How GPS Became a Weapon | Katherine Dunn

[00:00:00] Lock your doors, close the blinds, change your passwords. This is Secrets and Spies. Secrets and Spies is a podcast that dives into the world of espionage, terrorism, geopolitics, and intrigue. This podcast is produced and hosted by Chris Carr.

[00:00:29] On today's podcast, I'm joined by author and journalist Katherine Dunn, and we discuss her excellent book, Little Blue Dots, which looks at how GPS has shaped the modern world. I hope you enjoy this episode. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. Take care. The opinions expressed by guests on Secrets and Spies do not necessarily represent those of the producers and sponsors of this podcast.

[00:01:02] Katherine, welcome to Secrets and Spies. It's wonderful to have you on the show. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm good. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it's great to have you on. So for the benefit of the listeners, please can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and kind of your background and what sort of sparked your interest in GPS and the hidden world behind it?

[00:01:19] Yeah, it's quite an odd story. I'm a journalist myself and my background, at this point, I really specialize in climate change and I work with other journalists to help them cover climate change. But I really come from the background of covering commodities and particularly energy. So when you cover energy flows around the world to a really granular degree, you spend a lot of time thinking about shipping.

[00:01:46] Of course, anybody who's been following the Strait of Hormuz and the war with Iran will know all of a sudden how critical the Strait of Hormuz is. So the Strait of Hormuz is a real focus for anybody who's covered energy flows around the world. And that's what I used to do several years back now. And, you know, it was a pretty technical job. You're just you're tracking flows here and there. And but every once in a while I would write a longer feature.

[00:02:14] And so I was just sitting there bored one day when a colleague sent me an article in it would have been a trade magazine. I've never been able to find it again. But it was about this mysterious incident in the Black Sea. So this happened in, I believe, 2017. I think I saw it a year later. And all these ships had arrived in this Russian port, Novorossiysk, which is very close to Crimea. People know a lot about modern Russian history.

[00:02:40] And although the boats were, of course, they were sitting at port, their boats can't fly. What was happening is the alarms were going off telling them they didn't have GPS. And when they look at their Google Maps sort of interface, which I was using in London, all of a sudden it would look like the boats were on the tarmac at a nearby Russian airport. Wow. So this was really, really weird.

[00:03:06] And my day job was not covering this kind of thing, but they sort of let me, you know, every once in a while to stop me annoying them, they let me write kind of some other stories. And I'd just written about cybersecurity attacks on oil refineries sort of by Iran. So I was always interested in any sort of geopolitical intrigue. And I got really hooked on this incident. And I asked some of my shipping contacts and everybody said, oh, we've never heard of this happening before.

[00:03:36] And I started looking at a U.S. government database because the U.S. government is responsible for GPS. And they would have these incidents appearing all over unknown interference. They couldn't say what it was, but it was clear that it was happening in these geopolitical sort of hotspots. So that's how I got into this. It's a little bit sideways from what I normally cover and what I normally do. But through all the other things I was covering, you know, I went to COPS and I covered the big

[00:04:04] oil companies and covered lots of stuff about climate change and finance. And then I was at the University of Oxford working with other journalists. All through this time, I was sort of hooked on this mystery. And because I've always been interested in the Cold War and modern Russia, the fact that there was some sneaky Russian stuff going on was what kind of kept me coming back, I would say. And then eventually my editors were just sick of me wanting to write about this anymore.

[00:04:32] And I said, OK, I'm going to try and write a book because that's they haven't heard about this yet in publishing. And I'm going to try and find new readers for this obsession of mine. Fantastic. Well, that example you share kind of reminds me of the opening of your book where you look at the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, in which the media mogul Elliot Carver manipulates GPS to trigger an international crisis. So I guess, why did you choose to begin your book there? And what did that fictional scenario reveal about kind of the real world story you wanted to tell?

[00:05:02] Well, I think from a writing perspective, you need a way to get people into this. And I think when people hear it's a book about GPS and I think they're going to be reading a book about the sat nav in their cars, and I'm totally aware it sounds so boring. We're always joking, my publisher and I like, oh, God, if only they called it something better than GPS, you know. But so I wanted a good story to get people in.

[00:05:28] And it was it was so funny because my husband, who worked in film at the time, he now works in podcasts himself, but he worked at British film industry for ages. He was like, you know, this really sounds like the plot of Tomorrow Never Dies. And of course, like I'm Canadian, but he's British. And, you know, if you grew up with the James Bond movies, you're immediately like, oh, this.

[00:05:50] So he said, why don't you call up the writer of the screenplay and see if he'll talk to you? And I was like, I don't know if he will. But actually, he did because he said he had read one of my articles before and he had actually heard about the fact that GPS was going weird. So it was a little bit of a pragmatic choice. I wanted a way to get people into the story to say, I know you think GPS is so boring and

[00:06:18] humdrum, but actually it's, you know, there's been this idea that it could go wrong for a while. And yeah, I was definitely surprised to see kind of how the echoes in that story of what had started happening now and the fact that, you know, this was becoming a major concern in niche circles.

[00:06:42] But, you know, if there is even a fake territorial incursion into Iran or whatever, Israeli waters, or we see this now, it could be a massive geopolitical incident. But yeah, I was really impressed. Like when he said that he would talk to me, he was just so curious. He said, people are always trying to get in touch with me. People always want to talk about the Bond movies. But this is such a weird request. I couldn't say no. And he's an absolutely lovely man. This guy, Bruce Fierstein.

