Latest news with #TheWIREDGuide
WIRED
08-07-2025
- Politics
- WIRED
The 911 Calls Inside ICE Detention Centers
By Leah Feiger and Dhruv Mehrotra Jul 8, 2025 12:15 PM On this episode of Uncanny Valley , we unpack WIRED's recent investigation of 911 calls made from the facilities where Immigration and Customs Enforcement detains migrants. Photo-illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images Our senior politics editor Leah Feiger speaks with WIRED's Dhruv Mehrotra about an exclusive WIRED investigation into how serious medical incidents are increasing at some of the country's largest immigration detention centers. You can follow Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger and Dhruv Mehrotra on Bluesky at @dmehro. Write to us at uncannyvalley@ Mentioned in this episode: 'They're Not Breathing': Inside the Chaos of ICE Detention Center 911 Calls by Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron How to Protect Yourself From Phone Searches at the US Border by Lily Hay Newman and Matt Burgess The WIRED Guide to Protecting Yourself From Government Surveillance by Andy Greenberg and Lily Hay Newman Here's What Mark Zuckerberg Is Offering Top AI Talent by Zoë Schiffer How to Listen You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for 'uncanny valley.' We're on Spotify too. Transcript Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors. Leah Feiger: Hey, this is Leah. Do you have a tech-related question that's been on your mind or just a topic that you wish we talked about more on the show? If so, you can write to us at uncannyvalley@ And if you listen to and enjoy our episodes, please rate it and leave a review on your podcast app of choice. It really helps other people find us. And a heads up that this episode deals with sensitive content like suicide attempts and sexual assault, please take care while listening. Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley . I'm WIRED Senior politics editor Leah Feiger, filling in today for Zoe Schiffer. Today on the show, an exclusive WIRED investigation on how serious medical incidents are increasing at some of the country's largest immigration detention centers. By looking at data from 911 calls, WIRED reporters, Dhruv Mehrotra and Del Cameron found that in at least 60% of the ICE centers they analyzed, there were reports of serious pregnancy complications, suicide attempts, or sexual assault allegations. Their findings show how these detention centers have quickly become overwhelmed, following the administration's immigration crackdown, and its mandate for more frequent and often indiscriminate arrests. To dive into the show, I'm joined by WIRED's Dhruv Mehrotra. Dhruv, welcome. Dhruv Mehrotra: Hi. Thanks for having me. Leah Feiger: So Dhruv, talk me through how you went about reporting this. What prompted you to look at the 911 calls from ICE detention centers? And most importantly, what did you find? Dhruv Mehrotra: Well, immigration detention centers are largely black boxes, right? Attorneys can't see living areas. And advocates told us that even tightly controlled tours have mostly stopped getting approved by ICE. At the same time arrests are surging, and we've been hearing reports about deteriorating conditions. So what we really wanted to know here was, what's actually happening inside of these overcrowded facilities right now? People in custody often are too afraid to speak publicly, and ICE can take months or even years in some cases to respond to records requests. So instead Del and I decided to kind of look more locally, right? We looked at local agencies like sheriff's departments and EMS crews for records from people who respond directly to ICE facilities when there's a real emergency. So that led us to these 911 call records, which offered one of the clearest, and frankly the most alarming windows into how overwhelmed the system really is. Leah Feiger: And so when tracing the spike in all of these medical incidents, you also looked at 10 of the country's largest immigration detention centers. There was one that really stood out. Stewart Detention Center in rural Georgia. You reported that the population at this center has actually increased by 10%, and the medical emergencies at the center have more than tripled. And they've also reported more in-custody deaths since 2017 than any other facility nationwide. What is going on there? How does something like that even happen? Dhruv Mehrotra: Yeah. As you mentioned, Stewart really stood out in the data. And in fact, as we were reporting the story out, two people at Stewart or on their way to Stewart died according to ICE, including one by suicide early last month. So part of what makes Stewart so dangerous, I think, is where it's located. Stewart is in a remote rural county in Georgia, hours from advanced medical care. Local hospitals have shut down, and according to the records we have, EMS response times are long. And in emergencies, detainees can be left waiting hours, right? One kind of particularly shocking call here is that we got a call from a pregnant woman who was reportedly spitting up blood. And EMS logs show that it took over two hours to clear that call. Leah Feiger: That's wild. Dhruv Mehrotra: Yeah. It's devastating to listen to, and to think through what these records really mean. But the numbers don't really capture the full story. So we also spoke to families of people who were detained at Stewart, and attorneys who visited regularly. And they all largely described the same thing, which is a system that's really buckling under its own weight. Leah Feiger: I think something that really stood out to me as well from these cases from Stewart in your reporting, is all of the abruptly dropped 911 calls as well. It really created this picture of an us versus them. People just entirely captured, caged almost, while this is going on, unable to actually even get assistance. Dhruv Mehrotra: Yeah. I mean, the records that we have are 911 calls, right? And so they are only