Since Google Maps launched in 2005, the little blue dot has come to symbolize a transformation in how we navigate through the world — wholly reliant on GPS. But what do we lose when we no longer get lost?

Guests

Katherine Dunn, journalist and author of the new book: “Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World.”

Also Featured

Todd Humphreys, professor of Aerospace Engineering, University of Texas at Austin.

Mary Hegarty, leads the Spatial Thinking Lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Shelia Purcell, On Point listener.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Sheila Purcell has a lot of treasured memories from her childhood, including all the times her family piled into the car and hit the road, no maps.

SHEILA PURCELL: We didn’t use anything that I can remember. I don’t remember seeing an atlas till I was in college and we definitely didn’t have any GPS. So my parents just seemed to know where they were going.

CHAKRABARTI: Most of the time. There were a few wrong turns here and there.

PURCELL: Every once in a while, my mom would start to get nervous in a car with five small children as she’d start to see that maybe we were getting a little too far from civilization or too far from where she thought we were supposed to be heading, and she’d start to ask, “Do we want to stop and ask for directions?”

Maybe we want to ask and see if this is the way we’re supposed to be heading. Sometimes we would, but more often than not my dad would find that as an opportunity to turn it into some great story, something that would pull us all in.

CHAKRABARTI: Sheila grew up in Guayaquil, Ecuador.

Her family spent a lot of time in the car, often driving to and from the beach. She was born in 1978, so no fancy gadgets in the car, no screens, just her parents’ imaginations.

PURCELL: They would tell these great, terrifying stories. If it was daytime, it might be fairies and mermaids, but if it’s nighttime, it was always a horror story.

The scarier, the better if my mom had her way. But it would just turn whatever detour, whatever lost adventure we were on into something that became memorable, that became something that we would keep talking about and laughing about year after year. Who was more scared and who really thought the car had broken down, or that time we got lost and ended up stopping, and asking for directions and getting lunch, and it turned out to be an ostrich farm.

And so the ostrich took Dad’s hat, and we’re eating ostrich burgers.

CHAKRABARTI: These accidental detours became a beloved part of her family’s car trips, as much a part of the journey as the destinations themselves. They even gave those detours a name, the Jacobson Shortcut, coined after Sheila’s father.

PURCELL: And we love it, and we celebrate it, and it just means we got lost and took the long way home. And, you know it means that we were lost, but it also means that you missed out on something. If you weren’t on it, you missed out. Everybody’d be like oh, what’d you get lost?” And go, “Nope, Jacobson shortcut.”

And then you tell them, “And we met this person,” or, “And we had this delicious thing,” or, “And the ostrich stole my hat.” And it ends up being more fun than if we had just gotten from A to B.

CHAKRABARTI: This is On Point. I’m Meghna Chakrabarti. Sheila Purcell lives in Timnath, Colorado now, and those Jacobson shortcuts seem even more precious these days because it’s next to impossible to get lost anymore.

Whether it’s in your car or on your phone, GPS systems have given us the power to know exactly where we are and how to get where we want to go almost anywhere on planet Earth. The technology is also a critical part of much more than simple mapping systems. GPS, in fact, has changed how all of us live, and for the better.

But have we lost a little something too? Have we lost the opportunity to just get lost? To look up from our phones, not know where we are, and discover something delightful and new? That is one of the questions that Katherine Dunn asks in her new book, Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World, and she joins us now.

Katherine, welcome to On Point.

KATHERINE DUNN: Thanks so much for having me, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so before we get into the technical specifics of GPS, I just have to ask you, are you a frequent Google Maps or GPS user yourself?

DUNN: Yeah, constant. People keep asking me if writing this book has changed my relationship with Google Maps, and unfortunately, the answer is not at all.

I once managed to get lost in about a three block radius for 45 minutes and stood my own husband up at the restaurant, and he could not believe how is this possible. And I said, “My phone died. I was completely defenseless.” So yeah guilty as charged.

CHAKRABARTI: Actually, you’re in London right now, and I have to say that a three block radius in London, given how old the city is and how winding and small and maze-like some of those streets can be, I very much sympathize that you could get lost there.

