark skies.

“They bridge the gap between the science community and common people – locals and visitors,” Jorphail adds.

But longtime residents say Hanle’s night sky is already changing. Padma’s father, Dhuntup Chamchot, in his 70s, remembers when the skies were even darker.

“Back then, when the weather was good, people would often sleep outdoors under the open sky,” he says.

The young women often take their families stargazing too.

“We frequently show the night sky to our families through the telescope. They enjoy looking at it now,” says Yangdol, one of the astro-ambassadors. “If one of us takes even a single day off, the families ask why the telescope was not set up,” she jokes.

The women say they have no desire to leave Hanle or its dark skies. They hope for advanced training and better telescopes and eyepieces to enhance visitors’ experience.

Four years ago, the equipment was unfamiliar; now, they are building a future around the stars.

Pope Leo XIV has issued a warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) at the start of his four-day visit to France.

The pontiff cautioned against “losing our humanity amid a paradise of machines” in wide-ranging remarks to Church and state officials at the Élysée Palace, following an hour of talks with President Emmanuel Macron.

Leo made a similar warning earlier this year when he spoke of the need for AI to be “disarmed” in the first major teaching document of his papacy.

In his May appeal, he mentioned the slave trade in relation to AI, suggesting that the world was in danger of normalising the exploitation of people once again.

The highpoint of Leo’s visit to France is set to be a giant Mass attended by more than half a million people in Paris on Saturday, for which an altar has been built on the Place de la Concorde and a large area around the Champs-Élysées sealed off by police.

Large crowds are expected throughout the trip, reflecting an enthusiasm that the Church attributes to growing spirituality among the French and other Europeans.

He was greeted at Orly airport early on Friday by Macron, with the pair expected to deliver a speech later in the day in Metz.

Crowds were meanwhile gathering along a route to the Notre Dame, where the pontiff will later be driven in his popemobile.

The president will not be at any of the Pope’s Masses, largely to avoid breaching France’s strict separation of state and religion.

On Friday, Macron hailed Pope Leo’s visit to France as a “great honour”, stressing that French secularism “in no way negates religion”.

Leo said that “authentic secularity” should not exclude religion “from the public sphere or from education”.

In recent years, French politicians have often invoked France’s brand of secularism to justify bans on religious symbols, including Muslim women’s attire, in public spaces and schools.

EPA

The Champs-Élysées Mass will be attended by Macron’s wife Brigitte and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu. Several candidates for next year’s presidential election are also due, including Marine Le Pen of the nationalist right, centrists Edouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal, and conservative Bruno Retailleau.

There were reports of tensions between Macron and the Vatican team sent to make arrangements, with the president allegedly frustrated in his wish for a more ceremonial aspect to the visit.

This was dismissed this week by Élysée officials, who said it was customary to offer a visiting head of state – which the Pope is – a range of high-profile events, such as a cavalry escort down the Champs-Élysées. But they said it was never expected that the Pope would actually take the offer up.

Cyber-criminals who hacked the FBI say they have extremely sensitive medical data for thousands of its special agents.

BBC News has seen samples of the stolen “fitness-for-work” medical examinations, which contain information such as blood and urine test results, and doctors’ notes mentioning conditions such as a “shellfish and banana allergy”.

The records include agents’ full names and addresses, as well as references to medical concerns including ‘blood in the urine’ and ‘high cholesterol’.

Experts say the hack – which the FBI is investigating – could leave agents vulnerable to scams, blackmail and targeted attacks, as well as help criminals impersonate law enforcement officers.

“The list maps thousands of agents against their medical and fitness records,” said Etay Maor, vice-president of threat intelligence at Cato Networks.

“Passwords can be reset if stolen, but medical records cannot, so once this data is out, it stays compromised for good. That permanence, applied across an entire workforce, is what makes this leak so serious.”

The FBI has not responded to requests for comment. However, on Wednesday it acknowledged the breach and said it was “aggressively investigating” how it happened.

The cyber-criminal group ShinyHunters claims it breached FBI systems on Monday, and later posted details of the attack on its darknet site.

