America High Risk for GPS hacking

The West Is Terrifyingly Vulnerable to Chinese Hacking of GPS

• Big risk: America’s Global Positioning System (GPS) is exposed to possible attacks from hostile nations like China every day. The U.S. must update out-of-date technology to prevent disruptions to the GPS that would cripple our economy.
• “Both China and Russia have shown that they can take down Western satellites,” writes Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment.
• “The global cost of GPS interference is too high for world governments to wait for it to fail,” she writes.

The West may be divided on tariffs, but all countries can agree that protecting global navigation satellite systems from interference from China, Russia and Iran is a matter of extreme importance. Disruptions would pose an immense economic and national security threat, costing trillions of dollars daily, dwarfing any market disruptions from tariffs.

Global navigation satellite systems are free services that send positioning, timing and navigation systems to phones, banks and other electric utilities. America has the global positioning system (GPS), Europe has Galileo and China has Bei Dou.

But these systems are vulnerable. They depend on satellites, which can be damaged by electromagnetic storms or military attacks. Even with the satellites intact, hacking incidents proliferate, using inexpensive, easily available hardware.

Both China and Russia have shown that they have the capacity to take down Western satellites. The University of Texas student Zach Clements, meanwhile, has traced GPS manipulation to Iran.

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