Going Mainstream - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 144

ers. 166 Canadian government agencies also launched awareness campaigns,
and on the eve of the rollover, the Canadian Coast Guard had sixty search-
and-rescue vessels on standby to help stranded boaters. 167 Dar Moja, the only
gps seller in Saudi Arabia, offered free software upgrades to the five thousand
customers in the kingdom it had identified as having older units. 168
Ultimately the rollover caused no serious problems. A spokesman at the U.S.
Air Force y2k Fusion Center at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama termed it
a “non-event” and reported fewer than twenty calls. 169 A Coast Guard spokes-
man reported less than a dozen malfunctions among several thousand receiv-
ers on its boats, aircraft, and vehicles, and all but one of those reset itself. 170
Rockwell Collins received no reports of malfunctions among the two hundred
thousand military units in the field.171 171 One Australian naval patrol boat crew
saw their gps receiver fail. 172 The most trouble occurred in Japan, where con-
sumers were early adopters of electronic products. Thousands of complaints
poured in about blank or frozen car navigation screens, and estimates put the
number of device failures at one hundred thousand. 173 Pioneer Electronics
alone sold 270,000 navigation units between 1992 and 1996, but about a quar-
ter of them were not replaced or upgraded in time. 174 American drivers started
buying automobile navigation systems later, and Ford and General Motors
officials confirmed that there were no problems with the newer equipment. 175
Four months after the gps and y2k rollover worries passed came the official
act that gps manufacturers and users had long awaited—President Clinton
signed an order permanently turning off Selective Availability on May 1,
2000. 176 In announcing the decision he noted that modernization plans
included adding two new civilian signals as replacement satellites were
launched, and he reiterated the commitment to provide gps free of charge. If
the 1996 presidential directive announcing the government's intention to take
these steps acted as a sort of starting gun in the race to commercialize gps,
the fulfillment of signals up to ten times more accurate shifted private devel-
opment into high gear, as shown by the amazing growth of the gps industry
over the first decade of the new millennium.
However, the government did not hand off gps to private industry like a
baton. More than ever, it remained a critical military system, and new security
concerns arose sixteen months later with the September 11, 2001, attacks on
the World Trade Center and Pentagon. gps returned to the battlefield in
Afghanistan and Iraq and on the home front found unexpected uses and famil-
iar questions.