Is that where it happened?

DUNN: Yeah, it was around Carnaby Street. So if it had been a nice grid, a nice orderly grid system, I would have been okay. Yeah. But this was a real accomplishment. Let’s just put it that way. I had to stop some Finnish tourists and get them to do the map.

The restaurant for me. And they were like, “Why? Why are you in this position?” And I was like, “I am but a lemming.” What can I say?

CHAKRABARTI: No, London is truly an ancient maze and it makes it delightful. It is not New York City. Let’s just put it that way. Okay. But you’re not alone, obviously. Just about everyone in some way, shape, or form if they, especially if they have a smartphone, are using GPS.

More importantly, we’ll talk about this a little bit later. Even if you’re not using maps, we are all using GPS systems in broader society and how infrastructure is created these days. But let’s go back, though, and talk about how this system of global positioning became public and so ubiquitous.

Where would you start that story?

DUNN: Depends how far you want to go back. You can go all the way back to antiquity, I would say. But for today’s purposes, let’s take it back to the Vietnam War, the end of the Vietnam War. 1973, Labor Day weekend, so coming right up on that time now would be when GPS is dated to.

And there’s this whole half story, half myth around it, this weekend called the Lonely Halls meeting, and it’s when all of these officials gathered in the Pentagon and they set out what became the Global Positioning System. And why it’s so important that it was 1973 is because this is a precision bombing system.

It was built to drop bombs from planes, and it was built because the Vietnam War, the U.S. Air Force didn’t really have the precision that they wanted to bomb, the Ho Chi Minh Trail going from North to South Vietnam. So that’s the moment a lot of people point to. But yeah, you can go back to World War II, and you can go back even further if you want to look at how we navigate and how we understand the world around us.

CHAKRABARTI: So but in terms of global positioning though and GPS, there was some of that in World War II? I wasn’t familiar with that, because I was just assumed that this is a product of the era of satellites.

DUNN: Yeah. It is satellites, but it’s also radio waves, and navigating using radio waves is a 1930s era thing.

The collision of commercial radios and the collision of commercial aviation. They started using landing beams to help pilots land at Berlin Airport and at London Airport and across the U.S., leading up to World War II. And once you get into World War II the British and the Germans start engaging this battle, and the Americans as time goes on, to use radio beams that they can hear with their ears to drop bombs in the dark.

So that’s the predecessor to the system we have now. Obviously now we rely, the space age changed everything, but this is all about radio beams, and it’s all about the electromagnetic world. That’s what we’re relying on here.

CHAKRABARTI: So you’re talking about man-made systems in general, right?

Just when we moved beyond using the lost art, I have to say, of using stars or the sun or even just simple timekeeping to know where we are. Okay. That’s really interesting. Now, there’s another … let’s move back into the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era. I think there’s another event that caused the, or advanced, sadly the GPS, and that was the attack or the crash of a Korean Airlines plane?

DUNN: Yeah. Yeah, that was a seminal moment in GPS history. People might remember it if you’re listening and you were around in 1983. It was this crash that occurred at an incredibly tense time during the Cold War. And basically, it was a Korean Airlines jet. It was going from JFK to Seoul, and at the time they would stop over in Alaska, and then they would take south of the Bering Strait.

They would head down to Asia. And what happened is there was a navigational error, something went wrong, and instead of flying south, they flew straight into the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, just north of Japan. It’s really hard to emphasize. People will remember, of course, if they remember it, how tense things were at the time.

The U.S. and the USSR had been in this kind of game of chicken. And the USSR fighter pilots shot it down, and more than 100, 250 people died. It was this absolutely huge disaster. And in the aftermath of that, Ronald Reagan and his press secretary came out and said, “We have this tool in the bowels of the Pentagon. It wasn’t finished. It wouldn’t be finished for more than another 10 years, but we have this tool and it’s going to make sure that this never happens again.”