[00:07:11] So yeah, that's the story behind that. Oh, fantastic. Now, had you seen the film prior to your partner's recommendation? I definitely had. Like, I grew up on the James Bond movies as well, of course. I definitely had. But I didn't remember that level of detail. I think a lot of people wouldn't. You know, they just think, oh, it's sort of computer stuff. It's the late 90s. Computer stuff goes wrong. Yeah. So I had to watch it again for sure. And I had to kind of look up the plot. But yeah, I definitely seen it in the 90s.

[00:07:41] Yeah. What was that like watching that? It was fun because of course I wasn't watching it like a normal person, right? I was like pausing and I was like, oh, oh, he says it does. You know, Admaro Robux says it does not lie, but it does lie. And I've since had some people say to me, this is the overlap of their incredibly niche interests. Yeah. James Bond movie, deep cut stuff and GPS. It is a little bit of like a nerd vibe. Like it's not totally surprising.

[00:08:10] There are some people where this really overlaps. But yeah. Yeah. It's kind of funny, actually, the more James Bond films over the years start to feel more relevant. I mean, I keep thinking about Moonraker that felt ridiculous when I was young, but now is slowly creeping into reality with like private companies sending people into space and things like that. Yeah. I guess it's always, I mean, it's funny because I'm not really a science fiction person, which is, you know, this book has quite like, you know, science fiction-y moon elements.

[00:08:39] And I'm sort of, I was coming to the space race, particularly the years before putting a man on the moon. The book's not really concerned about that. It's really concerned about the first satellites. And yeah, it is interesting because throughout the book, the characters you're meeting, they tend to be people who were really interested in science fiction. They tend to be a certain kind of person. And you do see that they're writing science fiction, they're reading it.

[00:09:07] And this is also where they're getting a lot of the ideas about what could go wrong or what could happen with this technology. Can you just give us a bit of a dummy's guide to how GPS works? The way GPS works in simple terms, there's a minimum of 24 satellites encircling the globe at any time, a minimum. There's usually more than that. And what that means is that a receiver, so I always say, oh, you, but you know, I've got my phone next to me.

[00:09:32] So the chip in my phone, which is a receiver, is in sight of at least four satellites at any one time. And these four satellites, each one of them is responsible essentially for a key part of the calculation. So longitude, latitude. I'm in South London, so I'm very close to the prime meridian. Altitude, that's because it was built for planes. So I'm on the sixth floor. It'll be calculating that.

[00:09:58] And then the fourth thing, which is by far the trickiest and the thing that gets forgotten about GPS, is time. And what it actually does is there's a cheap, crappy clock in my iPhone, and there's an atomic clock in space. And it gives my phone the gift of really, really good time. It turns a bad clock into a very good clock, and it does that for all kinds of digital systems. So it's calculating for these four things at any one time.

[00:10:27] And the way it's doing that is because it's sending radio signals. And in very simple terms, the chip is just calculating the difference in the time between when the signal left the satellite and when it arrived. But it's using all four of those calculations like it wants. And, you know, this is done by a series of computers. It's not done, you know. It sounds very simple in theory, like we could just do it on a chalkboard. But if you're not a physicist, it's a bunch of computers talking to each other.

[00:10:57] But it's these four things that it's really building for. So one of the things that sort of surprised me was that the story of GPS really begins during the Second World War with figures like R.V. Jones. Why was that period so important? And what did those sort of early intelligence battles reveal about sort of the future relationship between technology and warfare? You have the convergence of aviation at this level and the convergence of radio at the same time.

[00:11:26] So it was something that the interwar years had really set the foundation for this to explode into a conflict. I guess maybe the thing you can make now or later in the book, I'm talking about Ukraine and there are a lot of weird parallels there. But this idea of, you know, these kids playing with drones, you know, teenagers getting drones for their birthdays. And now those same drone models are being repurposed and resent to Ukraine and Ukrainian engineers

[00:11:55] are basically hacking them to use them in battle. They're commercial drones. And it is a little bit of that same element of things that were, I think, technologically, A, could finally happen. The technology was there and were culturally happening. And there's these characters like R.V. Jones who spent their adolescence fiddling with radios. And now they're in their 20s and war is breaking out in Europe and they have all these foundational skills.

[00:12:24] And you also see that these radio landing beams that become a really big feature of World War II and are used for precision blind bombing. They were used in civil aviation. They were used in the airport in London. They were used at the airport in Berlin. So it was these things that were happening in civilian life that really, really took off. And then they were experimenting. They were going back and forth in this crazy fast acceleration of technology, you know,

[00:12:54] very much like a cat and mouse game. And I think also in World War II, what you really saw happening is I was very interested in what was happening with aviation, with planes. But of course, with subs, the same thing was happening if you were looking at, you know, on the ground, if you're looking at radio communications. It was happening on all level. It was just warfare had exploded into the electromagnetic realm. And once it was out of the box, it wasn't really going back in, I think.

[00:13:22] And so that's one of the things, too, where if when I was looking at some of the key approaches of, you know, modern Russian hybrid warfare, right, going back to the roots of some of the Soviet, even pre-Soviet approaches of the information war. And of course, everybody was doing that, but this very Soviet approach to conflict and how it's been there all along.

[00:13:51] It's the technology and the methods change, but this sort of trickery and these optical illusions remain. And are you just to very quickly give us an overview about how the technology sort of came to be? Yeah. So the sort of the key origin story about GPS is this thing that's been really given this mythical status called the Lonely Halls meeting by Colonel Bradford Parkinson, who's sort of considered the patriarch of GPS.

[00:14:21] And it was this meeting in the Pentagon, long weekend, Labor Day weekend, where he gathered his his favorite crop of engineers. And they looked at all of the different elements that you could use to build a satellite navigation system because there have been competing systems within the U.S. military from different branches. And they sort of assembled it into the core of what we know as GPS today.

