Decoder Ring · 2026-07-15 · 49 min
GPS began as a Cold War weapon designed to help the US military achieve precision targeting, particularly after struggles to destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail during Vietnam. The system combines 24 satellites beaming signals using atomic clocks to provide both ultra-accurate location data and synchronized timekeeping across the globe. Journalist Katherine Dunn discovered evidence of GPS spoofing incidents - where GPS signals are deliberately jammed or falsified - affecting oil tankers in the Black Sea near Crimea and civilians in Moscow, with their devices showing false locations at airports. The turning point came when Korean Airlines Flight 007 was shot down in 1983 after flying 200+ miles off course into Soviet territory, killing 269 people. President Reagan subsequently promised to make GPS available to civilian aviation to prevent such tragedies. Today, GPS underpins not just navigation but the synchronization of financial markets (trades timestamped to milliseconds), power grids, and digital infrastructure globally. The episode examines how a system designed as a weapon now makes modern civilization function - and what happens if state actors weaponize it by disrupting either location data or the time signals everything depends on.
GPS is a network of 24 US government satellites that beam radio signals to Earth using atomic clocks to calculate precise location by measuring the time signals take to arrive at receivers, combining measurements from at least four satellites to determine longitude, latitude, and altitude.
More than 20 vessels near Novorossiysk, Russia experienced GPS spoofing where their navigation systems showed them at a Russian airport 15 miles away, appearing to teleport back and forth between their actual location and the false location for several days.
Financial markets, power grids, telecommunications, and digital infrastructure all depend on synchronized atomic time accurate to billionths of a second that GPS provides cheaply and efficiently; if time synchronization fails, these interconnected systems could 'unstitch' and malfunction.
When the 1983 flight strayed 200+ miles off course into Soviet territory and was shot down, killing 269 people, President Reagan promised to make GPS available to commercial aviation to prevent similar navigation disasters.
Journalist Katherine Dunn, who covers the energy industry, learned about oil tankers' GPS failures from a colleague's news article and discovered a U.S. Coast Guard database documenting GPS disruptions worldwide, then investigated through shipping industry sources.
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
Most of us use GPS - the Global Positioning System - on a daily basis: to find our location when we’re driving, running, shopping, dating, and so much more. But GPS is even more important, and more vulnerable, than you think. In the last few years, GPS interference has been reported all over the world, from war zones to shipping routes to public squares. What was once the fanciful plot of a Bond movie - bad guy manipulates GPS to start World War III - is increasingly plausible. How did the world come to rely so heavily on such an unreliable system? In this episode of Decoder Ring, host Willa Paskin talks to journalist Katherine Dunn , author of the new book Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World . You’ll learn how GPS works, why it was created, how it became so ubiquitous, and why it’s now under attack. You’ll also hear from Dr. Todd Humphreys , an aerospace engineer who manipulated GPS to trick an $85 million superyacht into following his direction - for science, of course. This episode was written and
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
Speaker A: On an otherwise unremarkable day In June of 2017, near the Russian port of Novorossiysk, something strange started to happen aboard a boat named the Atria.
Speaker B: It was a gas oil tanker, and it was coming from Istanbul through the Black Sea, up towards the top of the Black Sea.
Speaker A: Katherine Dunn is a journalist who has long covered the energy business.
Speaker B: Very, very near Crimea, Ukraine on one side, Russia on the other.
Speaker A: Crimea had been annexed by Russia by this point. So the Atria was navigating through some tense waters.
Speaker B: And there was a French captain in charge. He's entering this port and all these alarms start blaring.
Speaker A: The alarms were warning the crew that something had gone wrong with the Atria's gps. At first, it seemed to be flickering in and out, but as the disruption continued way longer than ever before, alarms blaring all the while, they realized that wasn't all that was going wrong.
Speaker B: Something weirder is happening. It's not just that GPS doesn't seem to be working. It's that when it is working, it's showing a weird location.
Speaker A: In the ship's control room, there was a big location tracking screen, kind of like Google Maps for tankers. When the GPS was on, when the little blue dot representing the ship appeared on screen, sometimes it was right where it was supposed to be, where the Atria really was, sitting in the Black Sea off the coast of Novorossiysk. But sometimes the blue dot wasn't even in the water.
Speaker B: It looked like they were on the tarmac at a Russian airport.
Speaker A: They're, like, looking out the window at the water, but on the map, it's like you're at an airport.
Speaker B: Yeah. And when he called the other ships around or they radioed the other ships around, this was happening to a whole bunch of them.
Speaker A: More than 20 vessels in the same part of the Black Sea all appeared on their GPS screens to be at an airport some 15 miles away.
Speaker B: Like a UFO or something had scooped down and picked up the ships and then transported them over and then transported them back. So it was like they were doing this, like, boom, boom, boom, back and forth from the port to the airport.
Speaker A: No one could figure out what was happening. Even as it went on for several days.
Speaker B: It's not just this one bow. It's not just faulty equipment. Like there's something strange going on.
Speaker A: Meanwhile, around the same time, 1500 kilometers north of Novorossiysk in Moscow, something similar was happening. But not to oil tankers, to regular people.
