WIRED Roundup: Satellites Data Leak, Cybertrucks, Politicized Federal Workers

In today’s episode, Zoë Schiffer is joined by senior politics writer Jake Lahut to run through five stories that you need to know about this week—from how satellites are leaking sensitive data to what Zoë learned after interviewing Cybertruck owners. Then, Zoë and Jake dive into how federal workers ended up in the middle of a political fight that they didn’t sign themselves up for.

Mentioned in this episode:
Satellites Are Leaking the World’s Secrets: Calls, Texts, Military and Corporate Data by Andy Greenberg and Matt Burgess
A Plan to Rebuild Gaza Lists Nearly 30 Companies. Many Say They’re Not Involved by Caroline Haskins
A Quarter of the CDC Is Gone by Emily Mullin
Spit On, Sworn At, and Undeterred: What It’s Like to Own a Cybertruck by Zoë Schiffer
Federal Workers Are Being Used as Pawns in the Shutdown by Makena Kelly

You can follow Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer and Jake Lahut on Bluesky at @jakelahut. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED’s Uncanny Valley. I’m WIRED’s Director of Business and Industry, Zoë Schiffer. Today on the show, we’re bringing you five stories that you need to know about this week, including how federal workers are navigating layoffs and political interests in the continuing government shutdown. I’m joined today by Senior Politics Writer Jake Lahut. Jake, welcome back to Uncanny Valley.

Jake Lahut: Great to be back, Zoë. And could I interest you in a Cybertruck?

Zoë Schiffer: Oh my gosh, could you ever. We’re going to talk about that today. Our first story, however, is scarier than a Cybertruck might I say. It’s about how satellites are leaking all kinds of information from regular calls and texts to military and corporate secrets. Our colleague, Andy Greenberg and Matt Burgess reported this week that a group of researchers from UC San Diego and the University of Maryland found that roughly half of satellite signals are unprotected from anyone coming in and just eavesdropping.

Jake Lahut: Well, this is great. It’s very good to know, a classic Andy Greenberg story right here. Also, if you want your full Andy Greenberg fix for this weekend, folks, you got to check out this YouTube video he made about hacking a poker card shuffling machine. But what kind of data are these satellites leaking exactly?

Zoë Schiffer: So the researchers developed a pretty modest off-the-shelf satellite dish that cost them $800 to build, and they set it up on the roof of a building at UC, San Diego. For three years, they picked up the communications from satellites that would pass through the area by simply pointing at them and interpreting the signals that were being received, and they assembled this pretty alarming collection of private data. So people’s texts and calls from T-Mobile, cellular network data from passengers’ in-flight Wi-Fi browsing, communications to and from critical infrastructure sites like electric utilities and offshore oil and gas platforms. And they even found some US and Mexican military and law enforcement communications, which revealed the locations of things like Navy vessels.

Jake Lahut: If these guys could set a dish up on a roof and do it, you got to wonder what foreign intelligence services would be capable of doing. And it looks like they warned these companies and organizations about these leaks, and most of them, including T-Mobile, moved quickly to encrypt those communications and protect the data. But others, including some owners of vulnerable US critical infrastructure, whom the researchers alerted more recently and they declined to name those to WIRED, have yet to add encryption to their satellite-based systems. These researchers are pointing to the surveillance dangers of these unencrypted satellite connections before. This is not a fully, fully new thing, but the scale and scope of the new disclosures appear unrivaled. And I just love the idea that the researchers themselves were genuinely surprised at finding this amount of data thinking that it would be encrypted. Do they come up with some other reasons to explain it?

Zoë Schiffer: There are a few explanations as to why all this information was available for anyone to access, but the researchers agreed that the main reason is because the overall security strategy of a lot of global satellite communication systems is just hoping that no one looks up to the sky and checks out their communications.

Jake Lahut: Oh my God.

Zoë Schiffer: Which in fact, that’s what the researchers titled the paper, it’s called “Don’t Look Up,” which is a reference to the 2021 film as well. I love how researchers name their papers. On a total side note, it’s so funny and charming.