records of things that resulted in a call. And experts tell us that for every one call that we got, there's probably many, many, many more medical emergencies that go unreported. And the records give some kind of clue into that, right? I think one good example of what you're talking about, Leah, is a call that we received from a woman at Stewart who got a hold of the phone, and called 911, and basically kept asking the dispatcher for help. She said, "I need help, I need a UTA." And the call abruptly dropped. [Archival audio]: 911, where is your emergency? [Archival audio]: Do you speak in Spanish? [Archival audio]: Excuse me? [Archival audio]: Do you speak in Spanish? [Archival audio]: No, ma'am. [Archival audio]: I need help, a UTA. [Archival audio]: Are you in the prison? [Archival audio]: Yeah. In jail, yeah, by name... Dhruv Mehrotra: So the dispatcher called back. And when the dispatcher called back, a staff member answered the phone, and basically dismissed it, saying, "Look, sorry, we're at a detention center, a detainee called 911." And no ambulance was sent. [Archival audio]: I'm sorry, we're at a- [Archival audio]: [Inaudible] [Archival audio]: We're a detention center, Stewart Detention Center, and the detainee called 911. I'm sorry. [Archival audio]: Okay, thank you. Dhruv Mehrotra: And even in that call, you can hear this detainee kind of pleading in the background. So clearly this is a moment where someone thought that they needed medical care, and they weren't able to get it and they were prevented from getting it. And really, this is just one example, multiple family members of detainees told us the same thing. That their loved ones haven't been able to get the care that they have needed, even in times when they believe that their loved one should have been brought to the hospital for a serious crisis. Leah Feiger: Right, and like you said, you spoke to family members and you also spoke to immigration lawyers and experts to really fill in these gaps and contextualize what you found because you had the 911 calls and not that much more else. What were some of these gaps that they filled in for you? Dhruv Mehrotra: We were careful not to treat the 911 data as the full story because sometimes it's just audio that we have, other times it's just sort of a brief narrative of a medical emergency. So these calls only capture moments when emergencies were bad enough, or visible enough for staff to pick up the phone and call. But experts and advocates are quick to point out that for every call there are likely many others that weren't made. So in the conversations that we had with attorneys and families and formerly detained people, those conversations were crucial, they gave us the context that the records alone couldn't. A woman named Mildred Pierre, her fiance is a double amputee who's detained at Stewart. She told us that in the last month or so, he broke his prosthetic limbs in a fall. And he had to wait for days to be even seen by medical staff at Stewart. Another example is a woman named Kylie Chinchilla who said that her daughter, who's a nursing student with scoliosis and also a detainee at Stewart, is often left sleeping on the floor in pain with parts of her face going numb. And her condition is getting worse and she's in pain. Leah Feiger: Let's take a quick break. We're going to be right back. And when we return, we're going to look further into what has led to this increase in medical emergencies at ICE centers. When considering what factors have led to this increase in medical emergencies at ICE centers, overcrowding is one of the main ones. Dhruv, can you tell me how bad is it right now? And is this a direct result of the current administration's immigration crackdown? Dhruv Mehrotra: So overcrowding is a critical piece of this puzzle according to experts and immigration attorneys that we spoke to. Overall ICE's detained population has jumped over 48% since January, now exceeding 59,000 people. And I mean, that's just an estimate, right? The numbers probably far higher than that. And that's swell in population isn't by accident, it follows a deliberate policy push by this administration. Earlier this year ICE, under the direction of senior administration officials, intensified enforcement efforts and ramped up arrests. And that, of course, led to an influx of detainees, many of whom have these pre-existing health conditions, and that stretched medical units and staffing beyond their limits, according to the experts that we spoke to. And remember, these aren't violent offenders who are being held. The administration has made it sort of deliberate policy choice to target virtually anyone, even people who have been here for decades and haven't been convicted of any kind of violent crime. Not that it matters in this case, right? No one should be treated like this, but I think it's important to contextualize who's being held here in civil detention, not criminal detention. Leah Feiger: Absolutely. President Donald Trump and his really right-hand man on immigration, Stephen Miller, they are pushing day in, day out. It feels like you cannot go a single week in this administration without hearing about these renewed goals to increase ICE numbers, and to increase ICE funding, and just their ability to take kind of whoever they want off the streets right now in an effort to really buoy their numbers. And you guys also spent a good bit of time talking about how these ICE centers are in such remote areas, which at least from the outside, makes it seem like it would be pretty hard to get these folks support that they would need. Is this tactical? Dhruv Mehrotra: Yeah. That's a good question. I can say that as a strategy, ICE has been moving people around from detention center to detention center. And in an effort from what experts described to kind of deprive people of the representation that they have, or the immigration attorneys that they've retained, or from family members and loved ones. So I think moving people around