Going Mainstream - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 145

Firefighters and crews at Ground Zero began the search, recovery, and
cleanup effort by dividing the sixteen-acre site into seventy-ive-foot-square
grids but soon realized that manually mapping the myriad fragments of human
remains and other evidence would take too long and yield too many errors. 177
They switched to a system that used handheld computers and bar-coded tags,
cataloguing each item as it was discovered with a description, precise time
stamp, and exact location via gps. 178 Original estimates of the cost of hauling
1.8 million tons of wreckage from Ground Zero to Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten
Island ran as high as $7 billion. 179 By attaching gps trackers to about two hun-
dred dump trucks and five boats, officials optimized traffic routes, prevented
theft, and increased efficiency by 150 percent—raising loads per vehicle from
four per day to ten, cutting the number of trucks, and lowering the final haul-
ing cost to about $750 million. 180
Troops in Afghanistan found a novel use for gps that Col. John Mulholland,
commander of the 5th Special Forces Group, said helped connect their mis-
sion there to the events back home. A fellow officer with family ties to New
York procured a strip of metal from one of the towers. The troops cut it into
small pieces and buried one in each area where they operated, using gps to
log an exact location, which commanders tracked on a map. 181
Within weeks of the attacks Americans learned that the Federal Bureau of
Investigation was focused on the terrorists' use of handheld gps devices. That
could explain how inexperienced pilots navigated jumbo jets to targets many
miles off assigned routes, a task one federal official characterized as more chal-
lenging than flying the planes. 182 In November 2001 the captain of a major U.S.
carrier reported testing whether he could pick up satellite signals on a hand-
held device in his cockpit, but the heated windshield and windows blocked
them. 183 Others pointed out that the clear skies on September 11 made the
Twin Towers visible for miles and the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11
had only to follow the Hudson River to New York City. 184 It is unclear whether
the terrorists possessed the expertise to reprogram the aircraft navigation sys-
tems based on coordinates stored in handheld units. The owner of an aviation
supply business who sold a gps handset to one of the hijackers speculated in
a television interview that the terrorists could have visited the buildings and
set the devices in advance to ensure their accuracy. 185 Numerous print and
broadcast reports, including ones on abc, nbc, and cnn, appeared in May
2002, citing unnamed federal sources suggesting that Mohammed Atta, who
piloted Flight 11 into the North Tower, cased the World Trade Center site a day