The group also shared samples of the alleged stolen data with reporters, along with an extortion demand.

Unusually, the hackers are not demanding money. Instead, they are seeking a retraction of an FBI advisory published in May, which they claim “offended” them.

The samples shared with journalists appear genuine and include names, addresses, phone numbers, badge numbers, job titles and information about spouses.

The records appear to relate to thousands of agents, including senior officials such as deputy directors.

Professor Ciaran Martin, the former head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, has described the hack – if confirmed – “as serious as it gets when it comes to data breaches.”

‘Phishing, impersonation, identity fraud’

The news agency Reuters reports that some of the data includes information on agents involved in investigations relating to Russia, China and drug cartels.

Reporting by 404 Media suggests details of a previously little-known FBI hacking unit may also have been exposed.

It was initially thought the breach affected the FBI’s 38,000 current employees, but the hackers now claim the number could be far higher.

The group says it underestimated the scale of the data theft and now claims to hold sensitive information on around 60,000 current and former FBI staff.

Jamie Akhtar, chief executive and co-founder of CyberSmart, said the hackers’ claims should be treated with caution but that the breach appeared to be extremely concerning.

“Such data could be used for highly convincing phishing, impersonation, identity fraud, blackmail or even operations targeting law-enforcement personnel, making the potential implications particularly serious,” he said.

The hackers, who communicate with reporters in English via the messaging service, Telegram, say they will publish the full dataset in five days unless the FBI meets their demands.

ShinyHunters is an international hacking collective that has been active since 2019 and has been linked to a number of high-profile cyber-attacks, including incidents affecting Rockstar Games and the education platform Canvas.

The group claims it exploited a vulnerability in an Oracle cloud storage system used by the FBI, gaining access to multiple platforms including FBIJobs, FBI BEAST, which handles background checks on employees and applicants, FBI MedLink, which stores medical records, and FBI BICS, which contains investigative information.

In a statement posted on X, the FBI said it was still trying to determine whether the hackers had breached its systems directly or compromised a third-party provider.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has fiercely defended his country’s military campaigns in Iran, Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East in a speech to the UN General Assembly.

After dozens of delegates walked out in protest as he took to the stage, Netanyahu vowed to continue fighting: “We’re going to win. We have no other choice.”

In response to the walkout, he said: “If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t left the hall, please do so now.”

The Israeli leader also rejected accusations that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Hours earlier, in a recorded message Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told the UN that Israeli policies – in particular the illegal expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank – threatened “the very life and existence of the Palestinian people on their homeland”.

He also said it jeopardised the two-state solution, which is an internationally backed formula for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Abbas said that Palestinians were being subjected to “killing, destruction, starvation and attempts at displacement, as well as a genocidal war” in Gaza by the Israeli military.

The Palestinian leader was addressing the annual gathering via a video link because he had been denied a US entry visa.

EPA/Shutterstock

Netanyahu, who is subject to an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for alleged war crimes, launched scathing attacks on nations and leaders who have criticised him.

“They accuse Israel, tiny Israel, of colonialism – some colonialism. And who’s accusing us? Among them are people in Britain and in France. For God’s sake, they invented the term,” he said.

Netanyahu also accused the media of misrepresenting violence by Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank and said “maybe two or three” people are killed a year.

But, according to figures published by the UN, 23 Palestinians have been killed in the context of settler attacks this year – and 72 since the beginning of 2023.

Netanyahu went on to label Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan a “tyrant”, accusing him of supporting the Palestinian armed group Hamas.

Erdogan told the UN on Tuesday that the injustices faced by those in Gaza and the West Bank “deeply offends the conscience of humanity”.

Netanyahu’s comments drew a sharp response from the Turkish presidency’s communications director Burhanettin Duran.

The Israeli PM’s use of the UN General Assembly podium to level “baseless accusations” against Turkey and Erdogan was incompatible with the UN’s “ideals of peace, law and dialogue”, Duran said, according to state-run news agency Anadolu.

New York City’s left-wing mayor Zohran Mamdani – who had previously vowed to arrest Netanyahu but later said he did not have the authority to do so – was also criticised by the Israeli leader.