Jake Lahut: Honestly, it seems like one of the more fun parts of the job. I’m imagining in my head that it came with a bit of one of them losing their mind in a meeting like Leonardo DiCaprio on air in that movie, but.

Zoë Schiffer: Right. Moving on to our next story, and this one’s from our colleague Caroline Haskins, who reported this week about this plan to rebuild Gaza that was shared with Trump administration officials. This plan is essentially a pitch deck that lays out an ambitious redevelopment plan called the GREAT Trust, which stands for Gaza Reconstitution Economic Acceleration and Transformation. But it’s not just a random pitch because again, it got circulated among the Trump administration.

Jake Lahut: Okay, okay. Nothing wrong with a pitch deck in theory, but I got a feeling that this is going to take a turn and you’re going to hit me with a curveball right here.

Zoë Schiffer: So the pitch deck features the names and logos of dozens of companies like Tesla, IKEA, and Amazon. But the thing is, many of these companies told WIRED that they had absolutely no idea that this plan even existed, and they’re definitely saying they’re not involved.

Jake Lahut: And got to be kind of crazy learning from a reporter, our Caroline Haskins, that your company has supposedly been signed up to rebuild a decimated Gaza has got to be a bit anxiety-inducing, confusing?

Zoë Schiffer: I mean, enough so that they were willing to deny it on record, which honestly I found very surprising. I was expecting a lot of crickets from this. But the pitch deck was reportedly created by some of the businessmen who helped create the controversial nonprofit, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is currently leading aid distribution in Gaza. The group has been criticized by organizations like Doctors Without Borders for bypassing the UN’s existing systems for aid distribution. And a former security contractor has also alleged that the foundation’s contractor shot at unarmed Palestinians. The foundation has denied these allegations, but as you can see, some of the people involved in the group don’t have a great reputation. And the pitch deck, while a totally separate thing, it just doesn’t appear to help matters.

Jake Lahut: And this might look like a pitch deck that’s normal on face value, but when you really start looking at it, and this is where Caroline’s piece gets interesting, it doesn’t really have any connection to the reality on the ground in Gaza, and that’s what we’ve seen with the rhetoric from the administration so far when they’ve talked about this luxury redevelopment of Gaza. But then for the actual people who live there and want to return to their homes, they’re talking about things like, “offer Gazans to place their privately owned land in the trust in exchange for a digital token that gives them the right for a permanent housing unit.” So Gaza is devastated, and we’re not even talking about real money to rebuild your home or to relocate. And then more disturbingly in this presentation, the foundation would lead this “US-led multilateral custodianship” over the Gaza Strip. So that would essentially bring in these private contractors to be distributing aid and operate whatever this would be in the interim, in coordination with the Israeli Defense Forces.

Zoë Schiffer: I feel like the people who are proposing this plan should have to live there. They should get a digital token and have the private contractors keep them safe.

Jake Lahut: Yeah, maybe Tony Blair can pay for his foundation with digital tokens instead of Larry Ellison’s money, and we’ll see how that goes.

Zoë Schiffer: We’ll see how this plays out as the peace treaty continues to unfold as well. We’re staying in the world of politics for a little longer to briefly discuss what’s been going on at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is better known as the CDC. Our colleague Emily Mullin reported that after a fresh round of layoffs this past weekend, the employee’s union estimates that about a quarter of the agency’s workforce is now gone. This is putting together everyone who has been laid off and those who have accepted the buyout package offered by the Trump administration earlier this year, which you and I reported on a lot of federal employees have actually taken.