[00:14:47] There's some controversy and there's some disputes where there's another branch of the military under the Navy where they say, no, we invented it. We should get credit. They're still arguing about this to this day. But from my perspective, essentially, different pieces were taken from different projects. And it was sort of one satellite system to rule them all. So they have to decide, like, what is the orbits of all these satellites?

[00:15:17] Like, what formation are they going to be in? That affects when you have, you know, how are they going to send the signal down from space? What code are they going to use? All of these technical bits. And the core of all this, yeah, was decided in 1973. And it's still the core of what we use today. So it's pretty incredible given how much, you know, computing alone has evolved in the years since. I still, as we're talking, I was just thinking about the first time I ever encountered GPS.

[00:15:46] My father used to be an amateur pilot. He used to fly gliders. In 1994, he bought his first ever Garmin GPS. Yes, I remember us standing in the garden trying to connect to satellites and things. And it was all very exciting. And it kind of, you know, obviously it comes from this sort of military necessity. I mean, it's not sort of something that's come from some civilian use.

[00:16:13] I think even remember back in, certainly in the 90s, that GPS was ever so slightly inaccurate for security purposes. I think, I can't remember exactly what distances and things. So to what extent is this sort of system, do you think, sort of shaped by kind of Cold War thinking and the pursuit of a strategic advantage? Yeah, it's completely a product of the Cold War. What we call GPS, the real nuts and bolts of how the system works, directly comes out of the Vietnam War.

[00:16:42] And the fact that they were really struggling to bomb very, very precise bridges that, you know, were being used to supply South Vietnam. And there was this one bridge in particular that they spent seven years trying to bomb. And you can imagine the American kind of military hubris over this. Like, how can we not bring down a single bridge? This is really, really crazy. So that was really the direct approach.

[00:17:09] But also, when you look even further back, there was a predecessor system to GPS called Transit. And the Russians also had, or sorry, the Soviets had their own version as well that was very much like a copycat of that. And that was completely a product of realizing that not only did you want to bomb Moscow. So, okay, so you had to know where Moscow was. You had to know where B was. But you had to know where A was as well. You really had to know the starting point.

[00:17:38] And ideally, the starting point had to be moving constantly because you didn't want to make yourself easy to bomb, which is why they put loads of this stuff on submarines in the far north. And they didn't want to make it too accessible. They wanted to make it hard to find. And all of that was really coming out of the nuclear arms race.

[00:17:56] It was really about this drive for precision and the result of the space race and the insecurity, I think, of the Soviets coming first to put a satellite in space. The shock that the Soviets would be able to do that. But, yeah, I think there's this really interesting alternate history that a lot of other people have explored of what would have happened had the Americans come first.

[00:18:25] And they hadn't had that absolute shock of realizing that their great landmass wouldn't protect them anymore. If the Soviets could fly satellites over you, what else could they do? So it sort of merges, you know, once it comes to the Vietnam War and obviously a product of the Cold War, but, you know, with its own particular challenges. But it was totally, completely part and parcel with the Cold War.

[00:18:47] And I think what's a little bit funny is by the time it actually gets used in a conflict for the first time in the Gulf War, it's right after the Cold War has sort of ended, right? And it's facing this very different world of conflict. And now all of a sudden having nuclear submarines in the Arctic is not really the focus anymore. And they sort of have to adapt this technology.

[00:19:10] But it is just totally part and parcel with, I think, the second half of, you know, American and Soviet history. Let's take a break and be right back with more.

[00:19:36] If you're enjoying this podcast, please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. Go to patreon.com forward slash secrets and spies and you'll get access to the ad-free versions of this show. Now we'll get back to the interview. Thank you for your support. So you write about the 1983 shoot down of Korean Airlines Flight 007 as a pivotal moment. Why was that tragedy so important in opening GPS up to the civilian world? It was a really shocking incident. Of course, I wasn't around when it happened.

[00:20:05] But if people remember it, you know, it's still something that was etched in cultural memory. And of course, when you go back and you read scholarship now about that period, just how tense the mood was in 1983, how close we got to full-on nuclear war is stressful to read about even in retrospect. So obviously, yeah, but the horrible, this was just, you know, this was a horrible series of mistakes.

[00:20:34] And it's like, how could we get this close through a horrible series of mistakes? The Soviets thought it was a spy plane. To be honest, they had really good reason to think that to some extent because there had been an American spy plane in their territory. And so they're both kind of not really admitting the various mistakes that have been made. And then Reagan, or rather Reagan's spokesperson, goes out right after this and says, we have this piece of technology in the Pentagon.

[00:21:03] It hasn't been classified, but it hasn't been widely known by any means. And we're going to release it to the rest of the world as a civilian tool. And it's going to make sure this doesn't happen again. You're not going to have a plane just drifting totally unaware into Soviet airspace at the height of the Cold War. You sort of, everybody's worst nightmare, right?

[00:21:25] And the thing about that that's a little bit interesting is it's really treated as the seminal moment if you read other GPS histories where this thing is sort of burst into the open. But it was actually quite premature. They didn't have all the satellites up. It wasn't really ready. The aviation industry was incredibly, incredibly resistant to the idea that they would use GPS. They'd been exploring all sorts of other different tools to help them land in poor visibility.

[00:21:54] And now they were sort of being told they were going to use GPS and try to fit their equipment and change the regulations. And they were really not on board with the idea. So it's a bit of a red herring. Like, it takes a little while and certainly longer than his spokesperson says at the time for it to come to fruition. But it would have been the first time a lot of people had heard of it. And that's why it's so significant. And it's this idea of, like, we are not going to get totally lost unawares anymore.

