However, the government did not hand off GPS to private industry like a baton. More than ever, it remained a critical military system, and new security concerns arose sixteen months later with the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. GPS returned to the battlefield in Afghanistan and Iraq and on the home front found unexpected uses and familiar questions.
Firefighters and crews at Ground Zero began the search, recovery, and cleanup effort by dividing the sixteen-acre site into seventy-five-foot-square grids but soon realized that manually mapping the myriad fragments of human remains and other evidence would take too long and yield too many errors.177 They switched to a system that used handheld computers and bar-coded tags, cataloguing each item as it was discovered with a description, precise time stamp, and exact location via GPS.178 Original estimates of the cost of hauling 1.8 million tons of wreckage from Ground Zero to Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island ran as high as $7 billion.179 By attaching GPS trackers to about two hundred dump trucks and five boats, officials optimized traffic routes, prevented theft, and increased efficiency by 150 percent—raising loads per vehicle from four per day to ten, cutting the number of trucks, and lowering the final hauling cost to about $750 million.180
Troops in Afghanistan found a novel use for GPS that Col. John Mulholland, commander of the 5th Special Forces Group, said helped connect their mission there to the events back home. A fellow officer with family ties to New York procured a strip of metal from one of the towers. The troops cut it into small pieces and buried one in each area where they operated, using GPS to log an exact location, which commanders tracked on a map.181
Within weeks of the attacks Americans learned that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was focused on the terrorists’ use of handheld GPS devices. That could explain how inexperienced pilots navigated jumbo jets to targets many miles off assigned routes, a task one federal official characterized as more challenging than flying the planes.182 In November 2001 the captain of a major U.S. carrier reported testing whether he could pick up satellite signals on a handheld device in his cockpit, but the heated windshield and windows blocked them.183 Others pointed out that the clear skies on September 11 made the Twin Towers visible for miles and the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11 had only to follow the Hudson River to New York City.184 It is unclear whether the terrorists possessed the expertise to reprogram the aircraft navigation systems based on coordinates stored in handheld units. The owner of an aviation supply business who sold a GPS handset to one of the hijackers speculated in a television interview that the terrorists could have visited the buildings and set the devices in advance to ensure their accuracy.185 Numerous print and broadcast reports, including ones on ABC, NBC, and CNN, appeared in May 2002, citing unnamed federal sources suggesting that Mohammed Atta, who piloted Flight 11 into the North Tower, cased the World Trade Center site a day or two before the attack to capture the coordinates on a GPS unit.186 While the official timeline of his travels makes this theory problematic, it does not rule out the use of portable GPS receivers at another time by him or others for that purpose.
Authorities reconstructed the movements and activities of all nineteen hijackers and those of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called twentieth hijacker. He was arrested on immigration charges August 17, 2001, after instructors at a flight school in Minnesota became suspicious. Moussaoui proved to be a key to unraveling the wider plot, and he was later tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. The FBI pieced together financial transactions, physical evidence, and eyewitness accounts confirming multiple purchases of GPS units, cockpit instrument diagrams, operating manuals, maps, video simulations of jetliner operations, and varied simulator and airborne flight lessons. This evidence figured prominently in the Moussaoui indictment and trial.187 Prosecutors revealed that he had emailed both Garmin and Magellan to ask whether he could convert a street navigation unit for use in a plane.188
This type of publicity produced anxiety about GPS. U.S. News & World Report titled an article about the potential for good and evil uses of GPS “A Jekyll and Hyde System. ”189 Flying airplanes into buildings seemed an unexpected fulfillment of military officials’ worries about a “poor man’s cruise missile ” a decade before. Many expected the government to reactivate Selective Availability; others suggested restricting GPS receiver sales, but a Forbes writer likened that to putting toothpaste back in the tube.190 Analysts calculated that the civilian GPS market had grown to $14 billion a year and could reach $20 billion by 2004.191 Most experts saw the path forward in terms of exercising greater dexterity in using the technology. Some envisioned programming “virtual no-fly zones ” into flight management systems to prevent hijackers—or regular pilots, for that matter—from flying where a plane should not go.192 President George W. Bush, in a September 27, 2001, speech at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, indicated the government was studying ways for air traffic controllers to override cockpit controls and land planes by remote control when necessary.193 Pilots resisted such approaches, and tighter security coupled with hardened cockpit doors addressed those concerns. However, remotely controlled aircraft soon appeared in the skies over Afghanistan in the form of unmanned Predator drones, and the use of drones has proliferated.