Speaker B: They'll be in a, uh, taxi or they'll be in kind of the local equivalent of an Uber. And all of a sudden, the taxi will appear to be at a Russian airport as well, and that means they're getting charged the airport fee. And you start to get people who, when they're walking around near the Kremlin or near Red Square, their phones as well, start showing that they're near an airport.
Speaker C: I'll try to show you. Right now, I'm in the Red Square, and my GPS should definitely tell me that I'm in the Red Square. Where am I on the map here? Well, it's definitely not where I am.
Speaker D: Way off.
Speaker B: You get these little reports of this happening. They just think it's some sort of tech glitch, but they don't know for sure what exactly is going on.
Speaker A: At the time, nobody paid much attention. But when a colleague sent Catherine a news article about the oil tankers, she
Speaker B: was intrigued because an interest in everything Russian. So that's where I kind of got into it. I thought, okay, there's something sneaky going. Going on.
Speaker A: She dropped everything and started investigating. Eventually, she came across a database compiled by the U.S. coast Guard Navigation center of GPS disruptions around the world. And she realized that what happened in Russia wasn't all that rare. It seemed to be happening in lots of places.
Speaker B: There were all these cases of quote, unquote, unknown interference. I started calling all my sources in shipping especially, and saying, well, is this happening? Have you seen this? And all of them were like, we have no idea what you're talking about.
Speaker A: By now, Catherine was falling down the rabbit hole. She couldn't believe there wasn't more curiosity about this.
Speaker B: Call me crazy, but I think a huge gas oil tanker not knowing its location in a very tense part of the world sounds potentially dangerous. Like, I don't know. Sounds bad to me. And people like, it's fine. And I was like, I really don't think it is.
Speaker A: Catherine may have felt alone in her concern, but she wouldn't be for long.
Speaker B: Because it turns out the reason people didn't really know that much about it is the fact that this was just the start.
Speaker A: This is decoder ring. I'm Willa Paskin. A couple of months ago, we heard about a new book coming out about GPS and how important it was to the modern world. We're interested in all sorts of things here. We pride ourselves on it. But the Global positioning system, I'm not gonna lie, we were like, I don't know. Seems a little dry. Well, shame on us. It's like ignoring the most interesting and powerful person at the cocktail party because they don't call attention to themselves. Because GPS is a lot more than the thing that maps your route to the grocery store. It's an essential and ubiquitous global infrastructure relied upon in countless ways by billions of people to make the entire world work. And it is also newly being screwed with a lot. When something the planet has grown so dependent on is under threat, we take it for granted at our own, uh, risk. So today on Decoder Ring, GPS helped us find our way. What happens if we lose it? This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Ever wonder why we make the choices we do and how to make smarter ones? Join Wharton Professor Katie Milkman, an award winning behavioral scientist and author of the best selling book how to Change as uh. She shares true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes and everyday people about why we do the things we do and how to make better choices to help avoid costly mistakes. Choiceology covers the latest research in behavioral science and dives into themes like the power of self control, shaping your mindset for success, navigating new beginnings, and why starting over can feel so hard. Listen to choiceology@schwab.com podcast or wherever you listen.
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Speaker D: M
Speaker A: so GPS is ubiquitous and essential, and I'm well aware that I use it on a daily basis, most often when I'm driving. And thanks to gps, my location pops up as a little blue dot on a map. But as much as I use gps, it wasn't until I read Katherine Dunn's book about it, titled Little Blue Dot, that I learned GPS is doing something I had no idea about. Honestly, I never thought much about what it is, let alone how it works. So, to start, I asked, what is GPS?
Speaker B: GPS is this web of US government satellites around the globe. There's 24 of them. So wherever you are on Earth, 24, seven, you are in sight of at least four of them.
Speaker A: Right now, each of those four satellites that have a clear path to you are beaming radio signals down from space. When those signals reach a receiver like, say, your phone, GPS measures how far they've had to travel to get to you.
Speaker B: Always calculating the distance between the satellite and between the receiver. So between my iPhone and the satellite.
Speaker A: When those four satellites combine their measurements, GPS calculates the locations we've all come to rely upon. But GPS is not measuring the distance between you and the satellites in miles or kilometers. It's calculating it in time. It's measuring the time between when the signal left the satellite and when it arrived at the receiver.
Speaker B: So GPS is not just about navigation, it's about space and time.
Speaker A: To do all of this time measurement, you need really, really, really good clocks. Radio waves move at the speed of light. So while a satellite and your phone might seem pretty far apart, it actually takes less than a tenth of a second for a radio wave to get from one to the other. And GPS has to tell the difference between receivers down on Earth that are just a few feet apart. That's a nanosecond of difference. So for GPS to work, it needs to be able to measure these teeny tiny increments of time with extraordinary precision. And that's why onboard every one of the satellites is a very fancy, very expensive, very particular kind of clock.
Speaker D: In this atomic clock, the vibrations of atoms make it possible to measure intervals even smaller than 1 billionth of a second.
Speaker A: It's these atomic clocks that make GPS function. It's the calculations based on their measurements that give us four critical pieces of information. Longitude, latitude, altitude, and also time.
Speaker B: It works because the time is so accurate, but in the process of time being so accurate, it gives us ultra accurate time.