[00:22:25] And also the thing to know about that I found really interesting when you go back and you look even at the report is the fact that this was not the only time this happened. This was the only time people had died. But planes were regularly drifting off course. It was happening pretty often.

[00:22:43] And it was happening for exactly the same reasons that it might happen when you're in your car and you're tired and you think you know the route and you just sort of go on autopilot. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, my God, where am I? So this was not the only time this had happened. This was just the only time that people had died. And they were like, we really need to sort of put a lid on this. So today location data has become enormously valuable to governments, intelligence services and private companies alike.

[00:23:14] Did researching this book sort of change the way you think about the intelligence value of our movements and digital footprints? I think the main thing it changed was this sudden realization of how it's being used at all times. And in a way, I was already kind of a keen reader of things about modern tech and surveillance culture and all these things. But so there's the value of tracking me and trying to sell me stuff.

[00:23:43] But for GPS, there's also the real insane value of the fact that if you take the global supply chain, if you take logistics, GPS is used at every single step of the way. And the incredible value that that produces is really hard to overestimate. But I did, you know, the book doesn't really go into too much detail.

[00:24:10] I thought about doing it, but it doesn't go into too much detail about the modern crop of companies that are really built on top of location. But it is interesting. One thing that I find very ironic is the fact that some of these companies, they're so kind of free market and maybe a little bit, should you say, cavalier about following regulations?

[00:24:33] Well, guess what? The core of your product is a U.S. government military product paid for, funded all these years by the U.S. taxpayer. You know, of course, the Americans get a lot back in terms of hard and soft power and in economic growth on top of that system.

[00:24:54] But it is very ironic to build products that are so disrespectful of government regulations on top of a core government product. And I think that's a lot of the tech we have these days. And you see the people who built this, they were very much creatures of the government. They were tied into the government. And even when they left government, they usually worked for companies that were deeply tied with government contracts or they went to work for universities.

[00:25:23] And they did have this, you know, a lot of these people, some of them are in their 80s now, but you meet them and they have a very public service-y element. A lot of them have been in the military. That's part. And yeah, it's just, it is a little bit funny to me.

[00:25:39] And you can even look at Google Maps and Satellite View and you can see kind of the same story, whereas the predecessor to Google Maps and Satellite View, again, built on top of U.S. government data and information and huge, ambitious data projects paid for and maintained by the U.S. taxpayer. So, yeah, it is a little bit ironic.

[00:26:07] It's like, okay, dismantle, you know, the unsexy parts of the U.S. government if you want. But that is a lot of the core of what these businesses have been based on. Yeah. I mean, that's unfortunate attitudes are rife in the tech industry. I think it kind of comes from that sort of libertarian perspective where they kind of, as somebody once put it, they don't realize that, you know, a lot of society, you know, come, you know, the road you go to your school on was paid for by the government.

[00:26:33] The library you went to and read a book that inspired you to create this system came from probably government funding. A lot of people don't seem to understand that. Yeah. Yeah. And even, I mean, because I had not really been a student of Silicon Valley so much, but of course, for people who know a lot about Silicon Valley, they know that this is the product of the U.S. military industrial complex. The people who worked there, the engineers who worked there, who was buying the contract? Who needed computer chips this powerful?

[00:27:03] You know, like nobody else, nobody else needed this stuff in consumer products until relatively recently. It was the U.S. government. It was the U.S. military that needed it. So, yeah, I have in there, you know, the former president of Hewitt Packard when he goes during the late 60s to serve as, you know, in the Department of Defense. Well, yeah, no kidding, because these were totally tied in with each other.

[00:27:31] So, yeah, it is interesting to me that there's kind of this, these, how should we say, these short memories. Can you just give us a sort of dummy's guide to how spoofing works and the technology involved? So, jamming, in a simple sense, jamming is like if you start talking and I start shouting over you, you're still talking, the sounds still exist, but I've just drowned you out.

[00:27:56] So, what that means in a GPS sense is the signal coming down from space, it's robust. It's very, very, very faint. It's robust because it's getting to you, but it's very faint. And all they're doing is taking another signal on land and drowning it out. That's all that's happening there. So, that's obviously dangerous in the sense that you don't want to lose GPS. But if you know you've lost GPS, you can work on kind of contingency plans.

[00:28:26] What's really tricky and what's happening now is spoofing. And spoofing is just creating a fake dummy signal. It's like a hack. It's like an analog hack. And so, you create the same signal on the same frequency with the same characteristics. You broadcast it from the ground. And again, it's stronger. And if you see it sometimes, you know, on the screen, it's like boop. It's like a wolf in sheep's clothing.

[00:28:56] It just kind of overwhelms it. It takes it over. It latches on. And then the receiver thinks it's the right signal. So, yeah, that's what you've got. You've got a wall of mush and you've got a sneaky sort of attack from the side there. Yeah. Well, many of us simply think of GPS as this sort of thing that navigates us from A to B. But in reality, it's sort of become this invisible infrastructure underpins modern society. So, how deeply embedded is GPS in our daily lives?

[00:29:23] And what are some of the systems that would be effective if it suddenly stopped working? God forbid. I know. So, I gave, you know, you could, I could choose any example actually. But one example in the book where the Norwegian highway engineers have this revelation, right, of how vulnerable they are. And, you know, it's actually very funny when you meet a bunch of Norwegian highway engineers because they're these very, like, fit, outdoorsy, like, cool people.

[00:29:51] Like, they take road safety very seriously in Norway. And Norway is highly electrified. You can be up in the high north in the Arctic on a fjord and you can still be driving your Tesla and plugging it in. And so, you have this highly digital society. And what happened is the Norwegian highway engineer suddenly realized, okay, if GPS is a point of failure, where are the, the chart?