Jake Lahut: These are layoffs in a whole host of roles across the CDC, but it’s pretty concerning that there are very few left in just leadership positions at the CDC at the moment. A former staffer told Emily that, “At the highest level of leadership at the CDC, there are no public health or medical professionals left to help guide CDC recommendations.” And that’s a recurring theme that what we’re seeing across the shutdown is basically this gutting with a handful of people left in charge of really important teams or units or verticals with very few people left underneath them now, or in this case, the CDC we’re just talking about essentially a decapitation of leadership. The senior staff resignations at the CDC happened en masse after Robert F. Kennedy, the health secretary fired CDC Director Susan Monarez. She told a Senate committee in September that Kennedy demanded she sign off on this new anti-vaccine recommendations that basically were in her words, “regardless of the scientific evidence,” to be used to dismiss career officials without cause. Basically, if you’re not with the program of this anti-vax stuff, you’re gone, and she would not abide.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I mean, I was talking to someone before these recent layoffs who’d worked at the CDC previously and had been pretty involved in efforts to study the impact of certain diseases or pandemics specifically on pregnant populations, and this person had told me a while ago, that entire team was gone. They didn’t have many people in place anymore who could look at particularly vulnerable populations from a health perspective, which I found pretty sad and disturbing, but now, I mean, it’s just getting so much worse. It’s getting so much worse.

Jake Lahut: And Russell Vought seems to be quite happy about each additional version of this that keeps coming down the pike, so.

Zoë Schiffer: Right. Okay. We’ll talk more about these federal layoffs and how they’ve affected other agencies too in our next segment. But before we go to break, I’ve got a fun and very tech bro scoop for you, Cybertrucks.

Jake Lahut: Yeah. Honestly, I should be paying you to be on the show today, Zoë, so tell me more about it.

Zoë Schiffer: Okay. Well, I found this story so charming because essentially our Features Director Reyhan had said, “Let’s do a photo essay of Cybertruck owners.” And I was like, ‘I volunteer as tribute. I really want to do this.” So I contacted a bunch of people, I was actually going around, and when I saw Cybertrucks, I would leave little notes on their car. Not a single person ever responded to me, I was like.

Jake Lahut: Stalker behavior.

Zoë Schiffer: “Okay, all right.” But eventually I got in contact with this guy who runs Cybertrucks Owners Only, which is this 50,000 person Facebook group that’s really, really active. And he, while very suspicious of the media, like many Cybertrucks owners was like, “I’m game. If you come to Palm Springs on this weekend, we can have a Cybertrucks meetup and you can go meet people, you can take photos and interview them.” I love reporting where your original thesis is completely disproven in the course of the reporting, and the Cybertrucks owners really see themselves as the victims of this campaign. They’re being spit at, they’re being targeted, people yell that they’re Nazis. And to a lot of people who I talk to, they don’t see their purchase of this car as at all political. They’re like, “I just like the car. It’s a cool car, it’s fun and all of these crazy liberal people are screaming at me all day. I have my kids in the car and they’re chasing after me calling me a Nazi.” The article came out today, there’s some really cool photos. I’m curious to hear what you thought.

Jake Lahut: Okay. So first of all, I just want to know, what are the psychological profiles we’re dealing with here? And then just tell me about what’s going on with these guys and their cars. It sounds like both the boys and the cars are characters in this story.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I mean, to say the least, yeah, you really do have to check out the photos. But yeah, I mean, Michael Goldman, who runs the Facebook group, he told me this story. I was asking people, “What’s the craziest experience you’ve had while you’re driving the car?” And he told me this story about being in a Whole Foods parking lot. He was dropping off an Amazon package and a woman left a note on his car that read, “This is an extension of your small dick,” and the cars record 24/7. I also didn’t know this until he started talking to me about, I was like, “This is why those people didn’t respond to me because they saw me creepily walking up to their car.” Anyway, so he comes back to the car, he sees the note, he replays the video and sees that it’s actually a woman who’s still in her car across from him. And so he walks over and he’s like, “Hey, why did you write this?” And they get into this conversation where she essentially says, according to him, that she thinks he’s a Nazi and she finds what he’s doing offensive. And he’s like, “Well, my last name is Goldman, I’m Jewish.” And she was like, “Oh, my wife is Jewish.” And he was like, “Have you ever been profiled because you’re gay?”

Jake Lahut: No.

Zoë Schiffer: And she was like, “Yes, I have.” And he says she started crying and she apologized and he was like, “I’m a really big supporter of the LGBTQ community in Palm Springs, and so the idea that I was being called a Nazi or someone insinuating that I’m homophobic was really offensive,” and they had this reconciliation right there in the Whole Foods parking lot.

