World Superpowers Are in a Space Race to Build the Best GPS

As reported by Bloomberg Technology: All around the world, people use GPS to get driving directions in their cars, find nearby restaurants on their smartphones and geotag tweets sent from their tablets. The technology, created and operated by the U.S. Department of Defense, has become ubiquitous and indispensable.

And that may be making other governments uneasy, especially in light of the National Security Administration's snooping scandal. China, Russia, Japan, India and the European Union are each working on their own satellite systems to identify the locations of mobile devices on the ground.

So to stay ahead, the U.S. government is turning to the private sector. This year, the U.S. Air Force Research Lab plans to kick $15 million into technology startups developing tools for satellite-based navigation, positioning and timing. Grant applications are due by Jan. 22, and the Air Force won't take an equity stake in the companies it gives money to, said Joel Sercel, the founder and president of ICS Associates, a tech consulting firm that's advising the Air Force on the program.

"The Air Force wants to reach the best people in Silicon Valley," Sercel said in an interview. "It only asks to license the intellectual property that gets created during the contract for government use, with no dilution of ownership."

Alok Das, the Air Force Research Lab's chief innovation officer, wrote in an e-mail that the U.S. wants "to fundamentally improve its ability to navigate around the world."

Not all countries are looking to supplant America's efforts. For example, government projects in India and Japan are each building out satellite systems that can precisely cover nearby regions, primarily for military and government research — not to replace the Global Positioning System as a service embedded in millions of consumer electronics. The European Commission's Galileo project serves, in part, as a failsafe in case GPS and similar services become unavailable, according to the European Space Agency, which works jointly with the commission.

China has larger ambitions. The country began working on its Beidou Navigation Satellite System in 2000 and plans to achieve global coverage by 2020. Beyond preventing the U.S. from being able to easily track citizens' location information, the system could end up being more accurate. The version of GPS that the U.S. makes publicly available is less precise than the one its government uses. China is offering Beidou for free to encourage neighboring Asian countries to adopt it, according to the South China Morning Post.

For now, Russia is further along in creating a rival to GPS. In 2011, Apple began supporting the Russian Glonass system in the iPhone, and other device makers have followed suit. But a new U.S. law could serve as a major setback for Russia. A provision within the defense budget that was passed last month effectively bars Russia from building monitor stations in the U.S. designed to improve Glonass, the New York Times reported.

The U.S., it turns out, is concerned about spying.

Why The World Needs OpenStreetMap

As reported by the Guardian: Every time I tell someone about OpenStreetMap, they inevitably ask "Why not use Google Maps?" From a practical standpoint, it's a reasonable question, but ultimately this is not just a matter of practicality, but of what kind of society we want to live in. I discussed this topic in a 2008 talk on OpenStreetMap I gave at the first MappingDC meeting. Here are many of same concepts, but expanded.

In the 1800s, people were struggling with time, not how much of it they had, but what time it was. Clocks existed, but every town had its own time, "local time", which was synchronized by town clocks or, more often than not, church bells. Railway time, then eventually Greenwich mean time, supplanted all local time, and most people today don't think about time as anything but universal. This was accomplished in the US by adoption first of the railroads, and then by universities and large businesses.

Geography is big business
The modern daytime dilemma is geography, and everyone is looking to be the definitive source. Google spends $1bn annually maintaining their maps, and that does not include the $1.5bn Google spent buying the navigation company Waze. Google is far from the only company trying to own everywhere, as Nokia purchased Navteq and TomTom and Tele Atlas try to merge. All of these companies want to become the definitive source of what's on the ground.

That's because what's on the ground has become big business. With GPS' in every car, and a smartphone in every pocket, the market for telling you where you are and where to go has become fierce.

With all these companies, why do we need a project like OpenStreetMap? The answer is simply that as a society, no one company should have a monopoly on place, just as no one company had a monopoly on time in the 1800s. Place is a shared resource, and when you give all that power to a single entity, you are giving them the power not only to tell you about your location, but to shape it. In summary, there are three concerns: who decides what gets shown on the map, who decides where you are and where you should go, and personal privacy.