Speaker A: The fact that GPS tells all our devices exactly what time it is, I had no idea. But this ultra accurate time, it turns out to be a, ah, hugely important thing that GPS does. Easily. As important as all the location stuff,
Speaker B: GPS provides something they call time transfer. So the whole global economy can kind of like agree what time it is.
Speaker A: M precisely synchronized time provided by GPS is everywhere. It's in your computer, your emails, and all your digital licenses. It's why all the wired electronics in your house are always in sync. Now. It's in the timing of the bus system and the streetlights. It allows power companies to monitor and maintain the energy grid. In finance, electronic trading now takes place so quickly that transactions are timestamped and often disputed down to the millisecond.
Speaker B: Digital synchronization keeps sort of all of these systems on the same beat to the billionth of a second.
Speaker A: There are other ways to get this kind of atomically accurate time that aren't gps, but they require tons of infrastructure here on Earth. Meanwhile, GPS is just beaming it down like rays from the sun.
Speaker B: It's cheap, it's easy, it's really efficient.
Speaker A: In short, as useful and important as I already thought GPS was, it's twice that the world depends on GPS for multiple reasons. To tell us where we and all our goods and cars and boats and airplanes are, but also to get them to work together with larger far flung systems by telling us when we are.
Speaker B: And if the times don't quite match up all of a sudden, like, there's the risk that you get this, like, unstitching.
Speaker A: So if some bad actors were to mess with gps, to weaponize it by doing something like making boats and taxis show on tarmacs, but worse, that would obviously be bad. But messing with GPS time, that would be terrible too.
Speaker B: We don't really know exactly how this would play out, but it doesn't look like it would be good.
Speaker A: Gps, this system that helps us in so many ways, could start to hurt us. But the thing is, when you look at the history of gps, it was meant to be a weapon from the very start.
Speaker D: It's the biggest story of the year, possibly the number one story of the century, this launching of the Russian satellite, which brings into the realm of possibility all those wild science fiction stories of interplanetary travel.
Speaker A: In October of 1957, the Soviet Union famously bounded ahead of the United States in the space race with the launch of Sputnik, the first ever satellite to orbit the Earth and send a radio signal back down. The US military went into overdrive. It's the Cold War, and the stakes are high.
Speaker D: We are moving rapidly into an era when military operations, to an increasing extent, will be conducted above most of the Earth's atmosphere. That is manned satellites at strategic points
Speaker A: in space to keep pace with the Soviets, we needed to get our own satellites up there. And once they were there, we realized we might be able to use them to locate stuff down here on Earth.
Speaker B: What the US military was trying to do was not, you know, discover the mysteries of the heavens. What they were trying to do was see if they could send a ballistic missile from, you know, Virginia to Moscow. And that was what satellite navigation was basically designed to do.
Speaker A: The US military's first attempt at a satellite navigation system was designed to help American nuclear submarines locate their targets while in motion. But subs only needed to know their location in two dimensions, longitude and latitude. And that's not good enough for an airplane.
Speaker B: When you're playing, you need to know where you are in three dimensions if you're going to bomb from the sky. And you also need to know where you are very, very, very quickly because of course, you're moving at high speeds.
Speaker A: By the late 1960s, America was deeply enmeshed in the Vietnam War, and planes were missing targets all the time.
Speaker D: The weapons we had were not very effective for precision bombing in such a combat environment. For ground targets, our munitions were primarily general purpose bombs that didn't give us the required accuracy.
Speaker A: In particular, the US military was struggling to destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a dense, 12,000mile long network of roads and bridges along which the Viet Cong were constantly moving and receiving supplies. The trail was shockingly resilient to American attacks. One American pilot said bombing it was like trying to put socks on an octopus.
Speaker B: The mighty US Air Force was struggling for years to bring down even individual bridges.
Speaker D: From 1965 through 1968, we flew more than 2, 600 sorties over the Thwa Bridge in North Vietnam, hammering at it with every type of conventional ordinance. During this period, the bridge never ceased operations and we lost 10 aircraft in the process.
Speaker A: So the military is like, we are going to invent a technology that means we can basically target a missile accurately anywhere on Earth. Yes, that's what it's for.
Speaker B: Exactly. And it has to be in three dimensions. It was this idea of ultra accurate bombing technology.
Speaker A: For a while, there were competing projects with the same goal in the Navy and the Air Force, but they would merge into one. The NavStar Global Positioning System, or simply GPS.
Speaker B: This group of engineers met around labor day weekend in 1973 and agreed on the ultimate design of GPS that we have today. So where the satellites are in space, how they get to you, all those kinds of things.
Speaker A: They also agreed it shouldn't just be for the military. From the start, GPS Was intended for civilian use, too. Its creators hoped that university engineering departments, surveyors, and tech savvy hobbyists might all find their own uses for this location data. But first, they would have to build the thing, which proved to be a huge lift. And blasting satellites into space wasn't nearly the hardest part. They had to know how radio signals were going to behave being beamed from space down to earth. They had to know that an atomic clock could survive in space. They had to know the actual shape of the earth, which is not a perfect sphere and had never before been precisely calculated. And they started working on this all decades ago, when pocket calculators were still new inventions.