The 9/11 attacks prompted reexamination of the approach undergirding President Clinton’s decision to deactivate Selective Availability—namely, “selective deniability. ” This means the ability to deny adversaries the use of GPS signals in specific areas where U.S. troops are engaged in operations, without affecting the signals elsewhere. At the same time, U.S. forces or allies must be able to continue using the military signals and to overcome any adversary’s attempts to block them through jamming. GPS signals from space are very faint and can easily be jammed using inexpensive equipment. The 9/11 attacks hastened development of sophisticated antijamming techniques and electronic warfare countermeasures.194
At 9:25 a.m., September 11, thirty-nine minutes after the first plane struck the North Tower, Ben Sliney, the national operations manager at the FAA’s command center in Herndon, Virginia, ordered a full nationwide ground stop. No flights, private or commercial, could take off. It was the first time anyone had given such an order, and it was his first day on the job.195 Twenty minutes later, after Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, Sliney ordered every plane in U.S. airspace—nearly 4,500 of them—to land.196 Within an hour about three-quarters of them were on the ground, and by 12:16 p.m. the only planes in the air were military aircraft or emergency flights.197 Controllers diverted hundreds of international flights en route to the United States. The FAA halted civil aviation for two full days and lifted restrictions gradually, starting with airlines and then charter and corporate flights. General aviation restrictions remained until mid-December.198 Despite these unprecedented circumstances, authorities at no time disrupted the GPS Standard Positioning Service. On September 17, 2001, the Interagency GPS Executive Board (IGEB) posted a statement on its website reaffirming that the U.S. government had “no intent to ever use SA again. ”199
Some nations, however, continued to chafe at their growing dependence on GPS, fearing that the United States could “wreck their economies with the flick of a switch. ”200 One month after the IGEB notice, international aviation officials gathered for the ICAO conference in Montreal pressed the United States on unresolved GPS issues, and the Europeans in particular pushed for some type of binding international regime.201 While Russia’s GLONASS system, which attained a full complement of twenty-four satellites in 1995, had deteriorated by 2001 to just six operational satellites, the EU forged ahead with its plans to have thirty Galileo satellites in place by 2008.202
This emerging competition for global navigation satellite superiority raised political and security concerns about whether Galileo’s signals would interfere with GPS’s military bandwidth.203 After protracted negotiations, with the Iraq War raging in the background, the State Department announced in June 2004 that Secretary of State Col
in Powell would sign an agreement with the European Commission covering interoperability between Galileo and GPS. EU analysts at the time estimated that the global satellite navigation hardware and services market had doubled, from $12 billion in 2002 to $24 billion in 2003, and forecast it to reach an astounding $364 billion by 2020.204
On December 8, 2004, President Bush signed a presidential directive creating the National Executive Committee for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing.205 This successor to the interagency board President Clinton established in 1996 updated the structure and mission to reflect changes in the government, the marketplace, and security needs over the preceding decade. While the secretaries of defense and transportation continued to chair the committee jointly, its membership expanded to include officials from the Departments of State, the Interior, Agriculture, and Commerce, the newly created Homeland Security Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and NASA, as well as observers from the White House and FCC as liaisons. Perhaps most tellingly, the directive established a permanent staff for the organization—a civilian bureaucracy in Washington DC being the surest sign that GPS had become a permanent and integral part of daily life.
9
Where Are We? GPS and GNSS Today
I once was lost but now am found.
