How ICE Has Been Collecting DNA; SpaceX’s Rocket Crashes Into the Moon

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0:29Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, Contributing Editor.

0:33Molly Taft:I'm Brian Barrett, Executive Editor. And I'm Leah Figer, Director of Politics and Science. Today on the show, we're talking about how the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, better known as ICE, has been collecting DNA samples at an alarming rate. These samples have led to hundreds of thousands of people, including young children, to end up in an FBI criminal database basically forever. We'll also get into one of our favorite topics, AI slop. From Google Earth disabling its new AI tool after people used it to create fake maps, to Substack partnering with the AI writing detection tool Pangram, companies are starting to realize that people really don't like low-quality AI content flooding their feeds.

1:12Also in the realm of AI, the White House announced a plan to tackle the increasing security risks brought on by AI companies. It's keeping the details mostly under wraps, but we're going to discuss what's behind all the secrecy and what this could mean for future regulation.

1:26Molly Taft:We'll also talk about how part of a SpaceX rocket crashed into the moon, leaving a new crater behind and all kinds of questions. And later in the show, Wired senior writer Molly Taft joins to tell us all about how data centers have officially broken U.S. politics.

1:48Molly Taft:Well, to start off, let's talk about ICE, which we haven't in a little bit, but they're still there. They're still doing bad things, including collecting DNA samples. Wiredstreet Murota reported this week about how ICE has collected nearly 1 million people's DNA this past year, just this past year alone, including that of young children. As we mentioned up top, this DNA collection has led to hundreds of thousands of people with no criminal convictions, ending up in an FBI database indefinitely. And in fact, the Department of Homeland Security has become the single largest source of new profiles in this database.

2:22I feel like we're getting inundated with like, here's one more part of your privacy. Here's one more part of security. Here's one more bit of immigrants being treated as subhuman. But this one, like at least enough for me, like broke through the noise. Don't you guys think? Like this was wild. I feel like I have a question before we move forward, which is maybe one that's shared by listeners. Why is DNA being collected from immigrants in the first place? This surprised me, and maybe I'm a little naive about what they're subjected to when they're in this country.

2:52Molly Taft:Yeah, I mean, I think the answer is because they can. And I wish that were more nuanced or subtle than that. But I think they are just trying to gather as much information as they can at all times. And I want to be clear, too, like, these are not people with criminal convictions, people who are even necessarily suspected of a crime. It is just such a wide net that they are casting. In fact, internal training materials that drew, in partnership with researchers at Georgetown, we should say, dug up, said that asylum seekers and refugees who have not adjusted their immigration status must have their DNA sampled.

3:30Molly Taft:And that the DNA needs to be collected after any arrest. It is just sort of table stakes for people, for these officers to grab DNA whenever and wherever they can. And already a lot of lawmakers have been speaking out against this. For example, when learning that children were being swabbed at a family detention center in Dilley, Texas, a number of representatives said in a joint statement to Wired, none of the families at Dilley have been convicted of a crime. They do not belong in a database meant for violent criminals, especially children. Like this is starting to pick up steam across the board.

4:01I think that we've just gotten so used to like the idea that the government is allowed to collect any information it wants, store it in whichever way it wants. And like all of these norms have been kind of destroyed in the last year and a half. It's really shocking, honestly. So you're saying basically that refusing to allow your DNA to be collected can become its own chart, can become a mark on your record regardless of what you had previously.

4:26Molly Taft:Not only a mark on your record, Wired and Drew have identified two prosecutions filed in 2025 against people in immigration custody who refuse DNA collection. Like, it is becoming a crime to say, I don't want you to do that. That's one thing. And then the other thing, too, that I think we've mentioned, but I want to dig into a little bit is that they have started recently. I think the shift to collecting DNA from families is also relatively new. And we're talking about, I think, the official line is that kids as young as 14 can have their DNA collected. But Georgetown and Wired identified 492 children under 14 whose DNA the agency sent to the FBI, not just collected, but sent on to the FBI between January 2025 and January 2026.