“Since you were elected mayor of this city, many Jews no longer feel safe in New York,” the Israeli prime minister said.

In a statement, Mamdani’s office said Netanyahu “used his speech to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians”.

Netanyahu also thanked US President Donald Trump for his “bold leadership”, referring to the air strikes the US and Israel jointly launched against Tehran in February.

“Israel and America acted together not only to protect ourselves, but to save civilisation,” he said.

Election campaign looms

Much of Netanyahu’s speech was pitched at the two audiences he needs to convince the most: Israelis as he faces a critical election at home next month, and Americans as Israel faces growing isolation and fractures in support abroad.

In Israel, Netanyahu’s once unrivalled image as “Mr Security” has come under increasing scrutiny in what is the first election since the 7 October 2023 attacks.

Some political opponents have argued he is unfit for office following Israeli media reports, firmly denied by Netanyahu, that he did not heed warnings of a potential attack by Hamas.

His characteristic defiance at the UN podium will be replayed in a campaign seeing his religious-right wing coalition trailing in the polls.

Netanyahu appeared to have pre-scripted his comments about “moral cowards” as he faced a mass walkout.

It will likely be used as he tries once again to burnish an image as being the only Israeli politician that can truly take on Israel’s growing number of global critics.

There were also clearly marked references meant for American audiences, including the joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran and his praise for Trump.

Netanyahu, who was born in Israel but spent his formative years in Pennsylvania, has always tried to present himself as having a unique ability to pitch Israel’s case in the US.

Despite continued weapons supply from Washington, he faces an increasingly sceptical public.

Polls suggest plummeting support for Israel among Democrats, and a fracture in historically high levels of backing among Republicans which has spread to Trump’s Maga base.

Celebrity protesters held

A number of people protesting against Netanyahu’s visit were detained in New York City.

Among them were the Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon and Emmy-winning Hacks actress Hannah Einbinder.

Also detained were Democratic congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier and New York City council member Chi Osse.

A spokesperson for the NYPD said officers had responded to reports of an “unscheduled demonstration” where protesters were blocking a junction.

Reuters

The Israeli military launched a ground offensive in the Gaza Strip after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack against Israel, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others taken hostages.

During the Israeli military campaign more than 73,920 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Last year, the world’s leading association of genocide scholars declared that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.

A resolution passed by the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) stated that Israel’s conduct meets the legal definition as laid out in the UN convention on genocide.

Israel has regularly denied its actions in Gaza amount to genocide and says they are justified as a means of self-defence.

On 28 February, Israel and the US started launching massive air strikes on Iran, suspecting it of secretly building a nuclear weapon – a claim denied by Tehran.

Iran retaliated by carrying out missile and drone attacks on Israel and neighbouring Gulf Arab states which host US military bases.

The US Supreme Court has lifted restrictions on the Trump administration to use a controversial federal database that uses citizenship information and other sensitive data to identify voters suspected of being non-citizens.

Critics have questioned the reliability of the data, warning it could result in US citizens being wrongly removed from electoral rolls.

In June, a federal judge ruled that the system was illegal and violated the privacy rights of Americans.

But the top court’s conservative majority ruled that the National Voter Registration Act prohibits broad purges of voter rolls in the weeks before an election, which limits any “potential impact” of the decision ahead of the midterms.

But states can still check the citizenship of individual voters.

The three liberal-leaning justices on the Supreme Court dissented from the majority decision.

One of the dissenting Supreme Court justices, Ketanji Brown Jackson, expressed concern that this could mistakenly revoke the voting rights of eligible voters.

“The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the non-existent harm that the government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” she wrote.

In the trade-off between privacy and security, it helps to know the extent of your local surveillance infrastructure. There are now easy ways to find out.

I didn’t tell anyone I was meeting Michelle Dahl, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a watchdog group. But by the time I greet her in Brooklyn, New York, the system knows we’re together.

“It’s kind of invisible if you’re not looking for it,” says Dahl, pointing up to a lamppost, where two tiny cameras labelled New York City Police Department hide in black plastic domes.

