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GPS and GNSS systems quietly power nearly every aspect of modern life, from financial transactions and power grids to aviation and emergency response. But what happens when they’re disrupted?
In this episode, host Ken Miller speaks with Dana Goward, President of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, about the growing threats to GPS and GNSS infrastructure. They break down how jamming and spoofing work, why these attacks are becoming more accessible, and how real-world incidents have exposed critical vulnerabilities.
We invite you to share your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future episodes by emailing host Ken Miller at host@fromthecrowsnest.org or by visiting us on our Instagram @fromthecrowsnestpodcast.
To learn more about today’s topics or to stay updated on EMSO and EW developments, visit our homepage.
Creators and Guests
What is From the Crows' Nest?
Featuring interviews, analysis, and discussions covering leading issues of the day related to electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO). Topics include current events and news worldwide, US Congress and the annual defense budget, and military news from the US and allied countries. We also bring you closer to Association of Old Crow events and provide a forum to dive deeper into policy issues impacting our community.
speaker-0 (00:02.616)
We have seen aircraft be shot down because the GPS has been interfered with and they were not able to properly identify aircraft. So people have died. We've seen ships collide, fires, them running aground. We have seen a noteworthy number of incidents that have been attributed to interference with GPS and GNSS.
speaker-1 (00:36.494)
Welcome to From the Crows Nest. I'm your host, Ken Miller from the Association of Old Crows. Thanks for listening. Well, happy April to everyone. This episode is being released on April 1st, which of course is April Fool's Day. Now I've never been much of a prankster, so I can't say this is my favorite holiday. And because I'm not a prankster, our listeners do not have to worry about any shenanigans on this episode. However, if we're going to be fooling people today, it makes for a good day to air this episode on jamming and spoofing GPS and global navigation satellite systems.
with my guest, Dana Goward. Mr. Goward is president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, a public benefit scientific and educational charity dedicated to protecting GPS and GNSS satellites, signals, and their users. Without further delay, I welcome Mr. Dana Goward to From the Grows Nest. Dana, thanks for joining me here on the show. All right, so I wanted to have you on the show. Obviously, when we look out at the world,
speaker-0 (01:28.174)
It's always a pleasure. Thanks.
speaker-1 (01:33.762)
global security situation, a lot of conflict going on in the Middle East, Russia, Ukraine, throughout the Western Hemisphere as well. And no matter what the topic or the geography, GPS is usually in the conversation as a vulnerability. It's everywhere. We use it all the time in everything we have. Could you talk to us a little bit about the ubiquitous nature of GPS and how reliant we are on it?
as a way of kind of helping us understand our current state in this technical field.
speaker-0 (02:07.406)
Sure, well GPS is a great system as you know. It's satellite based and it was the first of the global navigation satellite systems and as such the United States government encouraged its use and adoption for any number of purposes and it turns out that the most frequent and least visible use of GPS is a timing signal. So just to give everybody a little bit of a background, all the GPS satellites are basically
big clocks, actually there's three clocks on each satellite and they agree on the time and all of the satellites transmit a time signal at exactly the same instant and that signal arrives at your device at slightly different moments and through a miracle of micro technology and algorithms it calculates your location on the earth in three dimensions. engineers have found that this highly precise
and free to access timing signal is exceptionally good for all kinds of things, especially synchronizing things like cell phone towers, financial transactions, the internet, SCADA systems for manufacturing processes. And so over the decades, it has become adopted into virtually every technology, in many instances where it might not even be appropriate, but because it's free and open and the specification is very well known and generally has been very, very reliable.
