June 2026: GPS has become seamlessly enmeshed into almost all areas of everyday life. “We’re almost blindly reliant on it,” the RNL’s Dr. Humphreys said. “It’s built deeply into our systems and infrastructure. Some call it ‘the invisible utility.'” In 2007, spoofing GPS was considered too difficult for the layman to do. Renowned GPS expert Logan Scott, however, wrote that mass spoofing was only a matter of time.
A year later, Dr. Humphreys proved the claim by building the first publicly-recognized GPS spoofer. Over the following years, this proof-of-concept grew into several impactful RNL spoofing demonstrations, such as subtly veering the White Rose of Drachs superyacht a mile off-course and fooling an $80,000 drone into plummeting to the ground. The real-world geopolitical implications were clear: “Spoofing a GPS receiver on a [drone] is just another way of hijacking a plane,” Dr. Humphreys argued.
Read more of the RNL’s retrospective on GPS exploitation on The Walrus, which excerpts Katherine Dunn’s new book – Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World.