Your phone call might have traveled 22,000 miles through space with zero protection, and someone with an $800 satellite dish could have heard every word. A new study from UC San Diego and the University of Maryland intercepted real, unencrypted satellite backhaul: voice calls, text messages, login credentials, and DNS queries, all spilling out across geostationary footprints using consumer hardware. This is a problem the industry has known about for decades.

I explain how everyday data ends up on satellites in the first place, remote towers, ships, aircraft, and rural networks, and why so much of it stays unencrypted while TV signals have been scrambled for years. Vendors sell encryption as an extra license. Carriers downplayed the risk. Recent attempts at basic telecom cybersecurity rules got rolled back.

Then the part you can contro ...