Speaker B: You know, this is basically a computer in space talking to a computer on land, in a chip talking to computers in the base stations. They all have to be talking to each other via radio waves.
Speaker A: And it was invented before we really have computers in the way that we currently understand them.
Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker A: Needless to say, the project took up a lot of time and a lot of money. And as it dragged beyond the 70s into the 80s, when the military was no longer carpet bombing Vietnam, there was a lot of skepticism that GPS was worth it.
Speaker B: Pilots tend to think that they have pretty good senses of direction. It's something you hear coming over and over and over again throughout history. Is that pilots saying, why should you tell us where we are?
Speaker E: Uh, we know.
Speaker B: We know. So I think there was just this sense in the U.S. military and in the U.S. air Force. This is not a real problem. I don't get it. Why are we spending huge amounts of money on this?
Speaker A: But the case for GPS was about to get dramatically and tragically made.
Speaker D: My fellow Americans, I'm coming before you tonight about the Korean airline massacre. This crime against humanity must never be forgotten here or throughout the world.
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Speaker A: Uh, on August 31, 1983, Korean Airlines Flight 007 took off in the middle of the night from New York's JFK airport carrying 246 passengers and 23 crew. The plane touched down in Alaska to refuel and was supposed to continue from there southwest to Seoul, South Korea.
Speaker B: And instead of flying southwest, what happens is they fly basically west into USSR territory just north of Japan at the very height of the Cold War.
Speaker A: To this day, it's not entirely clear what went wrong, but this was a long, boring flight over the ocean at night. Most likely it was a small human error that just compounded over the next five hours as the plane flew blindly into Soviet airspace.
Speaker B: And it's an incredibly tense time in the Cold War. There's been a lot of, like, saber rattling going up to this period. So everybody is on super high alert. And the Soviets think this is a spy plane.
Speaker A: In fact, the US did have a spy plane flying around this area at the time, one that even looked a little bit like a civilian jet. Russian fighter pilots were dispatched to intercept the foreign aircraft. Air traffic controllers in Tokyo, still believing the passenger plane to be on its proper flight path, gave instructions for a routine maneuver. But to the Russians, it looked like evasive action on the ground. A Soviet commander gave the order and a fighter jet fired two missiles at
Speaker B: the plane and they shoot it down
Speaker A: right up to the very end. The flight crew had no idea that they were more than 200 miles off course, let alone passing through Soviet territory. They were lost and they didn't even know it. Two hundred and sixty nine people, including about 20 children, are dead, it seems, because their plane strayed into Soviet airspace and was shot down by a Soviet fighter plane, which was, we were told, just following orders.
Speaker D: The attack on a commercial airliner, whether the Soviets knew it was that or not, has caused an outrage. With our horror and our sorrow, there is a righteous and terrible anger. It would be easy to think in terms of vengeance, but that is not a proper answer. We want justice and action to see that this never happens again.
Speaker A: To ensure that it would never happen again, President Ronald Reagan promised he'd make available to commercial aircrafts a new technology developed by the US military, GPS. If Korean Air Flight 007 had had GPS on board, the pilots would have been able to see where they. Not just where they thought they were. With GPS on board in the future, maybe we could avoid another horrible tragedy. Even after that, though it took years until GPS was fully operational, the final satellites didn't get up in the air until 1995. And, uh, it wasn't until 2000 that the government permanently provided civilian GPS that was as accurate as the GPS available to the military. Accurate enough to pinpoint your location anywhere on earth to within a few feet.
Speaker D: President Clinton gave the go ahead to
Speaker A: let boaters, motorists and hikers use a satellite navigation system with the same pinpoint
Speaker D: accuracy that the military has long enjoyed.
Speaker A: Isaac, what's this all about? By then, other GPS like systems were getting off the ground. The European Union has its own system of satellite navigation, as do Russia and China. And GPS receivers were finally small and cheap enough to go anywhere, everywhere.
Speaker B: They start realizing they can put GPS chips kind of in everything, and it starts this huge, huge boom.
Speaker C: Um, this handy little device here is the lost bushwalker's savior. It's called the Global Positioning System, or gps.
Speaker A: By the end of the decade, it's estimated at least 80% of all cars in the United States will carry Global Positioning System devices, or gps.
Speaker G: If you don't know where you're going, a, uh, GPS is the thing to have.
Speaker A: This is when I remember first encountering GPS and those single purpose devices. I think I just called the GPS that suction cup to the windshield of a car to give point by point directions. Within just a couple of years, smartphones and mapping apps made all those Garmins and tomtoms obsolete. But even that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Speaker B: GPS is going into consumer products, but also going into industrial systems, grids and base stations and stock markets and all these things.
Speaker A: It's at this point that we started to live in the world we do now. One in which we're carrying GPS around in our pockets basically all the time. And it's fully permeated just about everything we do.
Speaker B: We might remember a time before gps. We know it was possible. We know the global economy functioned. But it's undeniable that since then, the world has really, really changed. And trying to reverse that would be hugely difficult.
Speaker A: GPS hums along in the background of everything. And when something is so useful and so reliable, it's hard not to use and rely upon it. Maybe even a little too much.