It has been adopted and so we have these dependencies that in many instances are nearly invisible and because they're invested and installed in pretty much every technology and technologies depend upon each other you have the possibility of cascading failures and because of interdependencies. So really GPS and certainly GNS more generally but certainly GPS has become
as the National Security Council has said, a single point of failure for all kinds of things.
speaker-1 (04:00.714)
It's interesting because whenever you think of navigation, you don't usually think of it, as you mentioned, as a series of clock timing instructions. But you also don't often think, like, if you're doing a financial transaction and rely that GPS is involved in that, and it's the same GPS signal that could be affecting other sectors as well. it's not you don't have unique signals per se, the GPS network, if I am understanding you.
is ubiquitous everywhere and so everyone's tapping into it, which means if it does fail, it affects multiple sectors at once versus just the one particular sector using it at that time.
speaker-0 (04:39.906)
Well, it certainly has the potential to do that because of the interdependencies, right? And so the idea is that not everything needs GPS, but because it's so easily available without a fee and because the price of GPS receivers has come down so low, it's much less expensive to use a GPS receiver as a clock, if you will, than to go out and get yourself your own atomic clock for hundreds of thousands of dollars as a prepcedent extreme example. And of course,
Folks do use atomic clocks, and there are some backups in some places. But you can imagine that with such a low barrier to entry, a GPS chip now is $5 or $6 if you incorporate it into your cell phone. The tendency, just because of the economics, is to use GPS timing and signals whenever and wherever you can. It's the force of money.
speaker-1 (05:33.324)
What is the difference then between GPS and GNSS? you mentioned a lot about GPS kind of being the go-to. But is GNSS, is that an overarching terminology that includes GPS, or do they have different capabilities?
speaker-0 (05:51.278)
So GPS is a global navigation satellite system. It was the first. And because it was first to market, if you will, and had quite the start on all the other systems, it is the most widely used and adopted by far. So after GPS, the Soviets paid us quite the compliment, imitation being the most sincerest form, right? And they built GLONASS, their global navigation satellite system. After them, the European Union came along.
with Galileo, also a global navigation satellite system. And most recently, the Chinese have completed Beidou, which is the newest, most modern, and most capable of all of the global navigation satellite systems. And in fact, there is some concern in the sectors that think about these things and folks that know that the newer Beidou system has vastly outpaced GPS.
speaker-1 (06:45.642)
Now, you mentioned basically the four major global powers, Europe as a collective, Eastern Europe, Russia, and then China and the US. We've talked a lot on the show about the Russia-Ukraine war, and obviously I want to talk a little bit about what you're seeing there from a GPS jamming standpoint, because Russia's constant, that's one of their go-to disruption tactics, just globally. So they're heavily involved in it. We obviously are
currently in a conflict with Iran in the Middle East. So I want to ask about other countries' military capabilities, especially in this case, Iran. Are they using either the Russian or Chinese GPS satellites for targeting, or do they have their own? And how does it compare to the other constellations from the global powers in terms of how it's used and what it's capable of?
speaker-0 (07:35.992)
So all of the global navigation satellite systems, I won't say are completely interchangeable. They are on slightly different frequencies, but they're in the same frequency band. And they're designed to cooperate with each other, not to interfere, and to make it fairly easy for users to receive and use all of them at the same time. And many receivers do that. Now, whether a nation decides to exclude one of those for its national security purposes and military, that
could well be. Don't have a lot of information on that. I can tell you that we have information that Iran has a terrestrial navigation timing system that it uses as a backup for satellite navigation in those cases when GPS and the other GNSS are not available because of jamming and spoofing. So it's really difficult to say. And I'm sure if I knew, it would wander into the realm of classified material and we wouldn't be able to talk about it.
speaker-1 (08:32.343)
So what are we seeing in terms of the current global security environment, Russia-Korea war, other conflicts, in terms of the frequency with which GPS jamming is taking place? And are there any new trends that are keeping experts like you up at night? Because like any technical field,
just like electromagnetic warfare, it's a cat and mouse game. So whatever you do on one end, you're going to get a countermeasure and attempt to defeat on the other side. what are you seeing around the world as trends that make you keep you up at night?
speaker-0 (09:08.664)
Well, that's a really good question. And you're exactly right. And experts in the field are of two minds as to whether or not GPS interference is cyber warfare or electromagnetic warfare or both or some hybrid of the two. you're right. And that is exactly what we're seeing, as you would expect in both of those realms, is something is developed and then it's countered and back and forth. So in Ukraine, for example, there are cities that are covered.
with spider webs of fiber optic filaments because they have gone from using satellite navigation to sending out drones that are controlled physically, if you will, over a fiber optic cable. And the drones just explode at the end and the cable is left draping over the city. You may have seen some of these images on the internet. That said...