5:13Molly Taft:That included 21 five-year-olds, 32 six-year-olds, 33 seven-year-olds who are now in an FBI DNA database for the rest of their lives. And I mean, the kicker to me here, too, part of this has to do with preventing future crime, quote unquote. It's all supposed to be about how the primary purpose is to build a national DNA database for solving crimes, which is a theory. OK, sure, solving crimes. Cool. Cool about that. But the like these are five year olds. These are five year olds whose so many of their rights have already been taken away by this current administration and DOJ and DHS. To have that as an additional marker to me is a really important like visual next step of the war on immigrants at this moment in the country.

6:09all right i'm gonna take us from the depths of despair just drag us up some would say ai slop

6:15Molly Taft:is maybe not the depths but we're definitely still in despair territory i mean i i love the depths of despair my favorite place to be i find it funny but i have a bunch of thoughts on it and i've just like my views on this have been evolving really rapidly so i'm excited to talk to you about it. Good, good, good, good. Last week, Google rolled out a new AI feature on Google Earth, which would basically let anyone zoom into real coordinates on a map and type a prompt, just like you would in ChatGPT or Gemini, and superimpose an AI scene on top of real Google satellite imagery. What could go wrong?

6:49Yeah, I have a hard time imagining how no one during this process said this is a terrible idea, or perhaps they did and they were not listened to. But regardless, Google did this. As you might imagine, it took 24 hours for people to generate fabricated nuclear plants in Iran, a bombed hospital in Gaza, and fires at an Iranian oil terminal. People were extremely upset about this for misinformation, disinformation, and other reasons. And Google quickly disabled the feature. It just feels like there is a real split between how Silicon Valley feels about AI and uses AI and how the rest of the country feels about it and uses about it.

7:30Because these tools are pretty unpopular, even as they're being widely adopted. But I think that the way that they're being adopted is also really different. Like most people are using Chachapichi, Gemini, Claude as basically a replacement for Google. Whereas in Silicon Valley, they're using it as a replacement for a personal assistant or like a junior employee. And so for them, I think there is real like magic in the tools and the capabilities. But for everyone else, the thing you hear a lot is why is this being shoved down our throats? Like we don't want this. They're stuffing AI features in all of these apps that we previously used and were good.

8:11And the AI features are bad.

8:13Molly Taft:Well, I think it's AI slop specifically, right? Like, yeah, there are use cases for AI agents. Zoe, you've given over some percentage of your life to them already. It's working out great for you. But what I find interesting about this is A, how quickly they rolled it back. And B, it's just the latest in a series of steps like this where companies that have been sort of embracing AI up to this point are acknowledging through actual feature changes to their products that, hey, maybe people don't like this. So you had just in the last week or so, you had LinkedIn adding a little button to a post there.

8:44Molly Taft:You can say, I think this looks like AI slop. I don't like this. LinkedIn, which has basically been a platform that has been built the last year or so on saying, hey, look at all the AI slop you can make on this platform. Like that's their whole thing. I love AI slop. But now they're saying, okay, we can actually give people a chance to say no. You had a couple of weeks ago, Substack in the app. You can check to see if it's potentially AI generated. They partnered with a company called Pangram, which is a very good AI detector tool. Again, Substack, a company that has said in the past, like, hey, if people want to use AI, that's great.

9:15Molly Taft:And then more broadly, outside of companies themselves, if I can monologue slightly longer because I'm passionate about this. No, please go. Go off. The EU on Sunday, a new regulation kicked in that said, look, anytime you come across AI slop in your feed, whatever it is, it has to be labeled as AI slop. Every piece of AI content has to be labeled as such, which is a huge sea change for people over there. If you're an AI creator, if you're just someone on social media, it's sort of telling that, yeah, people want to know when they're seeing it and they want the option not to see it. And companies are listening.

9:54It's interesting because I was hearing this a lot from actual AI researchers at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. And they were saying it's so annoying how all of our executives are constantly just posting their AI. Like, they won't just post their own messages on Slack. Like, it sounds very distinctive. And it's not that it's posting, you know, misinformation or getting facts wrong. Like, I think largely the tools really have improved on that front. You need to check them. Like, you need to be literate on that. But it's more that the patterns and the way that they speak is distinctive. And there is an ick factor for people.

