A team of researchers from UC San Diego and the University of Maryland have published a study [PDF warning] detailing their attempts to pick up unsecured information from the airwaves using a basic receiver system. Over the course of three years, the team pointed their off-the-shelf residential dish at various geostationary satellites and interpreted the data, and were shocked by what they found.
"There are some really critical pieces of our infrastructure relying on this satellite ecosystem, and our suspicion was that it would all be encrypted," said UCSD professor Aaron Schulman, speaking to Wired. "And just time and time again, every time we found something new, it wasn't."