GPS is essential to darn near everything. It's certainly used and incorporated into legacy weapons. so, pretty much every conflict zone around the world, you will see interference with GPS and probably other global navigation satellite systems. It's actually easier to interfere with all of them at the same time than it is to interfere with just one because the frequencies are so tightly packed against each other.
speaker-1 (10:28.384)
One of the challenges that we've talked about here is that in today's modern age, the reliance on electromagnetic spectrum, electromagnetic energy, and all the different things that we can do with it, has made even civilians around the world just as close to the front lines oftentimes as our war fighters in traditional conventional warfare. While we're protected from distance for some things, distance doesn't matter when you
when it comes to electromagnetic energy and signals and things of that nature and GPS and so forth. So how has the threat of GPS jamming, spoofing, I want to talk a little bit about the spoofing and what's different with that and what people can do with spoofing as well. how does that, the existential threat of GPS jamming, spoofing, to private citizens as well as warfare? Because we're not just talking about what's happening in the Middle East. It could happen here, even though we're so far removed.
speaker-0 (11:26.968)
No, you're absolutely right. And it's almost a difficult subject because there's such a vast range. I was going to say spectrum, but that would be. But there's just a vast range of possible ways and actors that could interfere. So on the one hand, we have accidental interference all the time. And we've seen that in the United States significantly. It's disrupted traffic at Dallas, Fort Worth, and at Denver. And fortunately, it wasn't too severe.
Apparently, accidental interference also here in the US.
speaker-1 (11:59.854)
causes that accidental interference? that because earlier you mentioned that the GPS systems generally are developed to work with each other or not interfere with each other. So what causes that interference at the local level here?
speaker-0 (12:14.85)
Well, so it can be just about anything. The challenge is that these signals from space are so very, very, very weak, necessarily for several reasons. But they're so very weak that any radio noise on or near their frequency will tend to disrupt a receiver and prevent it from operating properly. So in the instance of Denver, we know that it was an accidental transmission from a military site. Just somebody messed up and pushed the wrong button. In Dallas, Fort Worth,
We don't know. We're still trying to figure out, I think it's now five years later, where the source was and what the source was of that interference. So the European Union actually conducted a survey several years ago to see if they could identify signals that would interfere with GNSS, Galileo specifically, but all of them as a general rule. They found almost 500,000 different signals in their survey.
that could interfere with the recession. Only about 10 % of those they deemed were intentional. Somebody trying to evade a toll or something like that. All the rest were accidental. So while the accidental ones tend to be fairly low level and localized, it's still very possible it's just the nature of the beast.
speaker-1 (13:30.702)
And it seems like there's not much of a line or a gap between intentional and accidental. mean, it's very easy to make your action look accidental just by being near the frequency doing something that you know would interfere and then walking away. I'm like, oops, sorry, we didn't mean to do that. But I can imagine it's easy to mask the intention.
speaker-0 (13:53.152)
if it ever came to that because we really don't have an interference detection network to be able to identify where the interference is coming from and we don't have a process to go and terminate the interference if and when it's detected. we were kind of falling down on several counts there.
speaker-1 (14:08.802)
That seems like something that has been proposed in the past or we haven't gotten there. Is that a pretty common mitigation? Do other people have that? Other countries have that? Or why don't we have that? What's holding that solution up?
speaker-0 (14:22.222)
And I think the general overall answer to that is leadership. It's just not something that we have focused on and devoted a modicum of resources to. We know that it's possible to leverage the cellular telephone network to do these kinds of detections. It's possible to use the internet to network things together and to pinpoint things and to alert authorities. But if the authorities were alerted, then we would need the resources to go and actually respond.