[00:30:21] Okay, if we just look at navigation, where are the charging stations, you know, where are the cars going, their navigation systems? Where are they being repaired? Where are we repairing the highways? All of these things. But even deeper than that, it's the GPS time, that turning a bad clock into a good clock, that is underpinning the mobile base station. So, the mobile connectivity when you're charging your car.

[00:30:49] Or, it's the electricity grid, right? It's how the electricity is being passed from place to place, is being kept in sync. It's all these things with emergency services. So, they're going to need to come down in a helicopter and rescue someone on the fjords. Well, there's multiple points there where if GPS is failing, the communication system is at risk. You know, they could slice one of these cords that's across the fjord. People could lose internet access.

[00:31:18] They could land in the wrong place. They could do, you know, so you can take, there's just a huge number of pain points. And that's when the Norwegian Highway Service was like, we suddenly care a lot about the security of GPS. And of course, if you're in northern Norway, you're actually quite close to Russia and weird things were starting to happen.

[00:31:37] So, there's a lot of really seemingly unsexy areas of civilian life that are having these moments of revelation. But yeah, you could take anything. And another one that I mentioned earlier is just global supply chains. If you're looking at any food, you're going to eat a pineapple from, well, they don't grow them in New Zealand. But you say you're going to eat a pineapple in the Philippines.

[00:32:05] I mean, the precision planting, the precision harvesting, the cranes in the port, the trucks going to the port, the water buoys and like the safety mechanisms inside the port. All of that will be using GPS. And then it'll be tracking GPS along the way. And then the same thing at the other end. So, it's at every point along the way.

[00:32:27] But the point I kind of make repeatedly throughout the book because people really don't realize is the way that this industrial time underpins these digital systems. That's the bit you really don't see. And that's the bit that in our ultra digital world is, I would say, the most dangerous. Your reporting's uncovered a growing pattern of GPS jamming and spoofing around places like Russia, as you just briefly mentioned. And you've got the Black Sea, the Middle East.

[00:32:53] When did you realize this wasn't a series of isolated incidents, but part of a much larger trend? I mean, I think when I was saying that I was sitting there and I was looking up these U.S. government reports saying there's unknown interference. You could definitely see that the interference or the reports of interference, because this was a tiny fraction of what was going on. They were definitely seem to be spreading. You know, they were appearing in the Strait of Hormuz.

[00:33:22] I kind of followed them for a few years. They were going west. And then if you're looking up news articles, you'd start to see little articles here and there in local news in northern Norway or in South Korea or in China.

[00:33:37] I think the moment that it really became clear that it was much more coordinated, the credit for that goes to a guy called Hugh Bradshaw, who was then at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, C4ADS. And he had a moment very similar to mine where his curiosity just got peaked and this was not his job.

[00:34:06] Nobody really wanted him to do this. It turns out a lot of people had a moment around this time. And he just started digging, digging, digging. And he had the brilliant idea to look on these ship tracking websites, which if anybody in logistics, shipping, anything will know. He had the brilliant idea to find a way to see whenever a ship appeared at an airport, because it was so weird.

[00:34:33] And he was the one who started finding these incidents going back to 2016 of these ships acting strange. And then they had the idea to match it up with Putin's calendar, which was public. So when that report came out, I was still pretty early and he kind of had a year's head start on me. And that was kind of the moment it said, OK, there's something going on with Russia here.

[00:35:02] I definitely, when writing the book, I also went back to this time period. And because I was no longer doing just journalism per se, I wasn't trying to find the next thing that was going to happen. I was trying to connect the dots going backwards. It was easier to see what had happened. And what was very obvious was the fact that the Russian government had decided to prioritize electromagnetic warfare again.

[00:35:29] And the reason they had done this, which they had said very openly, was because they didn't think NATO was good at it. It's sort of, it's kind of cheap and dirty, right? And NATO and the U.S. government were producing these big, expensive, fancy, sexy weapons. And the Russians were just out there jamming GPS, making things get a little crazy.

[00:35:56] It is very, very in keeping with this hybrid warfare approach. It's totally part and parcel with all of that. So around 2016, 2017, in retrospect, Putin explicitly said on the record that this was going to be a priority. And then what you were starting to see is that these new weapons were being tested on these new Russian front lines. So that's why it was affecting the East Mediterranean so much, as they were testing this stuff in Syria.

[00:36:26] And of course, they were testing it near Crimea. They were testing it in a complex that is very much thought to be a palatial complex owned by Putin. And so you could see geopolitically. And also around that period, very similar stuff starts popping up in Iran and starts popping up in China.

[00:36:50] So it was clear, you can't, it's very hard to say for sure, but there's some sort of exchange going on around this period between these allies. Yeah, it's a great way to kind of undermine the advanced systems. Yeah, I mean, it's cheap and it's easy. And I think they were identifying that this is very much their approach to undermining NATO, right?

[00:37:15] And to hit NATO where NATO wasn't seemingly as strong or was doing some things in a much more conventional way or respecting Article 5. And they were just going right under the radar and just causing chaos for chaos's sake.

[00:37:31] So, yeah, when you look back and you put it together, it's so clear it's part of this larger menu of hybrid warfare chaotic options that is being sort of unleashed across Eastern Europe and the East Mediterranean around this time. So the war in Ukraine has often been described as the first major drone war. How has that conflict sort of shaped our understanding of GPS as both an enabler of modern warfare and a vulnerability to be exploited?

[00:37:58] I think probably what's most emblematic of it is if you were following fairly early on in the war. And again, you can go back and look at what was happening in the Donbass. It was all sort of already there, what was going to happen, right? But you go back and you look the first year, year, two years of the war where, first of all, they mobilize all of these people who would have been fiddling around with drones making YouTube videos in more peaceful times.