Speaker B: One of the things you hear again and again is people start switching off the backup systems. They start getting rid of the redundancy. See, you know, the plan Bs because they think, well, this, this amazing thing does it all.
Speaker A: What happens when the thing that does it all proves to be surprisingly vulnerable? That's after the break.
Speaker F: Hey, Dan Taburski here. I'm a podcast host, a journalist, and now with my newest project, the author of my own manifesto. Well, it's a manifesto about manifestos, my search for inspiration in a world that feels more infuriating, more out of its freaking mind with each passing hour. Manifestos are, uh, a call to action. An artful scream. They capture our anger and they try to do something with it. This is my attempt to take the Manifesto back from mass shooters and nihilists and return it to its rightful place with the warriors, the visionaries, the regular folks with just the right amount of crazy. I compare notes with radicals, secessionists, Internet trolls out for a laugh, and punk singers screaming their guts out, all trying to turn their anger into the world they want to see. Listen to Manifesto wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of Manifesto early and ad free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.
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Speaker A: If you want to get a sense of a worst case scenario when it comes to GPS disruption, there's a major motion picture that's got you.
Speaker B: Excuse me, Mr.
Speaker I: Carver?
Speaker D: Yes?
Speaker B: This is the new banker, Mr.
Speaker D: Uh. Bond.
Speaker A: James Bond.
Speaker B: So the 1997 James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies includes this crucial GPS plot line.
Speaker E: Zoom in on that, Kenny.
Speaker C: That looks like an American encoder. They use it to control their navigation satellites, the GPS system.
Speaker B: Which makes sense when you realize that GPS was still this sexy new thing.
Speaker A: The villain in the movie is an evil media mogul, sort of a ruthless Rupert Murdoch type. In pursuit of higher ratings, he attempts to engineer a confrontation between the British and Chinese militaries by manipulating this newfangled technology called gps.
Speaker B: So they basically fake the location of this naval frigate. It produces this altercation with the Chinese navy.
Speaker C: Fire one missile at the flagship of each fleet. The Chinese will think the British are rattling the saber, the British will think the Chinese are being belligerent, and the media will provide cool, objective coverage.
Speaker B: And then it's going to spur World War iii.
Speaker C: Let the mayhem begin.
Speaker A: The plot may be heightened, like a lot, but the basic premise that a bad actor could manipulate the satellite system and cause havoc. That's surprisingly plausible, because the truth about GPS is that it has at least one serious flaw.
Speaker B: The radio signals which are coming from the satellites to Earth are really weak actually. And because these signals are so weak, they can easily be basically drowned out or manipulated.
Speaker A: There are two ways, broadly speaking, to screw with gps. Jamming and spoofing.
Speaker B: So jamming is when they're just drowned out. And that's basically the same as if you ask me a question and I shout over top of you. That's just jamming. Like you're still talking, but I'm just talking louder. But whereas spoofing, that's much more complex. That's kind of a hijacking. And that's like all of a sudden I have your voice, I've taken over your frequency.
Speaker A: Spoofing is what happens in tomorrow Never dies. And it's the more dangerous threat.
Speaker B: Jamming is knocking out gps. It's no more GPS for you. Spoofing is you have gps, but it's wrong.
Speaker A: If this seemed like action movie hokum in 1997, it wouldn't be long until GPS heads were starting to warn. It was very, very possible that if
Speaker B: you could start not just jamming, but spoofing gps, then you could create all kinds of crazy knock on effects.
Speaker A: Another thing to know about GPS is that the civilian signal is not encrypted or authenticated. There's no way to guarantee or know for sure if a signal is real. So by the mid 2000s, when GPS was really taking off, going into cars and airplanes and utilities and financial networks, there was growing concern among experts that not only could it be spoofed, but someone doing so could cause a lot of damage.
Speaker B: You could dump toxic waste and pretend you're a port. You could illegally fish and pretend, and you're not illegally fishing.
Speaker A: Still, this was all theoretical. Nobody knew if it was actually possible for a civilian to build a GPS spoofer. At least not until Todd Humphries came along.
Speaker C: I thought, huh, this is a sort of Damocles hanging over us and nobody's really tested it to find out how difficult it would be to build it and how damaging it would be if it were built.
Speaker A: Dr. Todd Humphries is an aerospace engineer at the University of Texas in Austin and a lifelong tinkerer. How'd you get into aerospace? Were you always sort of interested in
Speaker B: this kind of thing?
Speaker C: Not particularly in aerospace engineering. I was interested in electrical engineering. I built circuits when I was younger. And then I fitted my car out, my high school car, to be a James Bond car, which took me the whole summer. I sawed off the top of the stick shift and put in a bunch of buttons, one of which would squirt water out of the back of the car from this Little tiny hole I drilled in the license plate, and then the car would talk to you with pre recorded canned phrases. It was a lot of fun.
Speaker A: He first got into GPS as a grad student in the early 2000s, when one of his professors gave him a receiver to take home over the weekend, like a classroom pet.
Speaker C: I've never held one in my hands before, and it was just amazing to me to feel, you know, how precisely it knew my movements, my position, and my velocity, and I was hooked.