And we don't even have the legal structure to do that. So for example, your local police department's not. Even if they're informed that somebody is illegally interfering with GPS, they don't have the authority to go and investigate and intervene because it's a federal issue. Only the FCC enforcement authority is allowed to do that. So I mean, it's a whole range of things that we need to do in order to be more effective here.
speaker-1 (15:18.146)
think the thing that scares me a lot about this discussion about how easy it is to interfere anywhere in the world is it can happen so easily without any of us knowing, and it only has to work one time. And particularly when you're talking about domestic activities, like for example, maybe interfering with GPS at an airport. It only takes one time for the fear and the uncertainty to spread. And so you're...
speaker-0 (15:30.264)
That's true.
speaker-1 (15:46.53)
you have to be almost have 100 % rate of success in terms of defeating that in order to continue on normal operations, but it just takes one time. Whereas even in conflict and battle, it's constantly happening. You're constantly adapting, you're changing tactics and so forth. In some ways you have a little bit more wiggle room in the fight to adapt than you do in the commercial sector.
speaker-0 (16:12.782)
And you're expecting
speaker-1 (16:14.05)
What is that perspective, what that mentality in terms of dealing with this threat between the commercial and the military?
speaker-0 (16:20.396)
Well, you make an excellent point because we have divided positioning, navigation, and timing, which is really the service that's provided by GPS. And that's what we really care about. mean, GPS is great, but what we care about is getting the positioning, navigation, and timing services that we need to support everything. But the policy for that is very starkly divided in the United States between the Department of Defense for their purposes and then civil as being led by the Department of Transportation. But Department of Transportation has never really been
authorized to proceed with any kind of mitigation effort that would provide an alternative system for GPS. Now, lots of alternative policies, procedures, and tactics, techniques in the Department of Defense. We don't have that in the civil world, right? So there is a growing body of belief that the real mitigation is to have an alternative system, GPS, that folks can automatically fall back on.
or use in conjunction with GPS and will function independently from it, if and when it's not available. And the idea there is, one, it will make everybody safer because if the sun acts up, for example, and GPS signals aren't available, then folks will have an alternative or if it's not there for any reason. And two, it will actually make GPS safer because it will demotivate the bad actors from interfering with it. Why would they do that if
users are not going to be affected because they have an alternative system. The Department of Transportation has found and other nations have implemented a system where they do use satellite navigation, but they also have a terrestrial broadcast navigation system available that can be co-used. And they have a timing system over fiber that spans the entire country. Actually, China is the leader in this. They've got a
fiber network of 20,000 kilometers with 294 timing stations to synchronize their terrestrial broadcast eLauran system that also extends about 1,000 miles offshore with their satellites in space. And so everybody's getting the signals in several ways pretty much all the time. And because they're so vastly different sources, it's very unlikely that something that would interfere with one could interfere with the others.
speaker-0 (18:40.302)
pretty rock solid. the British, the French are going that way with the space terrestrial broadcast and fiber. The South Korea has already done that. United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have systems. Russia has a terrestrial broadcast system to back up GPS. And we believe Iran does as well, not to back up GPS, but back up satellite navigation generally. Because all of the sat nav signals have
pretty much identical vulnerabilities. They're all great, but, you know, again, they're also vulnerable, so they're worth protecting.
speaker-1 (19:17.772)
Now, when we were talking last week and actually, you your webinar as well that you provide to the AOC, I guess, back in January, we were talking a little bit about some of the real world incidents of spoofing and some of the dangers and some of the sophisticated spoofing techniques that you're starting to see used by any actor, not just adversaries of the US, but just bad actors in general. to help our listeners really kind of get a...
of a handle on what this means when we're talking GPS jamming, spoofing, and so forth. Can you share some of the real world incidents that you highlighted that kind of represent the challenge that we face on a day-to-day basis?