and moving people from, in one case I talked to someone who was moved from Buffalo, New York all the way to Adelanto, California in a matter of days, and that's across the country. He didn't know anybody over there. Leah Feiger: Right, that's massive, that's everything. That's your entire community. And you guys did also report that the vast majority of the centers that you looked into are owned by two private prison companies, the GEO Group and CoreCivic. How have they benefited from the administration's approach? And what did they say when you presented them with your findings? Dhruv Mehrotra: Geo Group and CoreCivic currently operate most of the ICE facilities that we reviewed, and I think they operate most of the ICE facilities in general. So under the current administration's aggressive enforcement strategy, which aims to detain around 100,000 people, these two corporations have secured numerous lucrative contracts including these no bid contracts for reopening shuttered prisons. And just to get a sense of the scale here, right? GEO anticipates earning over $70 million in annual revenue just from one new facility. And CoreCivic, the other sort of private prison giant here, they're opening or reopening multiple sites and benefiting from expanded bed capacity. And that's according to reporting from the AP. So we reached out to both of them, and CoreCivic emphasized that their facilities are staffed by licensed medical professionals and adhere to audits and national standards. And that's something that GEO groups similarly pointed out. But those responses, they focused on policy and paperwork, and not the actual kind of cost to families and attorneys and detainees had described. I think there seems to be an unwillingness to even concede that this stuff is happening in their facilities in spite of multiple reports. Leah Feiger: Obviously, the Trump administration has made immigration and immigration crackdown such a core part of their policy platform over the last couple of months. But I do have to say that for years there have been hundreds of reports of sexual assaults and other abuses happening at ICE centers. Is there a path forward for accountability, or are we kind of on pause for the next couple of years while the administration just keeps shoving as many people as they can into these facilities? Dhruv Mehrotra: Right. These problems didn't start with this administration. There have been a sort of long and well-documented history of things like sexual abuse inside of ICE detention centers. And in that regard, our own reporting we found multiple 911 calls in 2025 alone that reference sexual assaults, including one described as staff on detainee. I mean, as you said, it's a deeply serious allegation and it's not new. But what's changed is the ability to respond to it. In recent months, the Trump administration has gutted the oversight offices at DHS that were responsible for investigating these types of abuses in detention, including the CRCL, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. So without them, there's almost no system left to track or escalate these cases. One advocate I spoke to called it a "black box of impunity." And I think that's a good way to put it. Leah Feiger: We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to share our recommendations for what to check out on this week. Welcome back to WIRED's Uncanny Valley . I'm WIRED senior politics editor, Leah Feiger filling in today for Zoe Schiffer. Before we take off, Dhruv, tell our listeners what they absolutely need to read on Dhruv Mehrotra: There are two pieces that I keep returning to. I think if you're listening to this and you're thinking about how it all connects to your rights and your safety. The two pieces that I would recommend on WIRED right now are these guides. So first, we have a guide to how to protect yourself from phone searches at the U.S border. It's a great explainer on what CBP, Customs and Border Protection can do and can't do with your devices when you across the border. And the second piece in the same vein is a WIRED guide to protecting yourself from government surveillance. So yeah, I think those are two really good stories that give you some actionable things to do. Leah Feiger: They're so good. Honestly, cannot recommend those to enough. I feel like anytime that a relative, friend, whoever is like, "What can I do?" I send those guides over, and they're always greeted with a lot of enthusiasm and fear, and fear because it's really terrifying, but really, really good stuff. Okay. My recommendation is in a totally different direction, so bear with me. But the business desk this week led by Zoe Schiffer have been pulling scoop after scoop about the AI talent war that's going on between Sam Altman's OpenAI and Mark Zuckerberg's Meta. And the reason I think that I can't stop thinking about this, is obviously I usually edit politics coverage. And so it is so wild to see these grown adult men just throwing millions and millions and millions of dollars at AI, and random researchers, and talking about their companies as if they're going to save the world, while we're seeing all of this reporting on things that are so sad and so devastating. So I wouldn't say it's levity, but I would say that it is if you want to hate billionaires more, a good read, Dhruv, thank you so much for joining us today. Dhruv Mehrotra: Thanks for having me. Leah Feiger: That's our show for today. We're going to link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Make sure to check out Thursday's episode of Uncanny Valley for a deep critical dive into the man who ushered in the era of artificial intelligence as we know it, Sam Altman. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. Amar Lal mixed this episode. Pran Bandi was our New York studio engineer. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Conde Nast's Head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon. And Katie Drummond is WIRED's Global Editorial Director.
