NATO Exercise Banned From Jamming GPS

judgecorp writes "A major NATO exercise off the coast of Scotland has been ordered to stop using GPS jamming technology after complaints that to do so would endanger the lives of fishermen and disrupt civilian mobile phones. The exercise — called 'Joint Warrior' — planned to disrupt GPS for 20 miles around each warship"

Comments

Re:What?

[Waffle Iron]

What happened to being able to read a chart, keeping a sextant on-board, triangulating your position with a compass, and all the other skills people used to be taught?

The innumerable shipwrecks dotting the shores of the British Isles over the centuries suggest that GPS navigation might be a bit more foolproof than those methods.

Re:The US owns the satellites

[kimvette]

This is why:

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

After Korean Air Lines Flight 007, carrying 269 people, was shot down in 1983 after straying into the USSR's prohibited airspace,[10] in the vicinity of Sakhalin and Moneron Islands, President Ronald Reagan issued a directive making GPS freely available for civilian use, once it was sufficiently developed, as a common good.[11] The first satellite was launched in 1989, and the 24th satellite was launched in 1994.

Initially, the highest quality signal was reserved for military use, and the signal available for civilian use was intentionally degraded ("Selective Availability", SA). This changed with President Bill Clinton ordering Selective Availability to be turned off at midnight May 1, 2000, improving the precision of civilian GPS from 100 meters (about 300 feet) to 20 meters (about 65 feet). The executive order signed in 1996 to turn off Selective Availability in 2000 was proposed by the US Secretary of Defense, William Perry, because of the widespread growth of differential GPS services to improve civilian accuracy and eliminate the US military advantage. Moreover, the US military was actively developing technologies to deny GPS service to potential adversaries on a regional basis.[12]

GPS is owned and operated by the United States Government as a national resource. Department of Defense (USDOD) is the steward of GPS. Interagency GPS Executive Board (IGEB) oversaw GPS policy matters from 1996 to 2004. After that the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Executive Committee was established by presidential directive in 2004 to advise and coordinate federal departments and agencies on matters concerning the GPS and related systems. The executive committee is chaired jointly by the deputy secretaries of defense and transportation. Its membership includes equivalent-level officials from the departments of state, commerce, and homeland security, the joint chiefs of staff, and NASA. Components of the executive office of the president participate as observers to the executive committee, and the FCC chairman participates as a liaison.

USDOD is required by law to "maintain a Standard Positioning Service (as defined in the federal radio navigation plan and the standard positioning service signal specification) that will be available on a continuous, worldwide basis," and "develop measures to prevent hostile use of GPS and its augmentations without unduly disrupting or degrading civilian uses."

Scotland's only 200x150 miles

[evilandi]

>What the hell is a fishing boat doing within 20 miles of a major exercise?

Scotland is only 200 miles x 150 miles in size. A fourty-mile exclusion zone (20 miles radius) would kill the entire marine economy for the western coast of the country.

And the marine economy is pretty much the only economy in western Scotland.