This horrible idea that you could just be completely off track and have no idea. It took a long time for it to actually come out into the civilian world, but this was definitely a moment where people might have heard of GPS for the first time.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay. We have war and a disaster that help really push the use of GPS you know into the world. There’s this beautiful line in your book, though, about how GPS may be one of the greatest gifts that the American people gave to the world, because this was obviously all publicly funded from the start.

And correct me if I’m wrong, but even though the initial uses were for the military, was it available to the public from the start?

DUNN: Yeah, it was. And I should say that line about the American people, that line comes from a Canadian. In our tense time, I’m a Canadian as well. In our tense times, it’s worth noting that’s a Canadian saying that.

Yeah for sure. Oh, sorry, could you ask me again? I got distracted by my Canadian anecdote. It’s okay.

CHAKRABARTI: In these tense times —

DUNN: Making the point about our relationships in these tense times.

CHAKRABARTI: It’s still Lake Ontario, I’m just gonna put it that way.

DUNN: Yeah, I know. It’s still Lake Ontario, that’s for sure.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: We actually put the call out to On Point listeners to get their opinions of GPS systems and if and how they use them, and we got a lot of responses. Let’s just start with two of them now.

This is George in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and George says he does not use GPS when he travels. He still, in fact, studies a paper map on the airplane before he gets to his destination, and he makes sure to memorize the important places that he needs to know, like public transit stops and where he’s staying.

GEORGE: Once I arrive, that map goes into my back pocket and comes out only in emergencies or for lapses in memory. This allows me to blend in a little bit better as a local, as opposed to standing out as a lost tourist. It frees up my eyes to view the sights that I’ve come so far to enjoy and leaves me reliant only on my memory rather than on Wi-Fi or cell service.

CHAKRABARTI: Good on you, George. On the other hand, we have Jeremy. He says he used to be like George and pride himself on not using GPS, but then, like many people, he moved to a new city.

JEREMY: Once I moved to a new city and Google Maps became more and more prevalent, I began using it as I drive for work. I needed to know exactly where I was going, what traffic was there, and what may be in the road.

Now I use Google Maps exclusively to navigate my way around Charlotte. I think it’s fantastic. I couldn’t live without it. You could go find fishing spots. You could find creeks and rivers. You can know where the wrecks are. You get to know where the cops are in traffic. It’s a great service, and I go everywhere with GPS.

CHAKRABARTI:  All right, so we’re gonna talk about this later, that it’s not just where you’re going, but now things like Google Maps have a lot more information on them. But Katherine, so a little taste there of how GPS has really changed how at least some On Point listeners live. But we were talking a little bit earlier about the fact that even though its first application was for the military in Vietnam and thereafter, and I’m talking about the satellite-based GPS systems, but it was actually available to the public also from the start.

So tell me a little bit more about that.

DUNN: Yeah, it’s incredible that this system, the existence of this system was never classified. And from very early on, it was always dual use, as they call it, civilian and military. And there had been a bit of a predecessor system, and that had also been for civilians.

But it was, when I say it was open to the public, it was open to a very special kind of person, I would say, through the ’80s. You had to know about it, and you have to be able to build a receiver or get an extraordinarily expensive receiver. So the first adopters, surveyors. Surveyors absolutely loved it.

If anybody listening was doing any surveying in the ’80s, they probably encountered it. Like any sort of maritime, and then eventually sort of aviation. But yeah, it was a real industrial tool. It was really for these kind of mapping applications. And regular people, if you didn’t have that kind of job, you probably wouldn’t have encountered it.

CHAKRABARTI: But even the public access at that time, though, forgive me for interrupting, but even public access at the time, if I understand correctly, the data that you got wasn’t as accurate as what the military got. Correct?

DUNN: No. Yeah. It wasn’t. They eventually put something on it called, they call it selective availability, and basically, they put an artificial error on it.

They made it a little bit less accurate. So there are two sets of signals, military and civilian. The big difference at this point is that the military signal is encrypted. But yeah, the civilian signal, they basically realized the system was too good. It was too accurate. It’s one way because it’s built for war, and it was 24/7 all over the world.