speaker-0 (19:56.11)
Sure. So on the one hand, first jamming is denial, right? It's just excess noise preventing reception. The spoofing is essentially hacking, right? So you transmit a false GPS-like signals or a set of signals that causes the receiver to believe that they're actually receiving the satellites into that it's someplace where it's not. Now, while this started out relatively difficult back when the system was first in space,
Over the years, advances in microchip technology have resulted in folks being able to buy a software-defined transmitter for several hundred dollars. And a relatively proficient hacker can, on their own, cause a GPS or other satellite navigation receiver to think that it's someplace where it's not. So, on the one end, it's a great tactical advantage for some folks. A good example of that is the celebrity chef Guy Fieri.
having his brand of whiskey hijacked. lost a million dollars of whiskey in a truck. The truck was spoofed off of its route to a location where the hijackers wanted to take the cargo and they did. Relatively easy peasy.
speaker-1 (21:09.87)
It's just fascinating to me that you can hack into a system and basically spoof it to make the map and the driver think that they're somewhere that they're not. And yet it's still telling you to turn right on the street or turn left on that. It's just not quite right. And a lot of these drivers, they don't know where they're going. They're just given instructions at the point of origin to go there. So they're not even paying attention. And next thing you know, you're a mile, not even far off, maybe just a mile or something off base.
speaker-0 (21:39.288)
Doesn't take much.
speaker-1 (21:40.187)
The threats waiting for you. It's insane to think how easy that is and how frequent it could be.
speaker-0 (21:45.548)
Yeah, and that's on the local kind of tactical small level. On a strategic level, we are virtually certain that China's brand new satellite navigation system has the ability to transmit GPS signals, or GPS-like signals. So conceivably, they have the ability to make everybody in the United States think that there is someplace where they're not. Now, would they do that? Probably not, short of an out-and-out war. Would they use that as a threat to gain concessions?
perhaps not even announced threat, but just something quietly communicated, that may well be the case. And because we have no complementary and backup system for GPS, that would not be immediately apparent to folks in the United States. And we really have no counter to that other than threat, I suppose, of an all-out shooting war. It's a significant threat and vulnerability that we have. We actually saw
Just before the war in Ukraine began, we saw Russia massing their troops along the border with Ukraine. It was in November of 2021. everyone in the West was getting concerned. And Russia shot down one of their old and defunct satellites. Everybody remembers that. Most people remember that anyway, because it even threatened the International Space Station, which held some Russian cosmonauts.
What a lot of folks don't know or remember is that the next day Russian state media said, and if NATO gets in the way of our efforts in Ukraine, we'll shoot down all 32 GPS satellites and blind NATO. Now, I'm not saying that two are related, but surely thereafter that, the United States decided to not send certain types of aid to Ukraine because they didn't want to provoke a Russian invasion.
So we certainly saw the first attempt at GPS blackmail back in 2021. And it's hard to say whether or not that will be done again or be effective or how that might proceed. But it remains a vulnerability for us, a much less a vulnerability for Russia and China and those nations that have taken action to have a complementary backup system sat nav.
speaker-1 (24:06.422)
Well, and I can imagine it's also an advantage to them as well, just being the home team, because if GPS, you mentioned Iran having a terrestrial system, whether that's the backup or whatever, the familiarity of the environment around you also can help mitigate some of the concerns in this area.
speaker-0 (24:27.062)
Absolutely.
speaker-1 (24:29.134)
So when we talk about this, we mentioned Russia, Ukraine. When the current war started, they've been doing this for 15 years up there, over there, since Crimea. But one of the challenges, and we still see it today, is commercial airliners getting GPS jammed, particularly in the North Sea, in the Baltic and Nordic regions, and is Russian jamming. Obviously, you have a lot of ships in the Gulf constantly under threat.
And then you have just, you know, pirate activities, non-state actors, cartels and things of that nature. They're using it as well. It feels sometimes like the fact that we have functioning systems that are growing and producing good is almost a house of cards in some way, because there's an awful lot that could go wrong very quickly. Talk about some of the consequences for freedom of navigation, aviation, and just
life in general, if we don't get a handle or keep pace with this threat.
speaker-0 (25:36.056)
Sure. Well, we have seen aircraft be shot down because the GPS has been interfered with and they were not able to properly identify aircraft. So people have died. We've seen ships collide, fires, them running aground. We have seen a noteworthy number of incidents that have been attributed to interference with GPS and GNSS.