They’re part of the NYPD’s massive AI surveillance platform: the Domain Awareness System (DAS). “Every police officer in the city can access it on their phones and pull up a profile of basically anyone walking around,” she says.

The platform connects more than 80,000 cameras with drones, social media data, even systems that follow cars when you drive to another state. Dahl says it can unveil who I’ve seen and everywhere I’ve been in the last week. My whole life: tracked.

Every day, across the US, your life is also being recorded by a growing system of mass surveillance that reaches far deeper than many of us may realise. Controversy around an American surveillance company called Flock Safety exploded in recent months, but it’s only one player in a giant industry.

Flock and other advocates say we need to strike a compromise between privacy and safety.

Is it worth the trade-off? To decide for yourself, it’s worth understanding how comprehensive the surveillance really is. So I went looking for cameras in my own neighbourhood. You can too, and you don’t even need to leave the couch to find them.

‘The more you start looking, the more you’ll see’

Some of those concerned about surveillance seem to think Flock is the whole issue. New York City demonstrates why that’s not true. The company doesn’t operate here, but we’re still being watched.

Dahl is taking me on a surveillance tour to the BBC’s Manhattan office, pointing out cameras and other devices along the way. I’ve covered privacy for 10 years, but even I was stunned by the infrastructure following our every move.

After just a few steps, we stop and look around. I count 16 different cameras.

“I would assume these are owned by businesses, buildings and renters,” she says. These are additional to cameras run by the city, she says. “But the NYPD likely has easy access. They often just ask the owner if there’s an investigation, and people hand over the footage.” 

Some camera vendors, like Amazon’s Ring, even have automated systems to make it easier for police to request and receive footage directly from users.

Cameras in public are now so ubiquitous I barely notice them anymore. But with Dahl’s help, my eyes refocus: small pill-shaped cameras hanging in front of stores, ageing grey devices on the corners of buildings, advanced dual-camera systems run by the city that pan, tilt and zoom to laser in on people of interest.

I try to count as we walk, but there are so many it’s impossible to keep track and hold up a conversation. “The more you start looking, the more you’ll see,” Dahl says.

Why the Flocklash?

These systems can capture and store your every move, and Flock has become the posterchild for surveillance. In recent months, there’s been nation-wide, bipartisan backlash against the company.

On reason is Flock’s staggering power. The company says it operates more than 100,000 cameras spread across 6,000 American communities. It’s best known for tools that track drivers, scanning cars 20 billion times a month, according to Flock. But it also makes facial recognition tools to track your body.

Such technology allows law enforcement to look far beyond its jurisdiction. A Texas sheriff reportedly accessed more than 83,000 Flock cameras across the US to hunt for a woman in an abortion case, including in states where abortion is legal.

Flock says their tools keep people safe and that every day it helps solve crimes that would otherwise go unsolved. Yet in at least 46 cases, law enforcement officers have reportedlyused Flock’s systems for unauthorised purposes, including to stalk partners, exes and strangers. (After months of bad press, Flock implemented safeguards to root out abuse. A Flock spokesperson says the misuse is a “betrayal of the tool’s purpose and completely unacceptable” and that officers who abuse the system should be held accountable.)

The backlash includes waves of people destroying and even urinating on Flock cameras. Over 50 cities have cut ties with Flock this year alone.

But again, Flock doesn’t operate everywhere, and it isn’t the only company in the businesses. Some cities that cancelled Flock contracts just quietly hired other surveillance firms instead.

“Communities continue to choose Flock at a rate far outpacing those that leave,” a Flock spokesperson says. “We’re adding new customers at roughly 10 times the rate of churn.”

Safer, or just more surveilled?

Behind the growing world of surveillance infrastructure is a wider argument about how to police.

“Every day, Flock helps solve crimes that would otherwise go unsolved – from finding missing children to solving murders, violent crime, and recovering stolen vehicles,” a company spokesperson says.

They also note Flock is “actively asking for clearer state and local regulation”, so it isn’t the sole decider on law enforcement’s use of the tools.

The NYPD makes similar points. A spokesperson says their surveillance systems keep the city safe, and the department publishes transparency reports on its tools. “We are committed to using technology with care and precision, and ensuring our use is consistent with the law,” the spokesperson says.