So if America had it, then they had it in the Middle East as well, basically. So they put this artificial error on it. And that was, it was a difference of 20 meters versus 100 meters or whatever. So if you’re hiking, if you’re sailing, GPS was still really useful, but it wasn’t quite what we associate it with today, the super accuracy.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so you said something really important there, and that is the way the system was created from the start with the satellites that the United States put up in space, if America had it, the rest of the world had it. So let’s talk about actually how it works and why what you said is true. How does GPS work?

DUNN: Yeah, people are like, I’m just realizing I have no idea. No, it’s such a good question. So we’re encircled by this web of satellites basically. And now there are multiple satellite systems from different countries, and they all work in a similar way. But minimum 24, and what this means is I am sitting here in London, my phone is next to me.

There is a chip in my phone, and it is getting signals from four different satellites. It’s in view of four different satellites at all times, wherever I am in the world, and that’s because it’s calculating for four equations, longitude and latitude, so I’m very close to the prime meridian here, so you have a good idea.

My altitude, I’m sitting on the sixth floor. That’s something that it’s calculating. And then the fourth thing is time, or it’s a clock offset. This is the hardest to understand, and this is I call it the special sauce of GPS and what makes it almost as important as navigation or more important sometimes.

And yeah, that’s the gift of really good time. You’ve got atomic clocks in the satellite, and it’s giving us the synchronized time here on Earth.

CHAKRABARTI: So can I just jump in here? So the reason why everyone gets this is because, let’s just stick with the phone example.

Your phone is receiving this. The satellites are just sending out this information, and the non-encrypted data, that’s why anyone can get it. Is that right?

DUNN: Yeah, exactly. It’s just raining down on us. People often think that GPS is tracking you. Actually, it’s more, in the physics sense it’s more accurate to say that you are tracking the satellites.

The GPS system has no idea where you are. That’s a little pedantic in everyday life because once we get our location or our phone gets our location, we do transmit it out. We turned it into this two-way system. But GPS itself was built for war, so that whole idea was you don’t want to give away your location, and this is why pretty early on, the U.S. government realized they had no idea how many people were using this thing.

They knew it was getting insanely popular, but they didn’t actually have the numbers.

CHAKRABARTI: Interesting. Hence the greatest gift, one of the greatest gifts that the American people gave. And again, this is so fascinating, but you said something that we should also underscore, which is a lot of people might think that when they use Google Maps, by virtue of getting those GPS signals they are giving away their location.

But as you said, that is not what’s giving away where you are. It’s when your phone is connecting to via location services through the cellular network essentially or through Wi-Fi. Your phone is actually telling other networks where you are.

DUNN: Yeah, exactly. You are giving your location away, but that’s not GPS’s fault, is something I would say. In our modern life we almost, we use it as a two-way system, right? So it becomes a little pedantic. But you could still get a GPS receiver, you could go out in the woods, and you could still use it as a one-way system if you have the technology to do that.

CHAKRABARTI: And so to this day, is there a master control station that is monitoring all these satellites or how GPS is used?

DUNN: Yeah, there is actually. I believe the Schriever Air Base, they might have changed the name recently, in Colorado, actually. So there are ground stations, and there is a central command station run by the U.S. military that is keeping track of where all the satellites are and how they’re doing.

Like I said, okay, there’s a minimum 24. There’s more than that up there because they need to be maintained. Some of them are getting really old. So yeah, there is this interaction. One of the people in the book who worked on it in the ’80s, he said, “The thing is you really need to understand this is a computer in the space talking to a computer in your phone or wherever, talking to a computer on the ground stations.”

This is really complex computing and physics that’s happening, and it’s pretty incredible because, like I said, this concept was developed and honed in the early ’70s, before we had personal computers.

CHAKRABARTI: Amazing, isn’t it? It also just makes me think of the space age in general, the dawn of the space age, and how we went to the moon with hand-calculated mathematics.