WIRED
20-02-2025
- WIRED
The Watergate-Inspired Law That's Being Used to Fight DOGE
PHOTOGRAPH: WIRED STAFF; GETTY IMAGES If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Andrew Couts, WIRED's Senior Editor of Security and Investigations, joins Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond to talk about how The 1974 Privacy Act is being used in legal battles against Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency's efforts to collect massive amounts of sensitive federal data. Plus, they discuss how you can protect yourself from government surveillance. Mentioned in this episode: The 50-Year-Old Law That Could Stop DOGE in Its Tracks—Maybe by Eric Geller The WIRED Guide to Protecting Yourself From Government Surveillance by Andy Greenberg and Lily Hay Newman How a 'NULL' License Plate Landed One Hacker in Ticket Hell by Brian Barrett You can follow Michael Calore on Bluesky at @snackfight, Lauren Goode on Bluesky at @laurengoode, and Zoë Schiffer on Threads @reporterzoe. Write to us at uncannyvalley@ How to Listen You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for 'uncanny valley.' We're on Spotify too. Transcript Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors. Katie Drummond: Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm WIRED's Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond. Today on the show How a Law Passed After Watergate Might Stop DOGE in its Tracks. I'm recording from the road today, but I am joined by Andrew Couts, WIRED's Senior Editor for Security and Investigations. Andrew, welcome to Uncanny Valley. Andrew Couts: Thanks for having me. Katie Drummond: Now, before we jump into this story that you published on yesterday about the Privacy Act and how it relates to DOGE, tell me and our audience a little bit about what you do here at WIRED. I know what you do, but tell everybody else. Andrew Couts: Sure. So a lot of my day-to-day responsibilities include overseeing our security desk, which covers cybersecurity, national security, privacy, surveillance, policing, crime, all the fun, light-hearted topics. Katie Drummond: And you have been spending a fair bit of your time recently focused on DOGE and everything DOGE and Elon Musk are doing inside of federal agencies, which has obviously been a big priority for WIRED. Yesterday you published a story, it was written by Eric Geller about the Privacy Act and how it might be used through legal means to thwart what DOGE is doing inside of federal agencies. So why don't you start by telling us a little bit about what the Privacy Act even is. When was it established? Why was it established? Andrew Couts: Sure. So the Privacy Act came out of the Nixon era, the Watergate scandals, where Nixon abused his access to government resources to people's data, including the IRS. He sicked FBI on his political opponents. And so lawmakers thought we need to do something to stop this from happening again. And so on December 31st of 1974, the Privacy Act was signed into law and basically it limits the ways in which the government can collect, share, or otherwise use people's personal data. Katie Drummond: That's fascinating. So this Privacy Act has a very long history, and why is that important right now? Sort of explain to us how the Privacy Act is being leveraged to try to prevent DOGE from accessing data inside of these agencies. Andrew Couts: So the Privacy Act is currently the basis for at least eight, maybe nine lawsuits against DOGE or against agencies where we know that DOGE workers have been accessing those systems. And so essentially the Privacy Act has a lot of limits on who can access data even internally or how that data can be used, but it does have several exceptions. I think 12 exceptions, two of which are pretty broad. One of them includes if an employee "has the need to access records in the performance of their duties, or a third party can have access if it's for routine use." "Routine use." And so as you can imagine when there are loopholes in this moment when it seems every loophole is being exploited in ways that we didn't expect, we're getting to see in these lawsuits how those exceptions are going to be applied. And so in some cases, these lawsuits are already succeeding. We saw one from several states attorney general sued to prevent DOGE employees from accessing treasury records, and a judge very quickly ordered that access to be stopped or limited. In other cases, there were some students at the University of California who sued to prevent DOGE workers from accessing Department of Education records. And in that case, the judge didn't issue a restraining order to prevent that access on some various grounds. And so we're going to see how these other lawsuits play out. A lot of them are really in their early stages and we don't really know yet whether they're going to succeed. Katie Drummond: So Andrew, help me understand here, this Privacy Act and these lawsuits, why is this potentially such a big deal for DOGE? How much of their time from what we can tell is being spent basically trying to access data? Andrew Couts: So as far as we know, the vast majority of it appears to be at least accessing these systems. And we don't necessarily know for certain what records they've accessed, what they've downloaded, what they've transferred, what they've uploaded to AI. All of these