Speaker A: A few Years later, in 2007, he read an article in the magazine GPS World warning about the possibility of a bad actor building a spoofer. And then he saw how warnings like this were being dismissed. Leaders in the field are basically saying, okay, sure, theoretically that's possible, but it's going to be so difficult to do, we don't really need to be worried about it. But Todd, ah, thought they should be more concerned. And he was determined to prove it.
Speaker C: Maybe it was challenging to build a spoofer, but it wasn't going to be that challenging for me.
Speaker A: He was warned by friends and advisors that making a spoofer, doing a bad thing to prove and warn it was possible, could upset people in the GPS community. But he didn't care.
Speaker C: I do have a mischievous side, I have to admit, and I didn't mind the idea that it would shake up the community because I felt like the community was far too complacent. I thought to myself, you know what, if people have the misapprehension that this is extraordinarily hard, I need to prove that that's not the case. Because otherwise we could be caught unawares. We could be caught thinking, oh, uh, that's years into the future. And instead know with the existing technology, it could be now.
Speaker A: So he set out to try and build a spoofer in his rented house in Half Moon Bay, California.
Speaker C: It took up the whole room. It was a spare room in our house.
Speaker A: There were computers, oscilloscopes, uh, and signal analyzers.
Speaker C: I was just really spread out in there, actually working on the floor because no desk would hold all of the things that I needed to wire together.
Speaker A: And after about a year of labor in 2008, he decided he was ready to see if his spoofer actually worked. For the first test, he would try to spoof his actual iPhone. The goal was to get the spoofer to simulate the signals coming from GPS satellites closely enough that it would trick the receiver in the iPhone into listening to the spoofer instead of the satellites at which point the spoofer could make the phone think it was somewhere else. If it worked. The little blue dot on the phone showing Todd its location ought, uh, to move.
Speaker C: You know, as an engineer, I've been disappointed so many times when I pull the trigger on something and it didn't work. And this has gotten me to where I almost expect it not to work.
Speaker A: Nevertheless, late one night, when his wife and son were asleep, he opened up Google Maps on his phone. Then he switched on his spoofer.
Speaker C: And I saw the blue dot quiver. And I thought, oh, it quivered. I've got some level of control.
Speaker A: For a beat, the blue dot remained just like that, seemingly caught between two signals.
Speaker C: After that initial quiver and struggle, it smoothly glided off toward the north, like somebody riding a bike. And, um, yet I was just staying stationary in the room, in the house. And it reached the end of our street and then just crossed over another street and then crossed over a highway. And it didn't pause at the edge of the highway. And I thought, oh, that's definitely not human. That's just going off in a direction that I had arbitrarily chosen. And it just felt so powerful, but scary at the same time.
Speaker A: Todd doesn't claim to have built the world's first spoofer. He thinks it's more than likely. The CIA and its clandestine counterparts around the world had been experimenting with things like this for years. But Todd was the first one to build a spoofer and talk about it in public. Like in this TED Talk, when this
Speaker C: little blue dot started at my house and went running off toward the north, leaving me behind. What I then saw in this little moving blue dot was the potential for chaos. It was important, I think, for the civilian world to know about the vulnerability of gps, and not just in a theoretical sense, but in a sense where they could feel it in their gut, like I was feeling that night, that this was a system we needed to use with caution, given its weaknesses. I saw airplanes and ships veering off course, with the captain learning only too late that something was wrong. I saw the GPS derived timing of the New York Stock Exchange being manipulated by hackers. You can scarcely imagine the kind of havoc you could cause if you knew what you were doing with a GPS spoofer.
Speaker A: Todd was basically throwing down the gauntlet and saying, building a spoofer is possible right now. Anybody who can build a receiver can build one. And if I can do it, someone else with less good motives can too. And he wasn't done calling attention to the issue. A Couple years later, with some of his students and the help of the US Military, he leveled up to show spoofing could crash a drone. And then in 2013, Todd was approached by a stranger with an unusual offer.
Speaker C: He said, how would you like to go after bigger fish? And I said, what do you have in mind? He said, well, I'm the. He doesn't call himself the captain. He calls himself the master. The master of the White Rose of Drax.
Speaker A: The White Rose of DRAX is a 213 foot boat worth $85 million. Todd was being invited to spoof a, uh, superyacht.
Speaker C: And ah, at first, honestly, I thought this was possibly a ruse to kidnap me and, um, to get the technology.
Speaker A: Once he was satisfied that this was not an attempted kidnapping, Todd flew to Monaco with two of his students, where they boarded this superyacht and sailed into international waters near the boot of Italy. Unlike his first experiment with the iPhone, Todd and his students were not just going to fool a static object into thinking it was moving when it wasn't. They were going to use GPS manipulation to steer the ship off its intended course.
Speaker C: On the ship, there is an autopilot system that aligns the ship with its intended line of travel that you charted as, uh, the captain. This is the bearing, this is the course. Now you turn on the autopilot, it locks on the GPS and it takes you exactly along that line.
Speaker A: The plan was that at first the spoofed signal would keep the proverbial blue dot at the ship's true location. It would match the real GPS signal, but then it would slowly begin to move the blue dot out of position to spoof the signal. The boat itself would be on course at the start, but the boat's GPS system was, would think it was off course. And so the autopilot would make an unnecessary correction as, ah, the fake location kept moving. The ship would keep making corrections until it was going in the wrong direction. One of Todd's students was on the upper deck ready to pull the trigger.