[00:38:27] And second of all, the Americans in particular start sending them these really expensive weapons. And they don't work or they stop working really quickly. And the Ukrainians, you can see, are caught in this awkward dance of saying, thank you so much for sending us the weapons. Please send us more and saying, and by the way, your JDAM missile or whatever doesn't really work here.

[00:38:55] And the reason it doesn't work is because GPS is completely unusable on the front lines. And the Russians and the Ukrainians had clearly been both jamming and spoofing on the front lines for some time at that point. And so you get this battle of the beams where they're going back and forth and GPS is sort of, and GLONASS is sort of off the table pretty quick.

[00:39:22] And they're going after any electromagnetic breadcrumb linking, linking the drones back. So a video link, a radio link, any way that the pilots communicate with the drones is a potential rope that can kind of be disrupted, be hacked, even lead back to the pilots.

[00:39:47] So it's this real conundrum of the fact that all of a sudden you have these front lines where it's machine versus machine. But at the same time, of course, any breadcrumb, any connection there is the immediate thing that you're going to attack in that kind of conflict. And I was a little bit busy when the war with Iran broke out because I was having a baby. And then I went back and I was sort of, okay, what's been happening? And I said, oh, okay, basically the same stuff. You play the same thing. Yeah.

[00:40:17] Yeah. They're using the fiber optic cables all of a sudden. And a lot of people I talked to, they did directly connect it back to World War II and to this kind of battle of the beams era of the technology is going so fast. You find one way to trick and then you find another way to trick and you find another way to trick and you find another way to trick. Back and forth and back and forth.

[00:40:40] But I mean, and definitely for people who are following this, they'll know now it's going to be the autonomous weapons, which don't have that same link, which really opens up new questions about what happens now. Yeah. I mean, like, do you remember Operation Spiderweb? Was that last year where the Ukrainians sent those drones in a truck and they were basically, I think, as far as I can tell,

[00:41:06] or in between lines, they had some software where they were autonomous and didn't need anything. And they just, at a certain time, just took off and did their thing. Yeah. Yeah. It was interesting because Ukraine is just the very end of the book. I didn't go to Ukraine. I'm not an expert in covering Ukraine. And so I relied a lot on talking to people and a lot of other reporting that would have been done. But one thing, there's a guy called Nate Hopper, who's a journalist who I think has a book coming out about time.

[00:41:36] And he clearly tried to ask the Ukrainians a lot of questions that I wanted to ask. And he'd gotten a straight no. So then I knew, OK, yeah, they're not going to be talking about this. No. The question of when GPS is so under attack, what does it mean for civil infrastructure in Ukraine? They will not be able to rely on GPS. Like, what are they doing? And it is a matter of national security.

[00:42:05] And from what I've seen, I could be totally wrong about this because I'm reading secondhand. I don't have any special sources here. But that the U.S. government, of course, has the encrypted military signals for GPS, which they share with other NATO countries. For now, as things stand, fingers crossed. But my understanding was that they probably haven't shared them with the Ukrainians because the risk is just too high that the Russians could get them.

[00:42:34] So it seemed like this battle was really playing out mostly with the civilian signals. I could be wrong about that. I would welcome a correction in somebody telling me what's really going on there. But, yeah, it is this – I am personally so curious. I would really want to know and read any other reporting about how the Ukrainians are doing some of this stuff.

[00:43:01] Because – and it's incredible to me because if you think about the people who are doing this, you know, I knew a young Russian guy here in London. And, you know, it's a 21-year-old kid. Like, it's like his friends. And on the Ukrainian, a bunch of other 21-year-old kids who grew up playing video games, right? And now they're playing this real-life video game. And it is really grim and really dark.

[00:43:28] And it also does remind me a lot of what was happening in Second World War where people had grown up tinkering with the radios. They'd grown up tinkering with technology. And now, you know, they're putting all of these skills into conflict. Let's take a break and be right back with more.

[00:44:00] Just before we get back into the interview, if you're enjoying this episode, please consider buying us a coffee at buymeacoffee.com forward slash secrets and spies. Thank you. So one of the most striking ideas in the book is that we've outsourced our understanding of place and time to an external system. So have we lost something in that process, both sort of practically and psychologically? Looking at the geopolitics, there are other people who have really been interested in what that means for us and the way we experience the world.

[00:44:28] But, I mean, I really felt like how could it not? You have something that's so overwhelmingly useful. And I can use myself as an example. I'll go to Oxford Circus and I've been there a gajillion times. I've lived in London for 12 years and I'll still, and I know I could get my phone stolen, right? And I'll still be like, walking like a lemming, you know, down the street.

[00:44:55] And how could that not affect you? There's just these things that you're not aware of anymore. And it is not by any means the case that we can't trick our eyes and ears. These things are, all of these senses are trickable, right? They're not necessarily inherently more robust in every way than technology. But to kind of replace them and put the trust in technology.

[00:45:24] I think the other thing you hear a lot is that pilots and crews on ships, especially in the Navy, they will be trained to do celestial navigation. They'll be trained to do paper charts. They'll be trained to do it the old-fashioned way. But they never use these skills anymore. So, when the moment comes that they don't have GPS and they have to rely on these skills, they are really, really, really rusty.

[00:45:53] And I think all of us find that easy to understand because we know exactly what would happen if suddenly we couldn't rely on Google Maps, even for something we know we should be able to do. You know, we should be able to ask directions. We should be able to kind of find our way. Yeah. And I always say, you know, with me walking down Oxford Circus, looking at my phone, I mean, thank God I'm not in charge of a plane, right? Yeah. But it definitely has.

