GPS pioneer warns on network’s security

The Global Positioning System helps power everything from in-car satnavs and smart bombs to bank security and flight control, but its founder has warned that it is more vulnerable to sabotage or disruption than ever before – and politicians and security chiefs are ignoring the risk.

Impairment of the system by hostile foreign governments, cyber criminals – or even regular citizens – has become “a matter of national security”, according to Colonel Bradford Parkinson, who is hailed as the architect of modern navigation.

“If we don’t watch out and we aren’t prepared,” then countries could be denied everything from ‘navigation’ to ‘precision weapon delivery’, Mr Parkinson warned.

“We have to make it more robust ... our cellphone towers are timed with GPS. If they lose that time, they lose sync and pretty soon they don’t operate. Our power grid is synchronised with GPS [and] our banking system.”

Western governments are “in their infancy in recognising the problem”, Mr Parkinson told the Financial Times in an interview on the fringes of a conference for government officials, academics and defence contractors at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory.

He said: “[In the US] I don’t know anyone that is really in charge of it. The Department of Homeland Security should be [but] ... they don’t have any people that understand it very well. They’ve got one person without any budget to speak of.”

Parkinson created GPS in the 1970's for the US military and is now a professor at Stanford University.

Until 2010 there was an alternate global navigation system in place but in 2009 it was defunded and ordered discontinued by the newly elected Obama administration.

The system, in various forms beginning during WW-II, was LORAN (Long Range Navigation) which enabled ships and aircraft to determine their position and speed from low frequency radio signals transmitted from shore-based radio beacons. The US Coast Guard had the responsibility for constructing and maintaining the transmitters which had to be located in remote areas to avoid radio interference. This lead to CG Electronic Technicians being stationed in such garden spots as Adak in the Western Aleutians, Con Son (a Vietnamese prison island during the Vietnam war) and French Frigate Shoals (a coral reef west of Hawaii). Surprisingly enough there were stations in US locations such as southwest of Las Cruces, NM and at Havre, MT.

A replacement technology exists which may provide the needed backup to GPS. Enhanced LORAN (eLORAN) uses advancements in receiver design and transmission characteristics to increase the accuracy and usefulness of traditional LORAN. Accuracy is reported as good as ± 8 meters. However, without US government and military support for use as a backup, it remains little more than a discussion topic in the US though the UK and South Korea are moving ahead with implementation.

Some links for further browsing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LORAN

http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/?pageName=loranMain

http://www.loran-history.info/default.asp

http://elorantechnologies.com/

FT wont let me read the article, so what is the threat to our GPS?

I got the story from Drudge, center column, second story down. Try going there and clicking his link.

Shooting down satellites is not that easy to do.

The problem is jamming the signals. From the story:

A report compiled for the UK government and released this week warned that “the conditions are present for a catastrophic ‘Black Swan’ event” that would knock out one or more critical GPS systems. The report identified thousands of instances of GPS jamming occurring annually.

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