Speaker C: And we called up to him over the radio saying, hey, Joshan, go ahead and start the attack. And he called back on the radio and he said, I've already been spoofing you. I'm the captain. Now. He had taken over the ship's GPS receiver and was guiding the ship without anyone on the bridge knowing about it, without any instrument on the bridge saying anything was amiss.
Speaker A: If your phone says you're on the highway, but you're actually inside your house, you can look around and see, hey, I'm not on the highway. When the GPS says your oil tanker is at the airport, but it's actually on the water, you can confirm that with your eyes, too. But here in deep water on the Ionian Sea, where everything looked the same, uh, looking out the window was no help. Spoofing had actually moved a boat from M one place to another.
Speaker C: So it was a James Bond moment for sure.
Speaker A: The hacking of the superyacht got a lot of attention.
Speaker C: With a $3,000 device, a laptop, and
Speaker D: an antenna, the team was able to
Speaker C: take the ship far off course, even running zigzag patterns. All the while, the ship's GPS showed it was moving in a straight line.
Speaker D: Professor Humphries and his team did a number of attacks, and basically we on the bridge were absolutely unaware of any difference.
Speaker C: The implications are staggering.
Speaker A: After that, the potential threat of GPS spoofing finally began to be taken more seriously.
Speaker C: Thousands and thousands of papers have been written since. And I think it was all to the good, because when spoofing arrived in the Wild in around 2016, 2017, we were much better prepared than if we had just sat around saying, I'll keep my head in the sand.
Speaker A: The in the wild spoofing that Todd's talking about, it started where we began this story in Russia.
Speaker C: It was the craziest phenomenon. Ships across the Black Sea would register their locations at, uh, nearby airports.
Speaker A: And remember, it wasn't just ships. Taxis going by the Kremlin, tourists walking in Red Square. They also appeared to be at an airport. Nobody understood what was happening or if it was all connected. And then a young American researcher got really curious about what was going on and started collecting all the instances of boats ending up on tarmacs. He reached out to Todd Humphries and some other experts to see if they could help. They started looking for patterns, and then they developed a hunch. The various locations involved in the GPS outages seemed to correspond with the movements of one man in particular, Vladimir Putin.
Speaker C: We cross referenced it with his travel itinerary when it was public of it. And we could see it going from St. Petersburg when he was on a visit there, to Arkhangel when he was on a visit there, to Vladivostok when he was on a visit there. And spoofing follows this man.
Speaker A: It followed him to Novorossiysk, too. That's the Black Sea port where oil tankers first reported their GPS placing them at an airport. And it's also very close to an enormous, luxurious, highly secretive complex known as Putin's Palace. It has impregnable fences, its own harbor guards, church, its own checkpoint, no fly zone, and even its own, um, border point. It is a separate state inside Russia. Todd and the rest of the team reached a conclusion. Putin's security detail was behind the spoofing, deploying it wherever he went.
Speaker C: And it was being done to protect him from drone assassination attempts, I believe.
Speaker A: And why did they end up at the airport? Or why is it always look like the airport?
Speaker C: Because all of the off the shelf drones at the time were built with a geofence that would prevent their use around airports. And if you can fool the drones around you into thinking they're at airports, they'll just come right down.
Speaker A: To put all the pieces together. Putin's detail was worried that a drone might try to assassinate him. But drones can't fly near airports, so they seem to be regularly spoofing the GPS to make it seem like he was at an airport even when he wasn't. So the potential killer drones would stay away. So that's why the airport. But the reason oil tankers and tourist GPS showed up there too, is that the spoofing signal was strong enough to spread out into Red Square outside the Kremlin, around the Black Sea. The captain watching his boat toggle back and forth between the sea and the tarmac, the tourists and the taxi drivers, they were just accidental casualties of spoofing. And in the years since, there have been a lot more.
Speaker C: Tonight at 10, we are live in Ukraine, a country at war after a huge Russian military offensive by land, sea and air.
Speaker A: Uh, Russia's use of electronic weapons has only escalated during the last four years of war in Ukraine, with bad GPS interference showing up throughout Eastern Europe, the Baltics, and parts of Scandinavia. But it's not just Russia, and it's not just happening in Europe.
Speaker B: It also starts to appear around Iran, around the Strait of Hormuz. It starts to appear in China.
Speaker A: Katherine Dunn again, it just starts popping
Speaker B: up more and more and more places where conflict is either actively happening or is on the rise.
Speaker A: GPS was born as a weapon and adopted for thousands of civilian purposes. And, and now screwing with GPS is its own kind of weapon, and it's impacting civilians, too. Some of these impacts sound disturbing, but not strictly dangerous. Since October 7, Israel has disrupted GPS so comprehensively across the region, it's led to some deeply awkward situations.
Speaker B: People were on Tinder in Tel Aviv, and they were getting matched with people in Beirut at a very, very tense time. You can imagine.
Speaker A: But then there's what's happening in the skies there's just something in your book that they think an average of 15,000 flights are being spoofed a day. Yeah, that sounds like so many to me.