10:31And I really am noticing that these days, like the difference between an executive who is a good writer and actually saying something that they're passionate about and writing it themselves and posting it on social media. And then someone who very clearly like, you know, whatever, maybe they had a conversation with Claude and it's just 100 % AI generated output. It sounds, my eyes glaze over it. It is genuinely hard to read this stuff. It's hard to remember what you just read. I think it's getting bigger and bigger. And I think that real human writing, real human output and content is going to be an edge for companies that are willing to invest in it.

11:12Which is not to say that there isn't cool uses of AI. I actually had a real unlock this week because nothing unites writers and reporters more than how much we hate our CMSs. I legit just like built a better one. It works beautifully. You can post blogs. Like it took me no time at all. It really was like a, okay, wow, these tools can do amazing things. But that's very, very, very different than what we're talking about with Substack or Google.

11:40Molly Taft:I want to take a quick moment to flag that Zoe just used unlock as a noun. Oh, no. It was painful. Just to be clear, I'm with Brian on this. Yeah, I just, I felt like it was important to say that. And then we'll move on. And then we'll move on. You know, I deserved that. You spend too much time in Silicon Valley and you, you become one.

12:08Okay, I am game to keep talking about AI, but let's pivot a little bit to the White House, if that's all right with you guys. It is. Great, great. So I feel like we've talked about this honestly a bunch, which is the White House is trying to figure out how to regulate AI, specifically keeping in mind cybersecurity risks. We talked about how the Trump administration has had different officials weighing in, how people have had some fun little disagreements. Apparently, as of this week, they have now all arrived at a common framework. And for the most part, they refuse to tell you anything about it.

12:43Love that. Love that. On Tuesday, the White House brought together staff from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, and a couple other AI companies to walk through its finalized AI cybersecurity oversight plan. The details of the plan haven't been released publicly, but we do know that developers can voluntarily submit new models up to 30 days ahead of release, and then the government is going to test their hacking capabilities using a classified benchmark. From there, they're going to share the results with federal agencies and quote-unquote quote, trusted corporate partners. Reportedly, open-weight models are being entirely excluded.

13:17This is like, I feel like I said a lot of details, but honestly, we're not getting a lot of details yet, really, about what's included here. A lot of companies kind of feel like they're being left out. The White House has had some sort of wild quotes about how they do have to keep things classified and even unclassified things they might not be comfortable sharing with the public. It could all be a national security risk, etc., which is language we've heard for a very long time. And in many ways, this just keeps a lot of this a bit opaque. I'm really curious what you guys think about any of this.

13:47Molly Taft:Can I set up some backdrop, the backdrop against which this is happening, which is over the last week and a half or so, we have had a continuing series of revelations and disclosures about how AI models have been escaping their sandboxes, have been going out on the open web have been hacking companies a version of anthropics mythos five not the same one that's available to the public because it had its security safeguards switched off nevertheless it literally made up online personas to try to trick a github repo manager into accepting a malicious pull request that's a lot of words just to basically it like try to social engineer or somebody into planting malware.

14:33Molly Taft:This is all happening very, very fast. It is getting worse very, very quickly. We have a story from Will Knight that he just published on Wednesday about how the next step, which we're not too far off from, is going to be potentially malicious AI models that could get out in the world and self-replicate, turn into viruses, worms, All of which is to say, I think we need to know what the AI security framework is, in part to understand just how far short it falls of where it needs to be. I mean, yes, and it's voluntary. It's in the name that this field—I mean, I get that, like, companies will feel compelled to be part of this, but it's unclear to me what this actually does functionally.

15:19Are companies going to do this because if they don't, they can't contract with the government, and so we just expect everyone to fall in line? It just feels like it's starting out from such a two-throw place. I will say, just before we move on, the Anthropic OpenAI disclosures on the agent hacking was giving me so much joy last week. OpenAI having its moment in the sun being like, we are so scary and powerful. We just did a bad thing. Oopsie doopsie. And then Anthropic couldn't let them have it. They're like, we also investigated. And you know what? Our agents did it too. And maybe it was worse.

