ICE’s DNA Collection Increases, SpaceX’s Rocket Crashes Into the Moon, and the AI Backlash Grows

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This week on Uncanny Valley, Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer, and Leah Feiger break down how ICE has collected DNA from nearly a million people this year, including young children, feeding an FBI database indefinitely. The team also discusses the backlash against Google Earth’s AI slop, the White House’s secretive AI cybersecurity plan, and SpaceX rocket crashing into the moon. Plus, WIRED’s Molly Taft discusses their recent story on the strange left-right coalition fighting data centers across the US.

Articles mentioned in this episode:

You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett, Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer, Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger, and Molly Taft on Bluesky @mollytaft.com. Write to us at [email protected].

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Zoe Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, contributing editor.

Brian Barrett: I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor.

Leah Feiger: And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science.

Brian Barrett: 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.

Zoe Schiffer: 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.

Leah Feiger: Also 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.

Brian Barrett: 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.

Leah Feiger: And later in the show, WIRED senior writer Molly Taft joins to tell us all about how data centers have officially broken US politics.

Brian Barrett: 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. WIRED’s Dhruv Mehrotra 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.

Leah Feiger: I feel like we're getting inundated with 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, at least enough for me, broke through the noise. Don't you guys think? This was wild.

Zoe Schiffer: 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 naïve about what they're subjected to when they're in this country.

Brian Barrett: Yeah, I mean, I think the answer is because they can. And I wish that we're more nuanced or subtle than that, but I think they are just trying to gather as much information as they can at all times. I want to be clear too, 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 drove, 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 and that the DNA needs to be collected after any arrest. It is just table stakes for these officers to grab DNA whenever and wherever they can.

Leah Feiger: 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. This is starting to pick up steam across the board. I think that we've just gotten so used to the idea that the government is allowed to collect any information it wants, store it in whichever way it wants. And all of these norms have been destroyed in the last year and a half. It's really shocking, honestly.

Zoe Schiffer: 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.

Brian Barrett: Not only a mark on your record. WIRED and Dhruv identified two prosecutions filed in 2025 against people in immigration custody who refused DNA collection. It is becoming a crime to say, "I don't want you to do that." That's one thing. 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 onto the FBI between January 2025 and January 2026. That included 21 5-year-olds, 32 6-year-olds, 33 7-year-olds who are now in an FBI DNA database for the rest of their lives.

Leah Feiger: I mean, the kicker to me here too, part of this has to do with "preventing future crime." 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 about that. But these are 5-year-olds. These are 5-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 visual next step of the war on immigrants at this moment in the country.

Zoe Schiffer: All right. I'm going to take us from the depths of despair. Just drag us up.

Brian Barrett: Some would say AI slop is maybe not the depths, but we're definitely still in despair territory.

Leah Feiger: I mean, I love the depths of despair, my favorite place to be.

Zoe Schiffer: I find it funny, but I have a bunch of thoughts on it and my views on this have been evolving really rapidly, so I'm excited to talk to you about it.

Leah Feiger: Good, good, good, good.

Zoe Schiffer: 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.

Brian Barrett: What could go wrong?

Zoe Schiffer: Yeah, 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 because 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. Most people are using ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude as basically a replacement for Google. Whereas in Silicon Valley, they're using it as a replacement for a personal assistant or a junior employee. And so for them, I think there is real 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? We don't want this. They're stuffing AI features in all of these apps that we previously used and were good and the AI features are bad.

Brian Barrett: Well, I think it's AI slop specifically, right? 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. Just in the last week or so, you had LinkedIn adding a little button to a post where 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." That's their whole thing.

Zoe Schiffer: Love AI slop.

Brian Barrett: But now they're saying, OK, 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, "Hey, if people want to use AI, that's great." And then more broadly outside of companies themselves, if I can monologue slightly longer because I'm passionate about this.

Zoe Schiffer: No, please go. Go off.

Brian Barrett: 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 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.

Zoe Schiffer: It'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. They won't just post their own messages on Slack. It sounds very distinctive. It's not that it's posting misinformation or getting facts wrong. I think largely the tools really have improved on that front. You need to check them. You need to be literate on that, but it's more that the patterns and the way that they speak is distinctive and there's an ick factor for people. I really am noticing that these days, 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, whatever, maybe they had a conversation with Claude and it's just 100% AI-generated output, my eyes glaze over it. It is genuinely hard to read this stuff. It's hard to remember what you just read. I think is 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, which 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 built a better one. It works beautifully. You can post blogs. It took me no time at all. It really was like a, OK, wow, these tools can do amazing things. But that's very, very, very different than what we're talking about with Substack or Google.

Brian Barrett: I want to take a quick moment to flag that Zoe just used unlock as a noun.

Zoe Schiffer: Oh, no.

