STUPID US Defines Plans to Shut Down GPS in C rises

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

_______________ Forward Header _______________
Subject:        Re: STUPID US Defines Plans to Shut Down GPS in C rises
Author: Bill Bumgarner <bbum () apple com>
Date:           16th December 2004 2:43:21 pm

On Dec 16, 2004, at 1:57 PM, ip () v2 listbox com wrote:
> (12-15) 15:59 PST WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush has ordered plans 
> for
> temporarily disabling the U.S. network of global positioning satellites
> during a national crisis to prevent terrorists from using the 
> navigational
> technology, the White House said Wednesday.
> Any shutdown of the network inside the United States would come under 
> only
> the most remarkable circumstances, said a Bush administration official 
> who
> spoke to a small group of reporters at the White House on condition of
> anonymity.

Oh, it gets far far stupider than what has already been discussed.   I 
don't think the administration has the remotest of clues as to how 
pervasive GPS technology has become.

(1) many law enforcement and emergency services are adopting GPS on a 
more widespread basis precisely to help navigate in times when smoke, 
storms, or the inconvenience of dealing with paper maps makes 
navigation difficult.  So, in other words, Bush wants to disable the 
GPS network during a period of time when it is most needed.

(2) GPS is also used for agricultural production these days.  Any 
prolonged GPS outage would do some combination of raising prices of 
certain farm products or potentially lowering yields because the farm 
equipment would require more man power to do a less precise job.

(3) GPS is now used in numerous products for the tracking of offenders 
on probation.   GPS based tracking systems are also used by law 
enforcement to track suspects and perform investigations.

(4) Commercial transport -- planes, trains, and automobiles-- have long 
integrated GPS based tracking into their business model.  It is at the 
core of their businesses, often.    Likewise, insurance companies are 
using GPS data quite heavily to reduce rider costs in return for a 
guarantee that the thing being insured is operated within certain 
parameters.

And, of course, anyone with half a clue or ten minutes with Google 
knows all of this.   So, if such a plan were enacted, it becomes 
painfully easy for someone to cause serious widespread disruption of 
services without actually doing any major amount of direct damage.   
Just throw up a big nasty smoke screen along with "evidence" that a 
coordinated attack will be carried out that might just leverage GPS 
like technologies and that'd probably be 'just cause' to turn off the 
GPS switch.

Is it still legal for me to even conjecture about such scenarios?

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