things seem to be possible. And there's reports that both from WIRED and elsewhere that they're using this data in a lot of different ways, but we just don't know what they're accessing. But what they could have access to is basically every possible sensitive detail about a person that exists. And so why are we concerned about that? Because we don't know what they're going to do with that information and how they're securing that information, whether they're making those systems less secure by subverting access controls and things that have typically been in place to protect this information, which everyone agrees it's highly sensitive. Katie Drummond: Got it. I mean, it's fair to say that if according to Musk and according to President Trump, DOGE's priorities are rooting out fraud, cutting costs, cutting personnel, they would need access to these systems. They would need data to even begin to start that process, you would think. And if they don't have access to that data, I guess that sort of stops them in their tracks in a given agency. Andrew Couts: I mean, one of the first places they went was the Office of Personnel Management, and that's going to be all the records on all federal workers like present, past federal workers. And so that's just information on millions and millions of people. But when we get outside of the federal worker systems, we're talking about everyone who resides in the United States ostensibly. Katie Drummond: It's interesting to me that... What we're almost at is certainly it's true that the Privacy Act and these lawsuits can slow down DOGE access to data in different agencies, but it's wild to imagine that depending on the agency and the judge and the judge's interpretation of this Privacy Act, we might see this very slapdash approach to data access depending on the agency and depending on the lawsuit and depending on the outcome of the lawsuit. Is that right? When we're talking about treasury, that access has been halted for now, Department of Education, not so much. So this might vary agency to agency and lawsuit to lawsuit. Am I accurate in interpreting it that way? Andrew Couts: It absolutely seems that way and that seems to be how these lawsuits are already playing out. Part of what I think about is oftentimes a lawsuit will hinge on whether there's actual realized harm or if there's imminent harm. And when we're seeing this government be manipulated in the way that it is by DOGE workers right now, we don't have precedent to rely on to be able to judge is there imminent harm here? Do we know how this data is going to be used? Do we know whether it's going to be weaponized? And if we look at historical precedent, there's maybe not evidence that that harm exists or that imminent harm exists. And so we might have to wait for people to be actually injured by this access for a judge to say, "That was bad and we're going to stop it." And so there's likely going to be victims here, whether these lawsuits succeed or not. Katie Drummond: Fascinating. Well, we're going to take a short break. When we come back, we're going to pick up where we left off and talk about how concerned Americans actually should be about their privacy and about DOGE accessing their data. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley, I'm WIRED's Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond. I'm here with our senior editor for Security and Investigations, Andrew Couts. Andrew, thank you again for being here. Andrew Couts: Thanks for having me. Katie Drummond: And let's talk a little bit more broadly about DOGE and American privacy. So there has been, as we at WIRED know very well, a ton of coverage about DOGE and what they're doing inside the federal government over these last several weeks. A lot of swirl, a lot of sort of chaos and a lot of concern, right? There's a lot of concern among journalists and among Americans more broadly about DOGE having access to various government systems, having access to data, access to sensitive information about Americans. Can you explain what kind of information would DOGE potentially have access to based on the agencies that they are currently working in inside the federal government? Andrew Couts: So they're going to have access to essentially everything, and they're going to know everywhere you've lived, everywhere you bank, exactly how much money you make, potentially what your tax returns are. They're going to have access to your medical history, likely to what your networks look like, what your social networks look like, everywhere you've worked, potentially travel records. Katie Drummond: There was a paragraph in the story that we published yesterday that I thought was really stunning, and it reads in just a few weeks, DOGE staffers have accessed federal employee records at the Office of Personnel Management, government payment data at the Department of Treasury data on student loan recipients at the Department of Education, information on disaster victims at FEMA and vast amounts of employment and workplace-related data at the Department of Labor. And it goes on from there. I mean, this is a sweeping endeavor to access and sort of hoover up a ton of really sensitive information about Americans. Can you walk us through a few different hypothetical scenarios? If DOGE and Musk and President Trump and the White House obtain all