Jake Lahut: Wow. God bless America.

Zoë Schiffer: I know. I talked to another man who was really surprised that people find the car to be political. And actually then during fact checking, it came out that this person was arrested and pled guilty to obstructing an official proceeding in the January 6th attack on the Capitol, but he was later pardoned by President Trump.

Jake Lahut: It all works out for the J6ers in the end.

Zoë Schiffer: It does. Yeah. The article came out, I wasn’t sure how the Cybertruck boys were going to feel about it, but everyone was very, very positive and excited. I have a group text with a lot of them now, but then I have gotten some really wild emails this morning from people being like, “I’m canceling my WIRED subscription. How dare you interview a Nazi? This is pathetic.”

Jake Lahut: I mean, look, there are people in this country where politics is just not a dominant constant in their lives.

Zoë Schiffer: Right.

Jake Lahut: But also Zoë, have you ever heard of the term partisan sorting?

Zoë Schiffer: Ooh, no, I have not.

Jake Lahut: I felt like when I was reading your Cybertruck piece that it’s very much adjacent to this concept, only you’re looking at the underbelly of it, which is basically that as American politics have become more polarized, our purchases have also started to fall along partisan ideological lines. So for example, the Cybertruck is just a great stand-in where you would assume if you see one that these guys have got to be Elon Musk fans, or if you see someone driving a pickup truck, you assume, okay, they’re probably a Republican. You see someone in a Prius, you’re going to assume they probably vote for Democrats, right? And you start to get to the point where just these little consumer signifiers, the Lululemon pants or the Stanley mug, they tend to indicate subconsciously to people, and there’s research that backs this up that they are largely skewing to people who vote one way or another. But this story was just incredible, Zoë, I really… I’m also just struck by, one, you made a lot of friends along the way it seems, but also the way that these folks seem to be genuinely going through it for how the public perceives this purchase that they were just really excited about at one point.

Zoë Schiffer: I think that’s what I found so delightful and charming again, I think it’s always really fun when your mind is changed in the course of reporting. I get that a lot of WIRED readers have their preconceived ideas and they found the reporting offensive. But for me personally, it’s like if you just bought the Cybertruck because you thought it was a cool sci-fi looking car, and then all of a sudden people are screaming that you’re a Nazi on the street to you, you’re like, “Those people seem unwell, like I’m totally fine.”

Jake Lahut: And I think some of our listeners out there might want to remember the Marc Maron-ism, a half serious joke he told that progressives at times may have annoyed the rest of the middle of the country into fascism, so you just got to sometimes check yourself on that.

Zoë Schiffer: Coming up after the break, we’ll dive into how federal workers are finding themselves in the middle of a political storm during this latest government shutdown. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I’m Zoë Schiffer. I’m joined today by Senior Writer Jake Lahut. Okay, Jake, let’s dive into our main story. And this one comes from our colleague, Makena Kelly, who published in your newsletter Inner Loop this week. She wrote that federal workers are trying to navigate a fresh batch of layoffs and ongoing political pressures during the ongoing government shutdown. Jake, what has been going on here?

Jake Lahut: Makena got some incredible quotes in this story, which I would just recommend reading all the way through, but here’s what we’re looking at. So as of July, more than 150,000 federal workers had resigned from their roles since President Trump took office for the second term according to the Washington Post. We got tens of thousands who’ve also been fired over the arc of DOGE and afterwards, and for the past few months, it seemed like this bloodletting was largely over, the federal government was actually trying to bring people back, but that all changed on Friday. Suddenly, when this government shutdown is in full swing and there’s this wait and see period where are these layoffs, what we’ll call RIFs, reductions in force, when are they going to happen? Russell Vought promised them in the first couple days of the shutdown, they didn’t happen. Then we get to Friday and thousands of employees at eight government agencies were subjected to these RIFs and the government’s formal process for laying off workers during a shutdown. Now, according to a court filing from the Office of Management and Budget, OMB, on Friday, this latest round of firings has affected already more than 4,000 federal employees. These RIFs appear to be spelling out a quiet rewrite of the administrative state and the cuts targeted offices and programs that focus particularly on public health, housing grants, homelessness programs, special education programs, and environmental cleanup.