The general consensus is this is going to continue for the indefinite future. Well, why is that? Well, it's very easy to do, very inexpensive. It hits the West exactly where the West is most vulnerable in technology, right? And there are very few consequences to doing this kind of thing, right? Russia claims that a lot of its interference is because it wants to protect Moscow against drones, right? Well,
The drones aren't going to be coming all the way from Great Britain, but sometimes we see interference pretty much almost all the way over into the English Channel. So yeah, there are very few consequences.
speaker-1 (26:41.582)
I know that was it last year already the operation spider web, you know, now I'm sure GPS played a role in some of this, but this was rushing cargo trucks, unknowingly carrying Ukrainian drones and with their, with the spoofing and communications going through the wife, Russian wifi to, to basis just outside of Moscow. So you can reach is it's a great example. We were talking earlier, you can reach what geographically might seem like a safe area.
very easily without even knowing what the existential threat closing in around you.
speaker-0 (27:16.622)
know, EW and CROWS have been important all along, getting to be even more more important and critical as we continue to rely more and more on electronics and technology. So you're absolutely right. So in my mind, the only real solution, the only real way that this kind of interference with GPS and other sat-nav is going to end is when
Pretty much every nation has their own sovereign ability to get positioning, navigation, and timing. And not just from space because signals from space, even the powerful ones, are relatively weak and they're out there and can be interfered with. So, as I mentioned, the Department of Transportation found that a good core P &T architecture involves signals from space, terrestrial fiber,
and terrestrial broadcast. And when you combine the three, nothing's going to be a silver bullet. Nothing's going to ever fix everything. But it will help manage the system, manage the problem, and provide enough resilience so that bad actors would probably go look someplace else rather than trying to interfere with your PNT.
speaker-1 (28:33.08)
So when we talk about spectrum allocation frequencies, who's where, we're always looking at, and we're now talking 6G. And even though we haven't really quite figured out 5G, feel like 6G is going to be the answer. But as we move up the spectrum, we're getting into millimeter wave, things that are very high frequency, but they have a very short distance in terms of the fidelity of their signal. And so the challenge is, you just need nodes everywhere. And then all of a sudden, you can almost create a.
a network on millimeter wave if people building things became their own nodes in that network and you could build it that way. Can you create a terrestrial GPS or navigation network in the millimeter wave if you have enough nodes to kind of create that as you go higher in the frequency? Because a lot of the signals that we get from space, we're at the low end and they're very low power.
What does GPS and navigation look like in the future as we move up in frequency?
speaker-0 (29:33.794)
So it is possible right now to do navigation and timing systems leveraging the cell phone network, right? The challenge with any technology is that nothing's perfect and with every advantage comes a corresponding disadvantage. So for example, if you were going to leverage the cell phone network, that wouldn't do much for you in terms of maritime transportation, I'm sure.
or international air traffic, right? And actually, would probably be kind of difficult to incorporate into international or even aviation, right? But all these kinds of things are possible. So, it's really a matter for national security and technology analysts to decide what does the nation need in terms of coverage and accuracy where it needs it. And then to figure out how we get that core
architecture to protect national security and architecture which other folks that have more demanding requirements can plug into and perhaps leverage. All kinds of technology is available, it's mature, it's ready to go as a commercial service or purchase off the shelf. But because GPS is free and ubiquitous and within the United States, it's been pretty reliable for the most part.