Decision time

Who decides what gets displayed on a Google Map? The answer is, of course, that Google does. I heard this concern in a meeting with a local government in 2009: they were concerned about using Google Maps on their website because Google makes choices about which businesses to display. The people in the meeting were right to be concerned about this issue, as a government needs to remain impartial; by outsourcing their maps, they would hand the control over to a third party.

It seems inevitable that Google will monetise geographic searches, with either premium results, or priority ordering, if it hasn't done so already (is it a coincidence than when I search for "breakfast" near my home, the first result is "SUBWAY® Restaurants"?).

Of course Google is not the only map provider; it's just one example. The point is that when you use any map provider, you are handing them the controls - letting them determine what features get emphasised, or what features may not be displayed at all.

A road sign warning HGV drivers not to follow Satellite Navigation instructions. Photograph: Christopher Thomond

Location, location

The second concern is about location. Who defines where a neighborhood is, or whether or not you should go? This issue was brought up by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) when a map provider was providing routing (driving/biking/walking instructions) and used what it determined to be "safe" or "dangerous" neighborhoods as part of its algorithm. This raises the question of who determines what makes a neighborhood "safe" or not – or whether safe is merely a code-word for something more sinister.

Right now, Flickr collects neighborhood information based on photographs which it exposes through an API. It uses this information to suggest tags for your photograph. But it would be possible to use neighborhood boundaries in a more subtle way in order to affect anything from traffic patterns to real estate prices, because when a map provider becomes large enough, it becomes the source of "truth".

Lastly, these map providers have an incentive to collect information about you in ways that you may not agree with. Both Google and Apple collect your location information when you use their services. They can use this information to improve their map accuracy, but Google has already announced that is going to use this information to track the correlation between searches and where you go. With more than 500 million Android phones in use, this is an enormous amount of information collected on the individual level about people's habits, whether they're taking a casual stroll, commuting to work, going to their doctor, or maybe attending a protest.

Certainly we can't ignore the societal implication of so much data in the hands of a single entity, no matter how benevolent it claims to be. Companies like Foursquare use gamification to overlay what is essentially a large scale data collection process, and even Google has gotten into the game of gamification with Ingress, a game which overlays an artificial world onto this one and encourages users to collect routing data and photo mapping as part of effort to either fight off, or encourage, an alien invasion.

Finding the solution

Now that we have identified the problems, we can examine how OpenStreetMap solves each of them.

In terms of map content, OpenStreetMap is both neutral and transparent. OpenStreetMap is a wiki-like map that anyone in the world can edit. If a store is missing from the map, it can be added in by a store owner or even a customer. In terms of display (rendering), each person or company who creates a map is free to render it how they like, but the main map on OpenStreetMap.org uses FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) rendering software and a liberally licensed stylesheet which anyone can build on.

In other words, anyone who cares can always create their own maps based on the same data.

Similarly, while the most popular routing programs for OpenStreetMap are FLOSS, even if a company chooses another software stack, a user is always free to use their own routing software; it would be easy to compare routing results based on the same data to find anomalies.

And lastly, with OpenStreetMap data a user is free to download some, or all of the map offline. This means that it's possible to use OpenStreetMap data to navigate without giving your location away to anyone at all.

OpenStreetMap respects communities and respects people. If you're not already contributing to OSM, consider helping out. If you're already a contributor: thank you.

US Senate Calls For Information About GPS Data Use

As reported by The Hill: Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) is pressing Ford over recent statements about the way the auto manufacturer uses drivers' data.

Last week, Ford's executive vice president for global marketing and sales Jim Farley said that GPS units in the vehicles allow Ford to “know everyone who breaks the law" but that the automaker does not share that data.

The claim came on the heels of a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that found some car companies have "unclear" privacy policies that could confuse customers. The report also found that all companies the GAO looked at both collect and share location data.