Leah Feiger: It was painful. Just to be clear, I'm with Brian on this.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. I felt like it was important to say that. And then we'll move on. And then we'll move on.

Zoe Schiffer: I deserve that. You spend too much time in Silicon Valley and you become one.

Leah Feiger: OK. 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.

Brian Barrett: It is.

Leah Feiger: Great. Great. 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.

Zoe Schiffer: Love that.

Leah Feiger: 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 "trusted corporate partners." Reportedly, open weight models are being entirely excluded. 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 feel like they're being left out. The White House has had some 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, et cetera, 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.

Brian Barrett: 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 Anthropic's Mythos 5, 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 try to social engineer somebody into planting malware. 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.

Zoe Schiffer: I mean, yes, and it's voluntary. It's in the name that this field ... I mean, I get that companies will feel compelled to be part of this, but it's unclear to me what this actually does functionally. Are 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 toothless 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."

Brian Barrett: Also scary.

Leah Feiger: I think something though also that I can't stop thinking about is the White House has left, by virtue of the way that they're doing this, they've left smaller AI startups, safety advocates and a bunch of other researchers, et cetera, 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, maybe some of these other smaller companies are just going to decide not to really jump through those hoops. So we're leaving a lot of gaps here. This is clearly not the comprehensive plan that everyone, I don't know if they were hoping for, but at the very least needed.

Zoe Schiffer: But also aren't open-weight models pretty critical for cybersecurity at this point?

Leah Feiger: Yes.

Zoe Schiffer: I'm just so confused about the rationale for leaving them out.

Leah Feiger: Even I know that. Even I am aware of that.

Brian Barrett: I was just going to say that. Yeah.

Zoe Schiffer: So you know it's legit.

Brian Barrett: One of us. One of us. No, but talk about gaps. That's the biggest 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, we've got an AI security framework. By the way, we're not going to talk about that.

Leah Feiger: Toothless. It's toothless.

Brian Barrett: Very tooth—yeah. Yep. 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, it 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 to drift because it didn't have enough fuel to return to Earth or to enter a stable orbit. So it's just been 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. That is approximately seven times the speed of sound. I don't know if that matters in space, but it is 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 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?

Leah Feiger: I mean, look, there's already so much space trash around. The fact that there's space trash everywhere. Where is this debris going? No, it's just all going to remain in Earth's orbit, and we're going to have to have our descendants deal with this in years to come.

Zoe Schiffer: 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.

Brian Barrett: And you are talking to both.

Zoe Schiffer: And I'm talking to both at all times. Astronomers are very up in arms precisely because of what you just said, Leah. 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. Makes it really hard to see the night sky. Their telescopes aren't working like they used to. And now we're seeing remains of rockets actually crash into the moon. So yeah, I think they have a point.

Brian Barrett: There's one element to this. Speaking of future generations, NASA does want to build a base on the moon, at least one base. 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?

Zoe Schiffer: You don't want our big space data center to be taken out by a random piece of SpaceX trash.

Brian Barrett: No.

Zoe Schiffer: Geez.

Brian Barrett: God, that would be poetic though, if a Grok database were taken out by a SpaceX Falcon 9.

Leah Feiger: 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.

Zoe Schiffer: I really feel like people didn't appreciate that as much as they should've. I thought it was really good.

Leah Feiger: It's really good. I'm forever a big fan. Brian?

Brian Barrett: I did not see it.

Leah Feiger: What?

Brian Barrett: And I don't think I'm going to.

Zoe Schiffer: Coming up after the break, we'll be getting into how data centers broke US politics. Stay with us.

Leah Feiger: Data centers have become one of the only things that pretty much everyone agrees on, including Democrats and Republicans. Over the past year, we've seen moratoriums pass in blue states and deep red counties alike, with attack on pro-data center city councilmen, protestors getting arrested at public meetings from New Jersey to Wisconsin, and so much more. But this movement against data centers holds some really strange origins. WIRED's Molly Taft spent the last few months investigating some of the different factions within the coalition and their motivations. Molly followed a Steve Bannon affiliated tech correspondent around Georgia, heard data centers being compared to neurons of the Antichrist, and spoke with Democrats who have been linking arms with right-wing speakers to push against these AI build-outs. Molly, thank you so much for joining us today.

Molly Taft: Thank you so much for having me.

Leah Feiger: To start off, can we just get into how fast the backlash against data centers has actually grown? You talk about a jump from under 100,000 to half a million people in data center opposition Facebook groups in the last couple of months. Talk us through that. What changed? How did this go?

