Two Los Angeles traffic engineers, Kartik Patel and Gabriel Murillo, open this three-episode series as the case study: in August 2006 they remotely accessed the city's traffic control system and scrambled light sequences at four major intersections during a labor dispute, triggering gridlock that reportedly lasted days before they pleaded guilty in 2009. Motherboard uses that incident to launch a wider look at how ordinary technology fails under determined attack, bringing in security researchers and white-hat hackers who demonstrate the exploits rather than just describe them. The second episode turns to automobiles, showing how a car's onboard systems can be taken over remotely, and the third moves to smartphones, walking through the ways a device most people never turn off can be compromised. Throughout, the hackers frame their work as proof-of-concept rather than sabotage, pointing out that much of the infrastructure running cities, cars, and phones was never built with security as a first concern. The traffic hack anchors the whole series as a real, documented breach rather than a hypothetical one.