There's been no economic incentive. There's been no political incentive to address these vulnerabilities. And of course, our big concern is that they go unaddressed until there's been a complete disaster.
speaker-1 (31:10.614)
And that seems to be our mantra whenever we're talking to stakeholders in government and Congress that might not really fully understand EW. Our history is that we can adapt to anything, but oftentimes it's because we're waiting until it's too late. And that next loss of life, unfortunately, sometimes what triggers our solution. And it's a solution that we could have implemented earlier. before we get, I want to talk to you a little bit about specific recommendations. Because you've been in this field your entire
career and you have some ideas about what we need to do. But I also know that you brought with you some visuals. So we're going to try something here. For our listeners, we're going to try to describe what you're showing. the video will also be up on YouTube. So if you want to see it in actuality, just go to our YouTube channel. But you had a couple of visuals about kind of the Middle East challenge in GPS jamming.
And if you can bring that up and we're gonna try to describe it for our listeners because it's very interesting about how you're tracking kind of the threat over in that region. And I'm gonna ask you to describe it because I am colorblind and so I am absolutely no use in trying to describe what we're seeing. So this is an education for me as well. And if I can understand it, then I know our listeners can.
speaker-0 (32:36.542)
Okay, well the first one we have is a picture of an image from GPSjam.org. this website uses transmissions from aviation safety systems, from commercial airliners, to detect whether or not there's been interference with GPS in the area. So we're looking at the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, specifically the Straits of Hormuz, and we can see
green hexagons where commercial aircraft have flown and not detected interference, and then yellow and red hexagons that span across the UAE and Oman and out into the ocean where they have detected interference. Now, there is a lot of the map that does not have any hexagons on it because commercial landowners are avoiding the area altogether.
The next one we'll see is a similar picture that is provided by a
speaker-1 (33:43.406)
Before you switch off of that slide, what I'm looking at in terms of the, I'm going to call it very light green, but I think that that might be yellow for you. That shows incidents of interference you said, right? That large. Okay, so is there an area where there was no interference detected even though there was?
And I can't tell like you mentioned three different colors. I can't tell exactly. And is there a reason why a certain area did not experience any any spoofing? Because it seems like the whole area is enveloped by the lighter color.
speaker-0 (34:24.246)
Right, so the lightest color indicates that the aircraft were there but did not detect anything. The darker colors to the lower right a bit and stretching out into the water indicate that they did detect interference. And again, it all depends upon how the transmitters are oriented, right. So it looks from this, and I'm definitely not expert, that
The transmissions are probably coming from Iran and they're pointed toward the Straits of Hormuz, which is the choke point for maritime traffic. And we do know from press reports that maritime traffic, because of the kinetic and the electronic attacks in the area, is pretty much stopped. And we see oil prices going up around the world and gas prices here in the United States and so forth. the next one, if you can see the switch, is pretty much a similar depiction, although it's better for
Those are looking in black and white because this is by Stanford University. And you can kind of see the arc. It's a little more stark. And you can see the difference there. But again, these are all aircraft. They're experiencing the interference. And the aircraft pick it up better because this is all line of sight now. If we had a system that showed what the ships are experiencing, probably would see that down more on, well, you would obviously see that down more on the water.
And we need to get access to the AIS data, which is the ship's equivalent of what the aircraft had to detect it.
speaker-1 (35:58.862)
Looking at this, know, it's interesting to see how, you know, a hundred years ago, you'd have to have a, for a naval blockade to happen, you would need a number of, obviously a great quantity of ships and patrolling and stuff. But with, in this modern age, you could form a virtual blockade basically, just with jamming. And you can just see how they're choking off the Strait of Hormuz right there in terms of anything going through that area is going to get jammed. Likely, face that threat.
speaker-0 (36:24.43)
pretty much.
absolutely. And more insidiously, of course, is the spoofing. So we do know that most of what folks have been seeing is jamming. But this is from our supporter, Aspirant Communications. And this shows that there's been a reasonable amount of spoofing going on as well. So you see the straits of Hormuz there up in the upper right. And that they have identified at least seven
active GPS buffers and perhaps 10 in the area. Again, probably a minority of the interference devices being used, but they're being used relatively effectively and they're causing, again, detection by aircraft. And undoubtedly, a lot more vessels are being impacted. And so you can imagine if you're going through the Strait of Hormuz and there's
kinetic activity going on and you're not sure where you are in terms of navigation and relatively confined area, you're probably just going to drop anchor and hunker down. No wonder at all why the traffic is virtually stopped.