There is something pleasingly improbable about Angh.

The film comes from Nagaland, a mountainous state of fewer than two million people on India’s northeastern frontier, and is in Konyak, a tribal language unfamiliar to most Indians, never mind audiences abroad. It was director Theja Rio’s first feature and most of its cast faced a camera for the first time.

And yet, at the Toronto International Film Festival this month, this quiet film won the Platform Prize, a major juried award.

The award is intended to recognise films with a particularly distinctive directorial voice. The jury praised Rio’s “refreshing perspective” and the film’s portrait of a world rarely encountered on the international screen.

The win also gives Angh an unusual route towards the 2027 Academy Awards. Under new rules, winners of designated prizes at six international festivals can qualify for consideration in the International Feature Film category without relying solely on their country’s official submission.

This does not make Angh an Oscar nominee. But it does place a Konyak-language film from one of India’s smallest states inside a global conversation from which such stories have been almost entirely absent.

Rio still sounds slightly startled by it. When we speak in Delhi, roughly 72 hours after the win, he has barely had a moment to breathe – Toronto, flights, interviews, more interviews.

“There were a lot of good films in the competition”, he says, including films by far more seasoned directors. His producers were confident.

“They thought we were going to win. I wasn’t.”

He is also less solemn than Angh might suggest. Before cinema, he wanted to be a rapper – “a kid from Compton instead of a kid from Nagaland”, as he puts it. His tastes still range happily from Black Thought, the lead rapper of American hip-hop group The Roots, to his favourite filmmaker, the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami.

But for his first feature, he turned close to home.

Set in the early 1960s, Angh follows Anghba, the ageing hereditary chief of a Konyak village, and his young son, as the world around them changes. The Konyaks are one of Nagaland’s 17 major tribes, concentrated in the eastern district of Mon, where such chiefs are known as Anghs. Even today, some older men bear facial tattoos associated with the Konyaks’ historical practice of headhunting.

George Pimentel

Anghba and his son are among the last in their region to hold to an ancestral faith as Christianity spreads.

Then an American missionary, played by Scottish actor Douglas Henshall, arrives. The father resists but the son is now curious.

Rio says the idea for the film came a few years ago, when he was visiting Mon for another project. What struck him was how closely different generations seemed to live alongside one another there.

Australia made a dramatic revelation on Wednesday during the United Nations General Assembly.

Rogue AI agents had hacked one of its government bodies – the first known incident of its kind in the world. Private data, but not sensitive information, was taken from Medicare, Australia’s universal healthcare scheme.

The breach happened in June, but OpenAI says it only became aware of it in August – and then took until 10 September to alert Australia’s government, by sending an email to an address used by researchers and academics to alert authorities to concerns of vulnerabilities.

While worrying, the timing of the incident is somewhat of a gift for Australia.

A middle power that doesn’t usually get as much of a platform as its influential allies, the country wants to be seen as punching above its weight on one of the most defining issues of our time – big tech regulation.

In the past year alone, it has implemented the world’s strictest social media ban, announced what it says are the world’s strongest algorithm controls, floated the possibility of “world-leading” limits on smart glasses, and is now the first government to confront AI firms over a rogue attack on its data.

Getty Images

It’s entirely possible other governments have been the victim of rogue AI agents.

Former Australian government cybersecurity adviser Alastair MacGibbon told the BBC he’d heard whispers that several others have been notified of similar recent breaches by OpenAI agents.

“Some have chosen to not be public – that’s every government’s choice on how it wants to handle these things,” he said. “The [Australian] government chose a time to release this to gain maximum publicity which is their wont to do.”

Revealing a data breach can of course be a risky strategy for governments – it leaves them vulnerable to criticism that their security systems aren’t up to scratch. But the fact that no sensitive information was leaked put Australia in a stronger position to use the incident.

“Nobody has died,” says the University of Queensland’s associate professor Michael Noetel, who studies AI risks. “This is another canary in the coal mine. This sort of loss-of-control incident, even though it’s minor now, is what CEOs are worried about getting worse over time.”