Just amazing. Okay. So let’s go back to our listeners because we did get a lot of people who were honest about how much they love GPS. This is Keith. He’s in Newton, Massachusetts, and he loves GPS so much, he thinks its creators deserve the Nobel Prize.

KEITH: I still have to think about which way I turn when I go to work, something I’ve been doing for the past 30 years to the same place from the same start point.

I don’t want adventure. I just want to get to my destination desperately.

DUNN: He’s honest, and I appreciate that. He’s got places to be.

CHAKRABARTI: Look, when you’re stuck in traffic, the last thing you want is adventure. You definitely wanna get where you go, where you wanna go. But so here’s what’s interesting, and I feel like I have experienced this in my own life, ’cause I’m old enough to definitely remember when it was just paper maps or AAA’s triptychs that we used to get and how the way that through something like Google Maps that we are now interacting with our environment, how that’s actually maybe turned our navigational ability, it’s shrunken it.

It’s made it more myopic. And so to that point, we actually reached out to some folks who are studying this, and one of them is Mary Hegarty. She leads the Spatial Thinking Lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and she has studied how reliance on GPS shapes people’s sense of direction.

But there’s a twist here, because Professor Hegarty told us that gathering reliable data for her research from people was actually very hard.

HEGARTY: We did try in one experiment to say, “Don’t use it for a month,” but people didn’t comply. They’re so dependent on it.

CHAKRABARTI: But Professor Hegarty says that an Israeli researcher actually has been able to observe what people do without GPS, and that’s because the Israeli military has been using GPS jamming in the Gaza War and in its operations in Lebanon, and some of that jamming has interfered with GPS signals in parts of Israel as well, forcing many Israelis to occasionally live without GPS.

HEGARTY: It’s really interesting, because something like 20% of people said, I just didn’t go to this place. I just stayed home because I didn’t think I could navigate there without my GPS. When they asked people now that you’ve had this situation of having to navigate without your GPS, do you feel you should work harder on your navigation skills?

And they were like, “No, we need a better GPS that can’t be jammed.”

CHAKRABARTI: The other option is, of course, to learn how to get around without that little blue dot on your screen. And Professor Hegarty is troubled by the fact that a lot of people don’t seem to want this option.

They’re not interested in maintaining their personal navigational skills.

And she says that most people probably don’t realize something important, that if you do not use these skills, you lose them.

HEGARTY: People who actually make a point of exploring their environments rather than just always taking the same route every time, seem to be better. There’s also some interesting research suggesting that the type of environment you grew up in or that you live in makes a difference.

So people who grow up in rural environments or cities that are not, more organically developing rather than city block type cities, sometimes have better ability too. So if your everyday life requires you to do more challenging navigation, then you tend to be better.

CHAKRABARTI: Hegarty’s research has revealed something else that we’re losing with an over-reliance on the maps on our phones. We’re losing our confidence.

HEGARTY: We ask people like, imagine you’re in a strange city, you come out of a subway system and you don’t quite recognize where you are. How do you feel?

And some people feel really anxious in that situation. Other people just feel challenged and say, “Oh, I just look around until I find something that I know,” or whatever. So people who are, who say they’re more anxious in navigation situations also depend on GPS.

CHAKRABARTI: It turns out that some 40 to 50% of an individual’s navigational skills are actually genetic, and maybe you’re one of those people who really struggles finding your way around.

Do not feel bad about it. You were born that way. The other half, though, of that skill set comes from the environment that you live in. So Professor Hegarty’s team wanted to know what environmental factors can actually give a person a better sense of direction.

HEGARTY: We asked people about things like, you know, hiking or camping or sailing, basically hobbies that people might have that affect navigation, and that didn’t really actually predict very much.

Two things predicted. One was people who use their GPS more did worse at our navigation tasks, and people who played video games that involved navigation were better. And so I think the younger generation is actually getting more navigation experience in video games than they are in the real world.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, going back to the Israeli GPS jamming story for a moment, that’s just one example of the dangers of our over-reliance on digital mapping because GPS systems are vulnerable. Professor Hegarty recommends that everyone try to maintain their navigational skills without your phone, but she also recommends it for other reasons as well.