speaker-1 (37:36.334)
Those are very interesting. like I said, we'll have the video up on YouTube and we'll make it available to our listeners to take a look at that as well. So just in our last few minutes remaining, we talk a lot about the problem, but I want to give our listeners some idea of what recommendations you have from your expertise and your career. What are some of the things that we need to do or we should be doing as the US and also in relation to our coalition partners and allies around the world, some steps to mitigate this in the future.
speaker-0 (38:04.59)
Well, the biggest thing, we think, is that we need to have the governance process and leadership for civilian PNT energized. So as I mentioned, the Department of Transportation is not only in charge, but they have not been empowered. They've been disempowered, actually, as a matter of practicality over the last few decades. And there's really no plan to protect America from this kind of activity, well, certainly from a national security or an economic perspective. Transportation Department is one of many stakeholders.
certainly see interference in transportation before you see it in other infrastructure sectors. mean, Uber and Lyft are going to be out of business right away, aren't they? Yeah. If a GPS goes away.
speaker-1 (38:46.454)
Yeah, even if we can't maintain a level of trust of the systems, there's a great deal of trust using these systems to begin with. If people feel unsafe, again, fear spreads a lot faster than comfort.
speaker-0 (38:59.352)
That's true. And are you going to get in a Waymo taxi and be confident it's going to take you where you want to go and need to go, right? And other kinds of autonomy. Certainly, if we've seen drones go astray and bad things happen overseas, certainly can happen here with all kinds of uncrewed vehicles. So leadership and our governance needs to be energized and consolidated. It's one of these things where if everybody's in charge, nobody's in charge.
And once we have someone who can be the trail boss, not necessarily the czar, but the trail boss and compel folks to do their part, we need to get a minimal core national PNT resilient architecture. Again, as recommended, use signals for space, use terrestrial broadcast, and use fiber and combine them all together. It's not.
that expensive and the technologies are readily available as services and products. So it's not a difficult lift other than deciding who's in charge and empowering them with a little bit of money and authority to make this happen. We can't wait for something bad to happen. We did that with 9-11. We had 142 airliners hijacked before 9-11, but we really didn't address airline security. And then the world changed horribly for the better.
This has the potential to be much worse than 9-11. We don't want be around the day after GPS gets turned off. It's a near existential threat for America.
speaker-1 (40:36.194)
Well, Dana, on that note, on that note, I really greatly appreciate you taking time to talk about this topic. It's something that we all use every single day, and we're not aware of how it works and how it can all of a sudden not work if we don't pay attention to the threat. So really appreciate you giving us your insight into this field and all the work that you're doing with your foundation.
Last word, anything about the foundation that you want our listeners to know or reach out to if they have any questions.
speaker-0 (41:06.702)
Absolutely. So we are available on the web at rntfnd.org. As you mentioned, we are a scientific and educational charity organized for public benefit. And so we have no employees. We have a couple contract folks that do our back office stuff on a part-time basis. But we exist on our memberships. So we encourage anyone who's interested in this topic and wants to help us.
advocate for policies and systems to protect GPS satellite signals and users to come to our website, sign up at the appropriate membership level, and also join in helping us spread the word. We have a lot of information on the site, and we have resources that can help people get out there and tell their elected representatives and tell people in business about the issue and what needs to be done.
speaker-1 (41:58.604)
Well, Dana, thank you so much for joining me here on From the Crows Nest. As always, great to talk with you and look forward to having you back again in the future.
speaker-0 (42:05.292)
Always a pleasure. Thanks much.
speaker-1 (42:07.438)
That will conclude this episode of From the Crow's Nest. I'd like to thank my guest, Dana Gower, for joining me. As always, please take a moment to review, share, and subscribe to this podcast. We always enjoy hearing from our listeners, so please take a moment to let us know how we're doing. That's it for today. Thanks for listening.
speaker-0 (42:38.222)
you