of this data, obtain all of this access, what could they do with it? Andrew Couts: One of the things we think about internally at WIRED a lot is threat modeling and just basically like what's the chance you're going to be targeted by any type of attack? And in this case, we have to completely redefine what our threat models look like. And that's especially true if you're a vulnerable person. So if you are trans, if you are an immigrant, if you are seeking an abortion, just to throw out the most obvious examples. This information could be used to target you in one way or another, and we just don't know how that information could be used. Historically, you're not going to think that a highly-placed government employee, such as Elon Musk as he is now, would tweet out your banking records or your health records, and we could see that happen now, if you are publicly critical of the Trump administration. Obviously law enforcement, if the FBI is going to be able to use the vast amounts of information that they have on people to target whoever they're going to target, and we just don't know. We're only a month into this administration. We're already seeing sweeping crackdowns on immigration, and that's going to evolve. We're going to go through at least four years of this, and it's impossible really for anyone to know if they are going to be a target. So we just don't know what the threat model looks like in an environment where anyone could potentially become a political target. And if we look at authoritarian regimes, it's going to be used in all different types of ways to go after people. And that data might be manipulated to make up charges against people to accuse people of crimes that they didn't commit. For years, WIRED has covered best privacy practices, best security practices, and a lot of people just say, "If you have nothing to hide, don't worry about it." But now we don't know what you have to worry about and we don't know what you should have hidden and the things you tried to hide or the things that were protected by government systems are now potentially exposed. And so it's really anyone's guess what could happen and what the consequences could be. Katie Drummond: And ironically, as you mentioned earlier, that's part of what makes these lawsuits so challenging to see through because a judge is assessing risk based on hypothetical harms to American citizens as opposed to actual harm or actual injury. Is that right? Andrew Couts: I mean it depends on exactly what the lawsuit is alleging or what it's attempting to achieve, what kind of legal standards they're going to apply. But typically judges, if they're looking for actual or potential imminent harm, they're going to be looking at past precedent to say, is it likely that this worst case scenario that is laid out in a hypothetical lawsuit is going to happen? And if they can't find any evidence that has happened in the past, it's entirely plausible that the judge isn't going to rule in favor of the plaintiffs. We can't necessarily rely on history to tell us what's going to happen next, at least not US history. We can look to dictatorships elsewhere in the world potentially, but US history is not going to give us all the information we need to make those calls. Katie Drummond: That's right. And we're also still up against this very real possibility, I would argue that a judge rules in one way and that ruling may not actually be adhered to within a federal agency. We've certainly seen a degree of lawlessness and impunity with DOGE's behavior thus far. So I think that sort of adds this extra element of uncertainty where I have been telling people for the last several weeks who are concerned about DOGE, concerned about what Musk is doing. Well, yes, they're moving very quickly. The courts will catch up, the legal system will catch up. That only gets you so far if the administration decides not to adhere to what a judge is saying on a given issue. Andrew Couts: Absolutely, and I think the fact that we're even talking about that possibility of the government just ignoring judicial branch rulings, that is an example of how little we can rely on past precedent to show us where the guardrails are here. The guardrails may not exist anymore because they've plowed over them with a cyber truck. It's not a good situation to be in when you're trying to figure out how to operate in this moment and feel safe and secure that your data is protected or you're not going to be targeted for political reasons. Katie Drummond: Absolutely. Well, Andrew, there's so much uncertainty right now. In the next few weeks, what would you tell our listeners to pay attention to in the context of DOGE and privacy? Are there certain lawsuits that are particularly salient or particularly interesting? What should they be watching for in the headlines as all of this unfolds? Andrew Couts: Well, one, I think we're going to be looking for other instances where we know that specific records have been accessed or we know specifically how they've used the records that they've accessed. WIRED is certainly going to be keeping a close watch on that and doing the reporting to find answers to those questions. But the more we know about what they're actually doing or what the consequences of what they're doing are, the more we're going to be able to assess what the actual risks are. In