Zoë Schiffer: That’s already pretty scary, but this isn’t even the first hostile and overtly political move that federal workers have faced during this government shutdown, right?

Jake Lahut: Yeah. In the weeks since the shutdown began, the administration has basically hijacked these government websites or even employees out of office emails, which we’ve reported on. We’ve had airport screens where Kristi Noem will suddenly appear and blame Democrats for the cuts while you’re just stuck waiting in line at TSA. This is going all the way back to that fork in the road email that Elon Musk and all these employees, where the vibe Makena captures in this story is just this sense of constant dread, and humiliation in a lot of ways that these federal workers are going through when they could be making more money in the private sector. They’re dedicated to their service. They’re not partisan actors or anything like that, but they’re really going through it right now.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, honestly, it’s giving Cybertruck a little bit with how much people assume that everyone has the same hardline political ideology that they do, or they assume they have a hardline political ideology when in fact, most of the country is just not political. In the case of federal employees, of course it’s not because they’re not paying attention like most people, it’s that they’ve just worked through many different administrations and their job is inherently apolitical, or at least they feel it was. But it’s clear that these layoffs are a shift from the initial DOGE strategy of reducing employees across agencies without any clear reasons other than the mandate of making cuts and saving money-

Jake Lahut: For cut’s sake, right.

Zoë Schiffer: Exactly. So these recent cuts you mentioned seem targeted to what the current administration’s calls “Democratic priorities.” So which strategy here should we be more worried about?

Jake Lahut: I think that the slash and burn approach of DOGE 1.0, if you want to call it that, that leads to all these second and third order effects where the people involved wouldn’t really understand that if you get rid of this swath of people, that means that XYZ things can’t or won’t happen. And there still are versions of that with this approach. And I’m not saying that it’s better per se, but clearly under Vought, there’s more thought going into it? And that’s the general rap on him when I talk to my sources in the White House, which is that Vought is just essentially a more savvy operator and more strategic than Elon was. So they’re basically saying he’s more focused and he thinks this stuff through a little more. Now, the question is when they say they’re cutting these for Democratic priorities, is that going to translate to what the general public will hear when something involving an agency that they didn’t even know affected their lives suddenly stops working? And I think that remains to be seen.

Zoë Schiffer: Right. Okay, so how are federal workers navigating this moment? What are people on the politics desk hearing?

Jake Lahut: This is a wild recurring theme from this shutdown, and even when we were reporting on the first one that federal employees are in some ways the most clear-eyed and often in favor of at least someone calling attention to what’s going on with the gutting of the federal government so we had employees reaching out to Makena on LinkedIn. They were reaching out to her on Signal, and they’re looking for some kind of clarity from her about whether they’d still have a job in the coming weeks, and they were just hoping she would have some information from another part of the agency or whatever about whether these RIFs are coming. And one of these folks told McKenna, “So tired of being used as a pawn.” This is this person that the IRS says, “is WIRED hiring?”

Zoë Schiffer: It’s dark when you’re trying to go work in media, famously, the industry that’s been dying for longer than the federal government.

Jake Lahut: And we actually, we typically are, we do have a features position, a features editor position, and another investigative reporter role open but-

Zoë Schiffer: That’s true.

Jake Lahut: … a little late in the game for this person to throw their hat in for that unfortunately. We wish them the best.

Zoë Schiffer: That’s our show for today. We’ll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Make sure to check out Thursday’s episode of Uncanny Valley, which is about how a history professor had to flee the US after far right influencers targeted him. Adriana Tapia and Mark Lyda produced this episode, Amar Lal at Macrosound mixed this episode. Pran Bandi is our New York studio engineer. Kate Osborn is our executive producer. Condé Nast Head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon, and Katie Drummond is WIRED’s Global Editorial Director.