John Newton, “Amazing Grace ,” 1779
Like millions of motorists, thirty-two-year-old Jeramie Griffin, a construction worker in Lebanon, Oregon, received a GPS portable navigation device for Christmas in 2009.1 Black Friday price wars heralded the holiday shopping season with a model from Garmin for eighty-nine dollars, while TomTom undercut its rival with a fifty-nine-dollar loss leader, making its PNDs the most heavily purchased electronics item online that day.2 What came unexpectedly with Griffin’s gift was fifteen minutes of fame. He tried his new GPS unit for the first time Christmas Eve, discovering a shortcut he believed would trim forty minutes off the four-hour trek to his fiancée’s relatives, who lived about two hundred miles away, on the other side of the Cascade Range from the couple’s home in the Willamette Valley.3 They packed their silver Dodge Durango, bundled up their eleven-month old daughter, and departed about 3:30 p.m. Their GPS guidance took them east into the mountains on a state highway, then northeast along a local road, and finally onto one of numerous unplowed logging roads that crisscross the national forests, where they got stuck in deep snow.4 Satellite navigation carried them beyond cell phone coverage. They spent a harrowing night in the car, even making a farewell video.5 Frantic relatives contacted two close friends, who found the stranded family about twenty-four hours after they drove into the snow bank. The friends borrowed a GPS unit identical to Griffin’s and duplicated the route he used.6 Griffin’s family was one of three groups of travelers stranded that holiday weekend after using GPS to plot routes across remote, snow-clogged Oregon roads. They drew the attention of the Associated Press and then CNN.7 Soon their stories went viral on the Internet. The Air Force felt compelled afterward to issue a statement reminding the public that it operates the satellites that emit GPS signals but neither creates nor updates the maps in devices, nor is it involved in calculating routes between destinations.8
Since GPS navigation devices became mass consumer products many have misused them, placed too much faith in them, or blamed them for unexpected outcomes. Stories abound of people driving into swamps or onto railroad tracks because, they say, the GPS unit directed them to do so. One of the first television commercials to tap this trend showed a driver crashing into a storefront as the GPS voice said, “Turn right [pause] in two hundred feet. ” The popular sitcom The Office had its main character robotically chant, “The machine knows ,” as he turned off a road—and into a lake.9 Allstate Insurance commercials featured the personified “Mayhem ” posing as a GPS unit giving incorrect instructions because “you never update me, so now I just have to wing it. ” By 2008 more than eight thousand visitors annually showed up in vehicles at the front door to Ireland’s famous Stone Age monument Newgrange after entering the landmark into GPS units.10 Ignoring the facility’s published directions in favor of self-guidance, all had to be sent south across the Boyne River to the visitor’s center, where official tours originate. British soldiers who repeatedly steered army tanks and gun carriers down a narrow lane in Donnington, England, some fifteen miles from their barracks blamed receiver error, and British railroad officials blamed poor mapping software for tall trucks frequently striking low railroad bridges, causing millions in damages.11 A Beaumont, Texas, neighborhood near the Port of Orange reported a similar problem in 2009, when big rigs began rolling down and having to back out of Childers Drive, a narrow, tree-lined cul-de-sac. Drivers using GPS units were trying to find Childers Road, an industrial street several miles south lined with warehouses and shipyards.12 A contractor in Carrollton, Georgia, demolished the wrong house in 2009 after an apparent mix-up involving GPS coordinates.13 Angry Hollywood Hills residents, exasperated by cars and tour buses clogging narrow roads and dead-end streets near the famous Hollywood sign, finally convinced Google Maps and Garmin in early 2012 to change the programming in their systems and guide users to appropriate viewing sites farther away.14
Media reports of GPS users gone astray seem to have waned, perhaps indicating that device makers have corrected most map glitches or that users have become more cautious, but such stories still appear occasionally. Tractor-trailer drivers using GPS units to locate Broadhead Road in a Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, industrial park were still finding themselves stuck on Broadhead Court, a narrow, nineteenth-century lane, a local newspaper reported in February 2012.15 Days later the Costa Concordia cruise ship ran aground and tipped over off the Italian coast. A former cruise industry executive acknowledged that technologies such as underwater sonar and GPS made many crews complacent about safety.16 The London Telegraph reported that buses transporting American and Australian teams from Heathrow Airport to the 2012 Olympic Village got lost, turning a ninety-minute trip into four hours, because the destination was not programmed into the vehicles’ GPS systems and the drivers did not know how to operate them.17 On the first day of competition hundreds of thousands of spectators lined the men’s cycling course, using mobile phones to send photos, videos, and text messages. Overwhelmed data networks blocked the information from GPS units traveling with the cyclists, so television commentators could not report how far ahead of the pack the leaders were.18