15:56It's also scary. I think something, though, also that I can't kind of stop thinking about is the White House has left, by virtue of the way that they're doing this, they've kind of left smaller AI startups, safety advocates, and like a bunch of other researchers, etc., very much in the dark of how they're addressing all of these cyber risks. Some people from these companies have argued that this is going to give an advantage to larger companies who actually know what hoops they now have to jump through. Vice versa, like maybe some of these other smaller companies are just going to decide not to really jump through those hoops.

16:30So we're leaving a lot of gaps here. Like this is clearly not the comprehensive plan that everyone, I don't know if they were hoping for, but at the very least like kind of needed. But also, aren't open-weight models pretty critical for cybersecurity at this point? Yes. I'm just so confused about the rationale for leaving them out. Even I know that. Even I am aware of that. I was just going to say that, yeah. So you know it's legit. One of us.

16:57Molly Taft:One of us. No, but talk about gaps. That's the biggest sort of potential pain point in the future, I think, is going to be super capable, open-weight models that you can't control. So what's the plan there? And to say, like, we've got an AI security framework. By the way, we're not going to talk about that. Toothless. It's toothless. Very toothless. Yeah. Yeah.

17:25Molly Taft:Before we go to break, let's talk briefly about a SpaceX rocket, part of which crashed into the moon on Wednesday morning. The rocket piece was part of SpaceX's Falcon 9. It was carrying a pair of lunar landers that successfully reached the surface some time ago. But as part of that journey, one piece was left adrift because it didn't have enough fuel to return to Earth or to enter a stable orbit. So it's just been kind of hanging out for 18 months, going round and round, looking for a place to land. And it found one Wednesday morning, slammed into the moon at a speed of 5 ,400 miles per hour.

18:00Molly Taft:That is approximately seven times the speed of sound. I don't know if that matters in space, but it was just for context of how fast it is. There are no pictures yet of the impact, but people do think it likely created a new crater on the moon. I mean, that is what moon craters are after all, just like space stuff slamming into it at ridiculous speeds. Just this one happened to be sent by Elon Musk. What do we think about space crashes, everybody? I mean, look, there's already so much space trash around. The fact that there's like space trash everywhere. Where is this debris going? No, it's just all going to remain in Earth's orbit.

18:34And we're going to have to have our descendants deal with this in years to come. I have been talking to the astronomer community. I really have to always say, Zoe, don't say astrologer because I'm from California. and it's just very close to me.

18:49Molly Taft:And you are talking to both. And I'm talking to both at all times. Astronomers are very up in arms precisely because of what you just said, Leah. Like they feel like there is so much junk up in space now and SpaceX's plan is to launch a whole bunch more stuff up in space. It makes it really hard to see the night sky. Their telescopes aren't working like they used to. And now we're seeing not, you know, remains of rockets actually crash into the moon. So yeah, I think they have a point. There's one element to this. Speaking of future generations, NASA does want to build a base on the moon, at least one base.

19:27Molly Taft:There is a plan. It's why Project Artemis happened. It's why we sent astronauts up around the dark side of it. It's already been a concern that, look, if you build a moon base, how are you going to protect it from various space objects slamming into the moon's surface, the more we send rockets up, the more likely it is that we're just adding new threats. Again, the moon's a big place. The odds that it would hit a specific moon base location, pretty small. But it's something you have to think about if you really think that that's an achievable mission and a viable path for humanity. How are we going to not get hit on the head with a SpaceX rocket?

20:01You don't want our big space data center to be taken out by a random piece of SpaceX trash. No. Jeez.

20:09Molly Taft:God, that would be poetic, though, if a Grok database were taken out by a SpaceX Falcon 9. A reminder that this weekend, like all weekends, is a good time to watch the movie. Don't look up. If you're looking for recommendations, here's one. You know, I really feel like people didn't appreciate that as much as they should have. I thought it was really good. It's really good. I'm forever a big fan. Brian? I did not see it. What? And I don't think I'm going to. Coming up after the break, we'll be getting into how data centers broke U.S. politics. Stay with us.