Those are exactly the people I do not want woken up. Bereaucrats have a tendency to panic and do more damange than they prevent. We came perilously close to killing the entire General Aviation industry in this country after 9/11. Now they're threatening this kind of stupidity.
Trying to prevent terrorism by punishing law abiding people is never the answer. It's not the answer in gun laws, and it's not the answer in GPS or General Aviation. The bad guys will always have alternatives. Even if we bring the economy down to cave man standards, they will still have big rocks to kill with.
If we killed GPS, high end aircraft already use sophisticated nav systems that triangulate multiple VOR/Loran/NDB signals to generate near-GPS like precision. So shutting down GPS wouldn't stop a terrorist. Actually, the best chance of doing so would be to actually enable them to use GPS, but detect their attack early and jam GPS signals locally. If we shut GPS down now, they will just design their system with alternatives that might be harder to jam.
As I said, the problem with aviation autopilots are that they can't be programed exactly *where* to come down. At least without re-writing software.
See my post 53 for more.
Also: how we gonna track terrorists that we know about if we can't use GPS trackers in their cars? GPS is a positive for handling terrorists, not a negative.
Where did I ever say anything about getting rid of GPS navigation? I'm the #1 fan. I've crossed oceans with it.
I'm just explaining why the feds are announcing they may have to interrupt it, if they detect a boat or aircraft possibly containing expolisves etc. heading for NY or DC. They may only have minutes to decide to "shift" the GPS system locally to throw the weapon into a vacant area.
According to some reports, something like this was done in Gulf War One, when GPS was "spoofed" to interfere with Iraqi agents directing SCUDs into Kuwait.
There needs to be an understanding that your GPS might be subject to wartime control or alteration in the event of inbound weapons which appear to be using GPS guidance.