HEGARTY: You might really notice some interesting things along the way. You might learn about some interesting places that you might want to visit or meet interesting people when you ask for directions, or have a more interesting journey.

CHAKRABARTI: Mary Hegarty leads the Spatial Thinking Lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Now, Katherine Dunn, I don’t want to over-romanticize things and sound like I’m saying, “Ugh, we should go back to the days where we could all read the stars and know exactly where we are.” But what do you think about this idea that a lot more people maybe would struggle getting around if they didn’t actually have that map on their phones?

DUNN: Yeah, I relate to it a lot. I’m, like I said, I’m one of those people who is so bad at directions, it must be genetic. I have to blame my parents for this. And I had, repeatedly when Google Maps wasn’t so common, tried to correct this in myself and take out paper maps and one of the things I thought about while writing this book too, was that for regular people, you might get lost, you might find something new.

I didn’t think the stakes were that high after a while but what really troubled me is the people who might be getting rusty on these skills who really need them. People who are in charge of a boat, a gas tanker, in the Strait of Hormuz, or people who are flying a plane. These skills get, or people who are now I think in military combat. The U.S. military at one point said, “You have to start preparing not to replace this piece of technology with, one with another, but to be able to operate in an environment where there just isn’t any of it,” right?

These navigational skills. And this question, I think what’s most troubling is it’s getting rusty for all of us, even if your job involves very high stakes navigation. You really want your pilot to feel fresh on these skills.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Let’s listen to a couple more On Point listeners. This is Margie of Scarborough, Maine. She’s 86 years old, and when she drives, she does not use GPS, but she does study Google Maps before the drive, and then she writes down the directions.

MARGIE: For me, it’s important to visualize the destination on that map in relation to nearby locations, whether they’re familiar or not. And I’ve come to that conclusion when I ride with one of my grandchildren driving. They have no idea where they are in relation to the real world. It shocks me. They don’t know how long it’s going to take them to get there unless GPS tells them.

It’s shocking.

CHAKRABARTI: Here’s another take. This is Barb Spencer, who’s a truck driver from Bondurant, Iowa. And here’s her view on what it means as a truck driver to get lost.

BARB: As a truck driver, one could always say it’s an adventure if you get lost, one you hope doesn’t end up with a bridge that doesn’t support your weight or maybe an overpass that’s too low for you to get under.

CHAKRABARTI: Very real, Barb. Thank you so much for those real-life views here. Now, Katherine, we have been focusing a lot, obviously, on the mapping features of GPS because of the fact that now these days it’s in virtually every new car. I understand that around the year 2000, the U.S. government really removed all civilian restrictions from GPS, and also the technology regarding the chips needed was cheap enough and small enough to fit inside cars.

And then the big one was a little later, right? What, 2008, when Apple announced that the iPhone would have a GPS capability in it. That was really the big turning point, Katherine, right?

DUNN: Yeah, definitely for me, you might have had a little TomTom or something in your car. A lot of people had that.

But I think the moment it really exploded was, okay, there is not just Google Maps on the iPhone, because that happened in 2007, but there’s Google Maps and there’s a GPS chip. And now you can find yourself using your brand new expensive 2008 iPhone. I think that was the moment it really exploded.

CHAKRABARTI: And it became commonplace. It’s funny, TomTom, I haven’t heard that brand name in a long time.

DUNN: Yeah. Cast your mind back to this antiquity as we talk about the TomTom.

CHAKRABARTI: My mother my parents used to have a really old Garmin that they’d plug into the car. My mom used to hate it.

She would say the Garmin would send them to Mars before it got them 30 miles down the road where they needed to go. Okay. But let’s actually talk for a moment about how much more than just mapping GPS has penetrated basically modern life. What are some of the other systems, industries, places where GPS has become central for how we operate?

DUNN: Yeah. It’s crazy. When you start looking, I often say that the way you interact with GPS, like that’s just the tip of the iceberg really. And one of the really important things I talked about time earlier is this synchronized time, the fact that it’s giving, it’s turning a bad clock into a good clock, and it’s giving this great synchronized beat, boom, tying us all together.