Molly Taft: Yeah. Man, I set up at night thinking about this, to be honest, which is maybe a bad sign. Most data centers in the US before basically two years ago, they were being built outside of DC and Silicon Valley were the two big places. And so there had been a couple of local environmental groups, especially in the DC area, where there were increasingly more and more who were starting to point out some of the environmental issues with this. So when I got to WIRED, those groups had been getting a little bit louder as there were more and more data centers that had started being built. So I started tracking them. But it's been interesting because this is really an area where politicians in Washington were not aware of what was going on at all until it seems like maybe the past six months. People are so mad about this for multiple different reasons. And I remember asking a colleague in the newsroom, "Do you think this could be used to block state-level policies on data centers?" Because there were some states where local lawmakers, again in Virginia, a big one, were starting to be like, "Hey, the power on these things is crazy. They're being built with few restrictions. We need to start talking about regulating these things." There was really not a lot in the 2024, 2025 state legislative agenda. And I remember asking that question, and then two days later, Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted about it. And I was like, "Oh, yeah, OK. The people who are clocking some of this are not the normal political coalitions that you will see."

Brian Barrett: Molly, you spent a good amount of time with a guy named Joe Allen down in Georgia who is a fascinating character/person who comes at this from the right-wing perspective, which I found that's the most interesting and revelatory to me is why this faction is so opposed to you. Talk about Joe and how you found him and his role in all this.

Molly Taft: Yeah, Joe is a really interesting character, and he comes from another portion of this conversation, which is when people oppose data centers, are they opposing AI in general? Joe was a musical rigger for many years for the Black Eyed Peas, Calvin Harris. He basically helped set up shows all over the world, but he also had this longstanding interest in tech. He's been thinking a lot about what it means to have this global cabal of tech elites control humanity's future. And he got an offer from Steve Bannon to come on War Room and be its anti-tech or its transhumanist editor. That's what it's called. He's been talking about the dangers of AI on War Room for a while. As the mainstream tech and the big tech companies aligned behind Trump, there are a significant faction of MAGA and the populous space that are deeply uncomfortable with what a lot of these companies are representing. And I was like, I got to have some sort of guide as to how the right is coming at tech. I understand how the right comes at some of these environmental issues, but I really want to understand how the tech right thinks about this.

Leah Feiger: OK. Yeah, get into this a little bit more with us. You spoke with a Democrat who has this big environmental science background running the Facebook group, a protester in New Jersey who describes right-wing allies as their temporary allies. Is this an actual durable coalition, an alliance of convenience? I'm really fascinated by this.

Molly Taft: It is. I also think that when I talk to a lot of people on the left, a lot of them are a little bit maybe politically blind to the fact that these ideas are resonating cross-party. I think what's interesting is when folks like the ones working on the ground, specific protesters, this is becoming a really good coalition-building issue. I—actually, this is not in the piece, but I spoke two months ago or so to Will Lawrence, who just won his primary last night. He was the far-left candidate in a Michigan district where there is a lot of data center development, and he really ran on that issue. And he said he was having a lot of really interesting cross-party conversations with people who are just like, "I do not want this here. I don't want it at all."

Zoe Schiffer: No, they definitely don't. I mean, I've been thinking about a couple points when you're talking. One is I think a difference with the clean energy movement and that build out where there was opposition, but there was also a very clear yes coalition. Whereas with AI, and I was talking about this earlier, the way that people in Silicon Valley use AI where it's like it's genuinely doing the work of junior-level employees, it's really changing their day-to-day in a magical and amazing way. And then how the average person uses it where it's not a necessary part of their lives in any way. It's like a lot of people, including probably people that oppose these projects, might use ChatGPT, but it's Google. It's just not a big deal. It doesn't feel like there's this strong coalition of people that are advocating for the data centers, except for the very, very tech elite. And those people are themselves so unpopular that it just feels like this whole issue has become radioactive.

Molly Taft: I think that's such a good point. I also think another thing that differentiates this from the renewable stuff is why I started talking to Joe is that there is this huge almost spiritual question about what are our lives going to look like if this technology is allowed to develop? I think a lot of people aren't directly thinking about that, but you're seeing news about how this is going to take your job and you're seeing news about what are your kids getting exposed to in school? What are your kids' lives going to look like? It's going to be so different from yours if this technology becomes more widespread. There is this really spiritual crisis element to it that I think doesn't necessarily cross everyone's minds, but plays a really important role. And I think that's something that is, I think, going to keep galvanizing people. I've been thinking a lot about what could tech companies do to tamp down some of this opposition? And I don't really know if I have an answer for them because I think even if they're like, "We will pay for everything. We'll make sure it's all connected to renewable energy. You will get an incredible tax base, durable jobs, whatever you want," maybe I'm wrong, I don't really see a lot of instances in which that would still fly for people. I just don't think people want these things at all.

Leah Feiger: Molly, thank you so much for joining us.

Molly Taft: Thank you for having me.

Zoe Schiffer: That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. It was mixed by Pran Bandi, who's also our New York studio engineer. It was fact-checked by Matt Giles. Marc Leyda is our San Francisco studio engineer. Kate Osborn is our executive producer, and Katie Drummond is WIRED's global editorial director.

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