[00:46:21] I think we can all feel that in our daily lives. And all we have to do is imagine that that's happening in sort of every level of society, no matter how important your job is. Google Maps has been a godsend in my life. I remember the thing used to terrify me as a youngster was being asked to give directions whilst my dad was driving or later in relationships with my wife and stuff. I'm like, you know, it's the worst. I just. I know. You know, yeah, I hate it. So, it's been wonderful. Yeah.

[00:46:51] The joke in my family is that I have perfect internal GPS in the sense that I am perfectly always wrong. Like, if given the option, I will always walk in the wrong direction. In that sense, I am always right. And every, like, the disasters I have caused when I am in charge of navigation is truly, like, so it is like this, and I can't drive. I also can't drive. Me neither. Yeah, it's this recurring joke in my family that I would have written this book.

[00:47:20] Like, I am the least likely person you can imagine. If you don't know about the Cold War and the Russian and the spy stuff, which I'm all into, I'm the least likely person on earth to write this book because I am just hopeless. I once got lost in Covent Garden for 45 minutes in a space of three blocks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's like an actual, like, intellectual, like, disability. It's really bad. So, you know, I don't want to replace this stuff wholesale. No, no.

[00:47:48] It's been a real benefit for a lot. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm very much a visual navigator. I go by, oh, yeah, that building there and then that one. And, you know, so my mind's very visual. Yeah, yeah. So I'm going to navigate that way. So obeying road laws and pesky things like names, no help to me. But if it's by that building and in that building and there's something distinct about that building, I could help. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, I think the thing to remember when people are like, oh, gee, this and that.

[00:48:17] I was like, well, the thing about it to remember is the worst that will happen to us, ideally, you know, no accident or whatever, is like, oh, okay, we'll be lost. We'll be late. We won't get our takeout. Oh, no. No, no. We'll be late. We'll be late.

[00:48:44] We'll be late. We'll be late. We'll be late. We'll be late. We'll be late. Strava. I do, I do, I do. Yeah.

[00:49:41] Oh, my goodness. We'll be late. We'll be late. We'll be late. We'll be late. We'll be late. We'll be late. We'll be late.

[00:50:11] You've been late. You've been late. You've been late. You've been late. You've been late. You've been late. You've been late. I think so much, actually. I think I've just said, like, people really think of it as being sat-nav in their cars and Google Maps. And that's really the tip of the iceberg, the consumer side of it, on the one hand, is so big and so life-changing, but on the other hand, is not the real risk.

[00:50:36] And I think what I said where the impact of time, the idea of industrial time is really, really trippy and it's really weird. But coordinated industrial time is a very important utility in our society at this point.

[00:50:58] And if this isn't working or if it's somehow infected, we don't really know what will happen exactly, but we don't think it'll be good. The risks are too high to find out. So in Norway, at this thing called Jama Test or Jama Test, if you're Norwegian, they're testing that in real time.

[00:51:20] They are basically creating an open-air lab and they've got industrial time clock makers and then cars, boats, planes, helicopters, everything. But they've got the people who supply the clocks and the timing systems to industrial systems and they're running the test to see what happens when this is under threat.

[00:51:43] And governments, both the Norwegian government and the UK government, and I think in the Nordics and especially in the Baltics right now, where GPS is being so routinely undermined, they are starting to realize that they have to strengthen the civil infrastructure. So I think that's what's really underestimated is the fact that this is really a core tool of our civil infrastructure.

[00:52:09] And when you think about cyber attacks, this is quite similar. It's just happening in a slightly more forgotten realm, but it has a lot in common with cyber attacks and those kinds of hybrid warfare attacks that we do know are at risk at this point. And so do you think the government are going to be sending us on map reading courses now? I think, yeah, yeah. It's like, what is it? Like the Duke of Edinburgh or something for adults.

[00:52:39] I did that. I actually did quite well on it. Yeah. You know what? I have heard in military circles for training, they're bringing a lot of this stuff back. I saw something about in Finland, they really are trying to make sure you know how to use map if you are a border patrol guard in Finland. So, yeah, I think they're starting to put wires back is what's happening.

[00:53:08] You know, GPS was so – it wasn't even just cheap. It was free if you weren't a U.S. taxpayer. And obviously they've got Galileo now. But it's putting clocks back on the ground. It's putting wires back in things and all of that costs money. But I think the revelation is coming that you need to do it. And there are other alternate – in terms of navigation itself, there are other alternate systems that are being developed and have been in the works for a long time.

[00:53:36] And, yeah, there isn't going to be a one-to-one switch. It's just like, yeah, if all of a sudden you say, okay, no more GPS, I'm going to do everything analog. You know, there are ways you can get confused using your eyes and ears as well. But the point is your eyes and ears, it is more difficult to intercept. So the book ends with a warning that certainty itself may be becoming harder to maintain. So looking ahead maybe over the next decade, what concerns you the most and what gives you hope? Oh, yeah, what gives me hope?

[00:54:06] If anything. If no hope at all. No, no, no. That would be horrible. That would be horrible. Yeah, I do think that was sort of the moment at the end of the book where I sat back and I thought about sort of my other life as a journalist and covering climate change and helping other journalists cover things and cover climate change. And I just, anybody who's been a journalist the last 10 years increasingly will just see that

[00:54:36] the wave of disinformation in combination with sort of the undermining of trustworthy institutions, not perfect, not infallible institutions, but previously quite trustful institutions, is having quite a devastating effect. I mean, here in the UK, it would be a good example of the BBC. BBC, I'm very, very fond of the BBC.