A survey in 2010 showed that more than half of British drivers do not trust GPS devices; a third said they have gotten lost while using them and 15 percent blamed them for making them late to an important event.19 Half of Australian drivers reported a lack of trust, while two-thirds blamed GPS units for getting them lost and a third acknowledged frustration with using their device.20 Michelin, which publishes maps and travel guides in addition to manufacturing tires, surveyed 2,200 U.S. adult drivers in April 2013 and found that 63 percent said GPS devices had led them astray at least four times, while 7 percent reported being misdirected more than ten times.21 Allstate Insurance reported that a study of three thousand drivers found 83 percent of men and 75 percent of women occasionally disregard their turn-by-turn directions, while a third keep a map in the car in case they need one.22 States still print millions of paper road maps to distribute at highway rest stops and tourist venues, but lower demand and tight finances make such programs attractive targets for budget cutters.23 Georgia reduced the number it prints from 1.7 million to 1.4 million between 2004 and 2009.24 Iowa in 2012 cut the number of state road maps it printed from 1.4 million to eight hundred thousand, saving about $240,000.25 AAA and Rand McNally acknowledge they are printing fewer maps but decline to give numbers.26 Insurance companies have an interest in public perceptions of GPS reliability. Many are actively promoting GPS tracking devices designed to record driving behavior and reward safer drivers with lower premiums.
The Bell on the Cat
While some drivers lost patience with their navigation devices, many others were losing the
units themselves—to thieves. As sales rose, so did car burglaries. The FBI reported that GPS thefts from vehicles jumped 30 percent between 2000 and 2004.27 Even as thefts of automobiles plunged 13 percent in 2008, car burglaries increased 2 percent.28 Philadelphia police said GPS units accounted for 20 percent of all thefts from vehicles.29 Dublin, Ireland, police put the figure at 25 percent.30 Spanish officials blamed GPS units and cell phones for car burglaries having “skyrocketed. ”31 Melbourne, Australia, police recorded more than six hundred GPS units stolen from vehicles every month in 2008.32 Bethesda, Maryland, police echoed an admonition to car owners that was prominent in GPS-related theft stories: leaving suction-cup mounts on car windshields was a red flag for thieves.33 Media reports of this kind also seem to have decreased. Drivers may have learned to be more careful. More likely the decline is because GPS navigation has migrated to smartphones, which people tend to take with them when they leave the vehicle, and to a growing number of in-dash systems, which are less prone to “smash and grab ” break-ins. Industry analysts predict factory-installed navigation systems will overtake PND shipments by 2015.34 However, a mid-2012 report highlights the danger of car owners programming their address into GPS systems as “home. ” A car thief drove his victim’s Lexus to her house, used the garage opener to let himself in, burglarized the home, and abandoned the vehicle nearby.35
When thieves steal PNDs, the odds of recovery are slim. Stolen or lost smartphones are another matter. The GPS infrastructure by itself cannot track receivers using the signals; tracking requires additional circuitry to transmit the calculated coordinates to some other monitoring system. As discussed in the preceding chapter, that technology is built into phones to meet the FCC’s mandate for locating mobile 911 callers, and it has migrated into tablets and some laptop computers. It enables apps that owners of stolen or lost smartphones— Apple or Android—can access online to display the phone’s location on a map. Reports over the past several years from around the world have shown victims and police using these apps to catch phone thieves. A Chicago executive called 911 after two men mugged him and stole his phone, credit cards, cash, and driver’s license. He provided real-time location information to the operator, who relayed it to police. The officers found the men at a gas station about a mile away and held them until the victim arrived and identified them.36 Sometimes such cases go awry. A Sherwood, England, resident was stuck with an $800 repair bill after police broke down his door while responding to an incorrect address provided by phone-tracking software.37 Such flaws make obtaining a search warrant increasingly difficult, so police often use other tactics. After a man robbed a restaurant delivery driver in suburban Atlanta of his phone, cash, and chicken wings, the driver called police and gave them the phone’s location, which was stationary at a residential address. The officers knocked on the door and, while they were conversing with the resident, who matched the robber’s description, the victim activated a feature to make the phone ring, precluding the need for a warrant.38 Antitheft apps are evolving to include features that sound alarms and allow victims to photograph thieves remotely.
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