Though Australia has made a name for itself by taking a stand against social media companies, taking up the AI mantle now is another way for Australia to rein in big tech, says Tama Leaver, professor of internet studies at Curtin University in Perth.

“It’s impossible to say for sure, but it seems incredibly likely that this was very carefully planned.”

PMO Australia

The fact that leaders were all together in New York this week has probably helped.

Albanese says he had a “frank” discussion with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to express Australia’s “extreme concern” about what happened. Altman acknowledged “issues with protocols” at OpenAI, he said.

The Australian leader also posed with Donald Trump for a selfie – and the two may have had face-to-face talks. But Australia risks the ire of the US president, who wants to encourage AI, “not rein it in”, and even rename it “super intelligence”.

Earlier this week, Albanese had to deflect criticism from the Trump administration over his government’s proposal to give users the ability to opt out of social media algorithms. The US said it amounted to “censorship of protected speech”.

Back home, Australia’s very own eSafety commission is currently arming itself with lawyers, preparing to take on social media platforms objecting to its social media law for under 16s.

Australia isn’t popular with big tech. But its bold policies on social media and internet safety have been largely supported among Australians themselves, especially parents.

The government is taking advantage of the hack to position itself as a leader on one of the biggest talking points of our time. And it’s wasting no time in using the incident to advance the country’s broader crusade.

Within hours of the announcement, Communications Minister Anika Wells told reporters: “This is an example of an unregulated industry where big tech clearly feels like they can do whatever they like, and that’s not going to wash here in Australia.”

New film Primetime, with Robert Pattinson, centres on the divisive series which performed sting operations on would-be abusers. A ratings hit, it caused much debate about TV ethics.

In November 2004, an incendiary new segment, To Catch a Predator, aired on US television as part of NBC’s current affairs show Dateline. It was packaged as a regular news report, involving a television crew camping out at a suburban address and waiting for strangers to arrive.

Except these weren’t any ordinary visitors: they had been lured by a group of digital vigilantes, self-dubbed Perverted Justice, who made it their mission to ensnare would-be paedophiles. A “decoy” – an adult actor masquerading as a teen – was deployed to meet them at the door. Hidden cameras captured their entrance, before the show’s presenter Chris Hansen appeared and confronted them with their incriminating digital footprints. Outside, local law enforcement would bide their time to arrest them.

Warning: This article contains references to suicide and sexual abuse that some may find distressing

To Catch a Predator took the US by storm. Part investigative journalism and part reality TV circus, the series horrified and gripped viewers, soon attracting an average of 7 million watches per episode. Hansen’s show blurred the boundaries of reportage, real-life policing and entertainment: “An easy, queasy morality tale of rightful comeuppance and social humiliation,” according to The Guardian’s Adrian Horton. Quickly, it was catapulted to the coveted 21:00 viewing slot on US TV, competing with ABC’s lauded series Lost. That’s where Primetime, a provocative new film about the controversial show, kicks off.

Sweet Relief Productions/ Rosewater Pictures

In an Oscar-tipped performance, Robert Pattinson harnesses the distinctive charisma of the show’s presenter, Hansen. The reporter cut his teeth in investigations and, one year before To Catch a Predator’s first broadcast, carried out a sting operation in Cambodia, with the resulting programme exposing paedophiles exploiting child sex trafficking. It provided the blueprint for this show much closer to home.

“This was a very special moment in the history of western civilisation where [for the first time] kids lived online and came of age online,” David Osit, director of a 2025 documentary about Hansen’s show, Predators, tells the BBC. “It was a moment when young people were [using the internet] in a remarkably unregulated way, and adults found out about it. It horrified them.”

“This was a very special moment in the history of western civilisation where [for the first time] kids lived online and came of age online,” David Osit, director of a 2025 documentary about Hansen’s show, Predators, tells the BBC. “It was a moment when young people were [using the internet] in a remarkably unregulated way, and adults found out about it. It horrified them.”