And our digital systems are so incredibly dependent on this at this point. So our mobile base stations, our electricity grids, our financial markets, anything digital basically relies on incredibly precise time, often down to the billionth of a second or the nanosecond, to agree that emails or surges of electricity, all these things are getting where they need to be at the time that everybody agrees.

But also, so the time is a big one. Navigation too. You or me using navigation to get to work is one thing, but if you think about the global supply chain as well, you can start with precision planting using your John Deere tractor, using GPS to precision plant in the Midwest, and you can follow, say corn, corn syrup or wheat.

You could follow it every single step of the way, and there will be GPS every single part of that process. There’s GPS in the shipping containers. There’s GPS in the cranes at the port. There’s GPS following the ships around the world. So when you start looking at our digital world, you’re going to find it absolutely everywhere.

And I think by the time we started interacting with it just as regular people, it was the infrastructure to synchronize all of that was already there, right? Just for us to get it in our iPhones and start using it to get to work, it had to be in the base stations. It had to be in the supply chain.

It had to be in the energy grid. It’s really crazy how pervasive it is and how little we see it once it’s there.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. in the book you’ve mentioned that some call it the invisible utility.

DUNN: Yeah, you don’t even think of it. Time itself, industrial time is a utility, and if you’re not in the world of running a power plant or an electricity grid, it’s such a bizarre concept.

But the idea that you need industrial time and that it has economic financial value, to have super precise time is a crazy concept, or at least it was to me when I started writing the book.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, financial value to another example that you write about is, for example, like the stock market, time is so wildly important for all kinds of trading that we couldn’t have the modern-day stock market without this atomic accuracy, as you’re saying in timing. And even disaster management. I was thinking about the horrible catastrophic flooding that happened in Nepal and how almost instantaneously we were getting information about like where did that start in the Himalaya Mountains?

We knew that because of systems that were able to detect not just the shaking of the ground when the flood started, but also when and where, and that was all because of GPS. It’s truly remarkable. But Catherine, the same reason or because of the fact that, as you’re describing, GPS is so thoroughly embedded in really basic systems that hold a civilization together these days, that also makes it a potential point of real vulnerability for those same societies.

So to learn a little bit more about that, we talked with Todd Humphreys, who’s a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Now, back in 2007, he was just finishing up his PhD at Cornell University when he came across an article about the potential vulnerabilities of GPS.

And keep in mind, at that point in 2007, GPS had only been commercially available for a few years.

HUMPHREYS: In this short article, the author, Logan Scott, was warning the world about the potential of GPS signals being falsified, mimicked by spoofers, and it was a hypothetical threat, but he was warning that because the signals coming down from GPS satellites are well understood, aren’t encrypted, aren’t authenticated, then they could be quite easily fabricated by a device that would pretend to be a GPS satellite.

CHAKRABARTI: So Humphreys decided he would try to build a spoofer to test how vulnerable GPS really is. And after about only a year, he thought he figured it out.

HUMPHREYS: When it was finally wired together, it was a quiet night around midnight, I think. My family was asleep, and I fired it up for the first time and tried to spoof my iPhone.

I turned on the spoofer, fully expecting that this wasn’t going to work because Murphy’s Law in engineering, stuff never really works on the first try. And yeah, lo and behold, there was the blue dot, and it quivered. It shook a little bit, and I thought, “Aha, I’ve got something. I’ve affected the internal receiver in this iPhone.”

And then I typed in a new command on the computer that was controlling the radio and said, “Make the blue dot go north like a pedestrian walking.” And that’s what happened.

CHAKRABARTI: Whoa. This was in 2008, just three years after the launch of Google Maps.

HUMPHREYS: And it was the very first publicly acknowledged GPS spoofer, and it worked distressingly well.

CHAKRABARTI: Two decades later, when we talked to Professor Humphreys, he still remembers exactly what was going through his head at that moment.