terms of the lawsuits, I would be paying attention to essentially all of the Privacy Act lawsuits and seeing where those succeed and fail. And those are going to give us specific instances of potentially blocking access to specific records. So the Treasury Department is a good example of one we've already seen, and we're going to want to be getting reassurances that that access actually has been cut off in the instances where there's orders telling them to do so. Because the Privacy Act is really our primary legal blockade against these kinds of abuses that are being alleged in these lawsuits, we really need to know how strong that law actually is. We're also going to be wanting to see whether there are members of Congress attempting to amend change, scrap the Privacy Act, or any other legislation that might be the basis for lawsuits against what the Trump administration is doing. And so paying attention to legislation that's introduced, how that legislation proceeds through Congress is going to be really important as well, because we have to know what the safeguards are, whether they're abided by or not, they have to exist in the first place for us to have any sense of reliance on them. Katie Drummond: Got it. And all of those Privacy Act lawsuits, by the way, are listed in WIRED's story that we will link out to for all of you. We're going to take a short break and we'll be back with Andrew in a minute. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I am WIRED's Global Editorial Director, Katie Drummond, here with Andrew Couts, and we are talking all about DOGE and your privacy. Andrew, I promise we are almost done. But before we go, you have been an editor at WIRED for several years now, publishing really, really vital work, particularly in the security space. And your team has done a lot of really great reporting that actually helps people understand privacy, data, the sort of personal context around their privacy and sort of what information about them is out there on the internet. But do you have any recommendations from the WIRED Archives, from stories that you've edited that might help people either educate themselves about privacy and about data, or at least shore up their own personal security right now? Andrew Couts: Yes, though I'll caveat it by saying there's very little we can do about... If you're going to be targeted by law enforcement or other US federal operatives, there's maybe not that much you can do about it. So I highly recommend people check out the WIRED Guides: Protecting Yourself from Government Surveillance. This was written by two of our senior reporters, Andy Greenberg and Lily Hay Newman. It's a really comprehensive guide on just many steps you can take to protect yourself, protect the systems that you use on a daily basis, and to communicate securely with anyone you're wanting to communicate with. So that's the really practical one. We're talking a lot about the unknown consequences of DOGE having access to these systems, and it made me think of a fun article that our executive editor Brian Barrett wrote back in 2019. It's called How a Null License Plate Landed One Hacker in Ticket Hell. And I think it's just a really good example of how accessing these systems, doing thing in systems can have really unintended consequences. And in this case, this hacker made his license plate null, N-U-L-L, which is also a term that computer programmers use when there's nothing in a field. And through various shenanigans that you can read about in this story, it ended up with him getting $12,000 in tickets because of automated systems detecting his license plate and ticketing him because of his license plate. So I think that's just a really tangible example of how even if DOGE, all their intentions are perfectly innocent and they're really just wanting to save the government money. If they're accessing these systems in ways that they aren't intended to be accessed that way or doing things in those systems that weren't approved by whatever layers of committees approve everything that happens, it can go really badly, even if they don't mean it to. So read We have a ton of guides out there that will tell you how to kind of lock down all your basic systems, but that's the best you can hope for. If you're hoping to evade being targeted by the Trump administration, hope you can get an EU passport and move to Lithuania or something. I don't know. Katie Drummond: Well, we'll see about Lithuania. I will say my entire family has recently migrated to Signal because I said I wouldn't communicate with them if they didn't. So that's great advice. Andrew, thank you so much for joining me today. Andrew Couts: Thanks so much for having me. Katie Drummond: That's our show. Make sure to check out tomorrow's episode of Uncanny Valley. Our hosts dive into the long and complicated relationship between Elon Musk and Sam Altman. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow our show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. If you'd like to get in touch with us for questions, comments, or show suggestions, write to us at uncannyvalley@ Amar Lal at Macrosound mixed this episode. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Conde Nast's Head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon. And I'm Katie Drummond, WIRED's Global Editorial Director. Goodbye.