[00:55:03] It's not perfect by any means, but the people who work there are good people. And seeing up close how hard it is when trust is being undermined. It's not even that, it's not, at a certain point, it doesn't matter if there's disinformation. If there isn't trust in the good information either, then the work there has been done, right? So you have early in the book where you have these pilots where they say,

[00:55:31] if we can undermine their sense of certainty and trust so much that even when their technology works, they can't trust it. Then that is, yeah, that is a means of undermining certainty. And this is so much about space and time in this weird way, but I think we're seeing that across all these different aspects of society and our relationship with journalists, with science.

[00:56:01] So I really, yeah, I think that worries me. And I struggle to see how that tide will be turned anytime soon. But I do think a reckoning is coming. You know, not very much of this book is really about big tech, even though, again, from a consumer perspective, they've built their businesses in large part off of this product. And they're now building more businesses off the wholesale siphoning

[00:56:31] of copyrighted and protected material. And I do think people are getting fed up of that. And they're questioning the idea that you should hand over your location, your privacy data for the financial benefit of a company. You know, I think here, yeah, as I said, I have a three-month-old daughter.

[00:56:56] And I don't want all these photos of the early months of her life to be completely in the hands of corporations. So I hope a backlash is sort of brewing to that. And it's not, this book is definitely not saying, oh, reject technology. That would be ridiculous. That's not me. But it's saying, you know, it's just like take a step back as well.

[00:57:26] And the idea that technology, the idea that we'll have better technology and we'll somehow inherently make more humane choices. I say at the end of the book too, you know, there was this drive here in the idea of precision bombing, that if you could more precisely bomb targets, war would be more humane. So you'd hit the factory and you wouldn't hit the school because you were hitting the school by accident. You didn't want to hit the school.

[00:57:55] You didn't want to hit the hospital. Of course, World War II, they were just hitting everything they could. But a lot of people who worked on GPS were, I think, a little bit traumatized by that idea. And they really had this idea that technology could make war more humane, that war would stick to the people war was meant to stick to. And I think, unfortunately, what we've seen is you can take incredible, incredible, incredible layers of precision and you can use that

[00:58:22] not to avoid hitting a hospital, but to hit a hospital on purpose. Yeah. And I think that was pretty dark. And I think it's something that we should really look at in our relationship with technology. It's not inherently good or bad, but, you know, yeah, we have to have like real questions about how we are going to use these tools. Yeah.

[00:58:52] Yeah. It's not a hopeful note, but I do think people are thinking seriously about those questions. They're thinking, you could have not hit a hospital. You have the tools not to hit a hospital. So why did you, you know? Well, for me, the more seriously you take issues like this, the more hope it gives me, because I think sometimes a lot of people don't take these subjects seriously and trivialize it. So it's good that discussions are happening. So yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And of everything you've uncovered while researching this book, what has surprised you the most?

[00:59:22] One thing that really surprised me was the fact that GPS was so unpopular for years after it was sort of created. You think of it now as being world changing and everybody accepts how foundational it is, but it was quite a long time when it was under risk of being cancelled. People didn't get what it was for.

[00:59:48] They were sort of dismissive of it, and they used the satellites to track violations of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, so they had to find another reason to kind of justify the program. That was really surprising to me. You hear all these, Gaylord Green, this lovely guy who's mentioned in there, he said, oh God, you explained to them over and over again what it's for and how it's going to change their life, and they just wouldn't get it. They would just say, well, I know where I am. Why do I need this technology to tell me that?

[01:00:18] So I think that was really surprising. I think because obviously I've worked with a lot of science journalists in terms of climate science, but the revelations about how recently we learned really basic things about the Earth's size and shape, I found really fascinating. I kind of felt like, how did I not know this already? But when they were using these early satellites to map the gravitational field,

[01:00:49] I found that super, super interesting and really fascinating part of the space race when you hear so much about putting the first man on the moon. But when we look at the foundational science that that led to, I think it's really about those satellites. Yeah, fantastic. And before we wrap up, is there anything else important to you that we haven't touched on that you particularly like listeners to take away from the book?

[01:01:13] I think the only thing with the book that I tried to convey is I tried to really build it around characters and around these set piece stories, so that you really see that this is not the kind of technology where one person invented it and there it is. You know, it's really about this whole sort of different cast of characters. And I think in the book it really was about that.

[01:01:42] I think we have such a narrative in our culture and sometimes in journalism about valorizing the one person as the one inventor, you know. And this isn't also to undermine Bradford Parkinson, who you will often see sort of treated as a person who's incredibly, incredibly influential. But this is a real convergence technology. It's really about all of these things converging to make this tool technically possible at the time that it was.

[01:02:12] And so it's, you know, and it was huge U.S. government projects. So it's not real, although it's built around all these characters, it's not really this like one person or this one thing that led to it. It's this kind of whole historical cast, I guess. Yeah. Thank you for that. Well, Catherine, where can listeners find out more about you and your work? I tend to use LinkedIn. I don't use X anymore.

[01:02:37] I think I have like a promotional account that my husband tweets out stuff for me because I refuse to go on X and be subjected to that anymore. Yeah. Don't blame you. The dirge of I just I can't handle it. So please check me out on LinkedIn. It's a little bit cringe, but I often share excerpts or things, newsy things going on with GPS around the world. So you can follow me there. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time today. It's been great chatting with you. Yeah. Thank you so much, Chris. I really appreciate it.

[01:03:06] Well, everybody, that's it for today's episode. Thank you again for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider becoming a patron subscriber. Go to patreon.com forward slash secrets and spies. You'll get access to the ad free versions of this show. Thank you for your support. Thank you for listening. Take care.

[01:03:51] Thanks for listening. This is Secrets and Spies.