As explored in his documentary, Osit is himself a survivor of child sexual abuse and became fascinated with Hansen’s show in his 20s as a way to try to understand why offenders commit their crimes. It was later when he came across online fandoms dedicated to To Catch a Predator that he decided to make his documentary. The final section of Predators features interviews with Hansen, who claims that his work has been for survivors like Osit and “serving a greater purpose”.

A precedent had been set for To Catch a Predator by another reality show Cheaters, which debuted in 2000 and enacted stings on unfaithful partners. “The concept was similar: people submitting their partners to be ‘caught in the act’ of cheating,” says culture journalist Louis Staples. “It made for oddly enthralling viewing, turning private indiscretions into public humiliation and retribution.”

A new phase of reality TV

However the popularity of Hansen’s show arguably spawned a new era of sensationalism in reality TV, following the foundational era of “social experiment”-styled shows like Big Brother and Survivor. “To Catch a Predator encapsulates what I call the ‘Wild West’ era of reality TV,” asserts Staples. “Around 2004, we started to see a wave of more extreme, spectacle-driven shows, like the horrifying [cosmetic surgery] makeover show The Swan and the dating show There’s Something About Miriam [in which a group of men dated a woman who they were not told was transgender, until a climactic reveal]”. To Catch a Predator similarly represents the gradual upping of the ante in the reality genre, where it felt like nothing was off-limits in the pursuit of headlines and ratings.

Getty Images

To Catch a Predator’s formula always entailed Hansen reading aloud the targets’ sexually explicit chat logs word-for-word to them and retorting with witty clapbacks. Before he unveiled himself, the show’s unwitting subjects were also often goaded by the decoys into making risqué comments or even physically exposing themselves. What is possibly most striking about To Catch a Predator, however, is the way in which its lurid content and mocking tone were underscored by the idea that Hansen’s team was enacting social justice.

“Why you see the issue of paedophilia, child predation and child trafficking [become] such an issue in politics is because it is an extraordinarily easy issue to align yourself with,” says Osit. Despite being a survivor of child sexual abuse himself, he received death threats for questioning Hansen’s methods in his documentary, as well as showing the more sympathetic raw footage of the show’s alleged predators as obtained through Freedom of Information requests – depicting them pleading, explaining their backstories which included mental illness, and expressing remorse. “It’s a pretty binary good v evil dynamic, even though societally we have also contributed massively… to a world where we, through the media, overtly sexualise young people and teenagers.” Predators touches on the hyper-sexualisation at the time of a teenage Britney Spears, for example.

“We don’t, as a society, believe that child predators need protection,” Osit adds. “We don’t accept them as human beings often, so [it’s understandable] that we’re not terribly concerned as to protecting their identity. [But] if you can decide that certain groups don’t need protection, you can then start making an argument that other people don’t need protections.”

One particularly grim case put a spotlight on the show’s ethical murkiness. In 2006, a sting operation was attempted in Texas on assistant district attorney Louis William “Bill” Conradt. But when he failed to show, Hansen’s TV crew and the police (with a hastily drawn-up search and arrest warrant) descended upon his home, soon after which Conradt killed himself. Conradt’s sister later sued the show for $105 million, and the case was settled out of court.

Osit’s documentary reveals the extent to which Hansen’s team were in cahoots with police, with officers allegedly being paid for featuring in the show and routinely wearing cameras (before the dawn of bodycams) for more compelling footage. Hansen responded to Conradt’s death in 2021 by alleging that the attorney possessed child pornography, a claim disputed by Esquire in their report on his suicide. He also said that, while it was “a difficult moment”, he didn’t “feel responsible” and one could “assume” Conradt “didn’t want to face the music”.

How its format continues to thrive  

The original To Catch a Predator strand was cancelled by NBC in 2008 – but its ratings-chasing format continues today in almost its original form, expanded into a standalone series. Takedown with Chris Hansen appears on TruBlu, the streaming service he cofounded in 2022. Meanwhile online, copycats have also proliferated on YouTube and other platforms.

A24

“Now everyone has the potential to recreate this type of content on their phones” says Staples, pointing towards Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere which depicts such stings. “We like to think we’ve moved on from [To Catch a Predator], but the attention economy proves that we’re still gravitating towards similarly extreme content on social media.