Speaker B: It's a huge, huge, huge number because essentially any of the flights on that flight path between Europe and the Middle east, even to Asia, will be going through a wall of interference. So you're having an enormous number of flights potentially facing this at that point.
Speaker A: One of the most extreme locations for this is Cyprus, an island in the eastern Mediterranean. A huge number of planes fly overhead day and night. And GPS disruptions aside, it's a tense part of the world.
Speaker B: There's British warships everywhere, there are French warships everywhere. There's Turkish ships, there's Greek ships. It's like just everybody is there. So it's not an area that is a great place to get lost or be unaware of your surroundings.
Speaker A: This part of the Mediterranean has become so bombarded with interference from Israel, Iran, even Russia, from its base in Syria, that pilots in Cypriot airspace have often stopped using GPS at all.
Speaker B: So GPS allows you to go from A to B, the most efficient route, right, like taking the shortcut. But to be on the safe side, they started using waypoints. They started using, okay, we're going to go A to B to C to D. And they started relying on Cypriot air traffic controllers to be like, so I'm here and what should I go and tell me. And, uh, these, these dudes, like sitting in, in this room in Cyprus would be like, okay, you're going to go X nautical miles and then you're going to go B nautical miles and whatever. It was very labor intensive. It's not great, actually. It's all these things that GPS was sort of supposed to eliminate and make less time consuming.
Speaker A: Catherine has spoken to experts in the GPS world, including pilots and air traffic controllers, who agree this is not good. And that's not all that's keeping the GPS wonks up at night. Remember, GPS doesn't just affect aviation or directions. It also spreads highly accurate synchronized time around the globe, allowing for the seamless functioning of everything from our stoplights to our energy grids to our financial system. All that could be vulnerable to spoofing too.
Speaker B: How long would it take to shut down an electricity grid? How long would it take before all the information about the buses stopped running, which could be very chaotic? Or how long until the stop lights just started going crazy and nobody knew why? Or how long before the mobile connectivity started to degrade? That is the fear that is the worst case scenario. I mean, people hear about this. And they tend to think the worst case scenario is just the big red button goes and GPS is no longer, and we don't have gps. But the big fear is that time gets spoofed and nefarious time enters the system and these digital systems start to go haywire.
Speaker A: Honestly, it sounds like a good James Bond plot. Screenwriters, please send us a royalty check, though we will settle for a thank you. I will confess that all of this made me a little bit anxious, especially about the airplanes. I'm a nervous flyer, but I don't want to leave you here with something else to be worried about. For one thing, air travel remains extremely safe. And Catherine reassured me that aviation in particular has lots of backup systems in place. For another, her book and the experts she spoke to for it are a testament to the fact that people are trying to figure all of this stuff out. They're testing it and troubleshooting. Catherine even traveled to a tiny island in northern Norway to see this in action. There's an annual event there called Jammer Test where GPS nerds gather to attempt to save the future from time terrorists by trying to do the bad stuff first.
Speaker I: Organized by Norwegian authorities, Jammer Test is the world's largest open air testing campaign for jamming and spoofing resilience.
Speaker B: Here, across mountains and coastline, systems are
Speaker A: pushed to their limits in real world
Speaker B: conditions, but in a safe, controlled environment. It's like a white hat hacker event, right? They do the spoofing and the jamming and they throw the clocks out into the middle of the city, see, and they send them back to 2014 and they, they spoof you onto the top of a mountain and they see how all these systems cope.
Speaker A: These tests and this kind of thinking are helping people prepare and consider how to counteract and work around spoofing. Whether that's making sure we aren't too rusty with our backup systems, to developing new ones, to working to encrypt and authenticate signals, all so we can continue to rely on this information that has become so essential to modern life. Hearing how vulnerable GPS is, there's a temptation to think maybe the solution is to just shut it all down, go back to basics or replace it with safer, newer things. But maybe what I want to leave you with is just how well GPS works. Despite its flaws, it is a massive success story. It's like the Internet itself, a vast government funded project built to be used by all that has become essential infrastructure for modern life. Infrastructure that works so well and so efficiently and so usefully we can take it for granted. And like the Internet and lots of other complex systems we rely upon daily, it's got plenty of problems and a few bad actors can destabilize the whole thing. But even so, that doesn't mean we'd be better off without it.
Speaker B: There's something to be said for the fact that this system is so elegant. It's it's decades old now and we're still using it. And that's pretty amazing, actually, and not something I think is going to be easy to replace. For better or for worse.
Speaker D: Foreign.
Speaker A: This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. I want to strongly exhort you to please sign up for Decoder Ring Plus. You get to skip all the ads and listen to episodes of Decoder Rings Back. You can hear it all by going to the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or visiting slate.comdecoder ring this episode was written and produced by Max Friedman. It was edited by me and Evan Chung. Our supervising producer, Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. Our intern is Phoebe Mulder. I want to strongly recommend that you go out and buy Katherine Dunn's book Little Blue Dot. As ever, it contains so much more information about GPS and how it works, all the technical details, but lots and lots of fun, rich anecdotes as well that you did not hear in this episode. Go get it. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decoder ring slate.com and you can also leave us a message on our Decoder ring phone number 347-460-7281. We'll see you in two weeks.
Speaker D: Foreign.
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