HUMPHREYS: So when I saw this blue dot quiver, it was against the backdrop of knowing full well that our society, the world at large, had become quite addicted to this drug of GPS. And now that the drug was manipulable, was shown to be something that could betray you, that really shook me. Because then I could imagine aircraft veering off course, ships going astray, and all of the confidence that people had built up in this system turning against them because they were perhaps not aware that it wasn’t so hard to fake the system, to fool it into deceiving its users.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, at that time, it was revolutionary that an individual researcher could build a GPS spoofer so easily, and so Professor Humphreys caught the FBI’s attention.

HUMPHREYS: There was a period of four years, I think, where the FBI came to my office once a year to check on whether we were being good stewards of the code that we had written, not allowing it to get out on the internet, making sure that we were following good security protocols in my laboratory so that this spoofing code didn’t just somehow leak out and become common across the globe.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Humphreys’ code never leaked, but in 2015, a similar version from Japan did, and it was open and available for anyone to download and use. Today, Professor Humphreys says basically anyone can make a GPS spoofer after watching a few YouTube videos.

HUMPHREYS: Fast-forward to 2026, and spoofing has become terribly widespread across Eastern Europe, across the Middle East.

Strait of Hormuz is just suffused with spoofing, GPS spoofing right now. On the coast of China. And it is a major headache for aircraft. It has become a problem now where the risk to flying, I would say, is no longer negligible.

CHAKRABARTI: Given how dependent entire nations are on GPS, you heard him mention civil aviation, of course there’s the military, virtually every form of transportation, even things like the power that flows to your home, because time syncing via GPS is critical to how electricity is distributed through grids.

So you’d think the United States would be doing everything in its power to protect such systems. But Professor Humphreys believes that if a bad actor wanted to launch a widespread GPS attack on the United States, America would not be ready for it.

HUMPHREYS: I’m afraid that people in governmental administrations, they hear this all the time.

It’s the Y2K bug. It’s GPS jamming. It’s GPS spoofing. It’s our vulnerability to hacking. So it’s hard to know what the relative priority of these ticking time bombs is. And one way, the unfortunate way that we often allow the priorities to be made manifest, is to wait for a catastrophe to occur, and then we say, “Oh that one was important.”

CHAKRABARTI: Todd Humphreys is a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. And by the way, he is not alone in his worries about GPS resilience here in the United States. Four-star Admiral Michael Rogers served simultaneously as commander of the U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency between 2014 and 2018, both those posts at the same time.

And just earlier this year, in February, he wrote an article in The Hill stating unequivocally that, quote, “A coordinated attack on GPS would ripple across aviation, finance, emergency response, and daily life within minutes, not days.” And he issued this warning, quote, “If GPS goes down, whether because of jamming, spoofing, a cyber attack, or natural disaster, America is dangerously unprepared.

A single sustained outage could cost the U.S. economy an estimated one point six billion dollars per day.”

Okay. So Katherine, we’ve just got a couple minutes left here. Your take on this great gift, by virtue of it being open, also being so vulnerable.

DUNN: Yeah, it’s this really double-edged sword, right?

It’s elegant, it’s useful. We put it in all kinds of things the original architects never expected. But it’s incredibly vulnerable, and it’s incredibly faint. And I think Todd Humphreys there who’s incredibly entertaining, would say that the U.S. government has clearly probably known how to spoof and jam and do that for a long time.

Maybe the point where they got a little too comfortable was the idea that nobody else would learn how to do it, too. And unfortunately we’re in the moment where a lot of people have learned to do it, and it’s really a feature of modern conflict in a way that hearkens back to the World War II, but we’re in the modern version.

And we’re in the modern version of a drone war where directing those drones and counterattacking is so much part of conflict now. And we can see this spilling out all over the world. So yeah, there’s been a push for quite a while for the U.S. government to even monitor how much this is happening in the continental United States.

And I don’t think it’s really gotten anywhere. But now for governments in Europe it’s… I can see that they’re starting to take it really seriously, and they have to take it seriously because the risks are just getting too large of something disastrous happening.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.