"This would strongly suggest that Ford does, in fact, share its customers’ location data in some form," Franken wrote in a letter to chief executive Alan Mulally on Monday.

Farley has since retracted his statements but that has not quelled Franken's concerns.

He wrote that companies operating car-based GPS still provide "too little transparency" about the way information about their driving patterns is used. "American drivers deserve better – and Mr. Farley’s latest statements underscore this problem."

“It’s troubling to see confusing and contradictory comments from Ford about something as sensitive as their customers’ location data—just days after the GAO report," he added in a statement.

The GAO surveyed 10 vehicle manufacturers, device companies and app developers for its report.

After the report came out, Franken said that it had encouraged him to reintroduce his location privacy bill from 2012. The Location Privacy Protection Act passed through the Senate Judiciary Committee but never received a floor vote.

Enhanced Differential Loran Maritime Trials in The Netherlands Declared Successful

As reported by Inside GNSS: The Dutch Pilots Corporation and Reelektronika announced today (January 7, 2013) the successful development and test of an Enhanced Differential Loran (eDLoran) backup to GNSS in The Netherlands.  

Trials at sea and in the Rotterdam Europort harbor area met the requirement for absolute accuracies in the five-meter range, according to Durk van Willigen, CEO of Reelektronika, and Wim van Buuren, Loodswezen’s information & communications technology (ICT) and innovation manager and board member.

The cooperating organizations have implemented a complete test system, which includes an eDLoran reference station and the eDLoran receiver for the pilots. This small and lightweight receiver can operate in tandem wirelessly with the standard software of the pilot’s GPS-RTK equipment. Differential eLoran data are available in real-time via the mobile telephone network. No modifications of the existing Loran transmitters was required.

For this joint project, the Dutch Pilots’ Corporation made facilities available on board their pilot station vessel Polaris and for the location of an eDLoran reference station. Reelektronika performed the research on eDLoran, and developed the equipment for the pilots and the low-cost reference station.

The position corrections (Additional Secondary Factors, ASF) database will automatically be expanded and refined by any new trip the pilots make, using GPS-RTK and Loran data they collect during maritime operations.

The effects on eLoran transmissions of any new industrial installations and buildings in the harbor area are thus adaptively incorporated into the database. This nearly continuously upgrading of the eLoran ASF database does not require any special measuring equipment or procedures, according to the organizations.

L.A. County's GPS Ankle Bracelets for Criminals Don't Work Very Well

As reported by the Reporter News: One in every four GPS devices used to track serious criminals released in Los Angeles County has proved to be faulty, according to a Probation Department audit — allowing violent felons to roam undetected for days or, in some cases, weeks.  

The problems included batteries that wouldn't hold a charge and defective electronics that generated excessive false alarms. One felon, county officials said, had to have his GPS monitor replaced 11 times over a year; for five days during the 45-day audit period, his whereabouts were unknown.

“If you have faulty technology, that is a recipe for disaster,” said Reaver Bingham, deputy chief of the department.

The findings come as nearly every California county is adopting some form of electronic monitoring to contend with tens of thousands of state inmates being released to their supervision, a result of the effort to reduce prison overcrowding.

Mandated for use on high-risk sex offenders by the 2006 passage of Jessica’s Law, GPS tracking has been promoted by both lawmakers and state law enforcement officials as a safe and cost-effective alternative to prison or jail. However, a Los Angeles Times investigation this year showed that California corrections officials were aware of widespread, serious problems in their program. Citing an “imminent danger” to the public, the state in 2011 replaced the GPS monitors on half of the paroled sex offenders.

Los Angeles County began depending on electronic monitoring heavily in 2011, putting GPS devices on its highest-risk felons — repeat sex offenders, domestic abusers who had violated restraining orders, and violent gang members.

Typically strapped onto a subject’s ankle, the devices were supposed to collect a location point every minute and send that data to a central computer every 10 minutes. GPS monitors also are designed to alert authorities if wearers tamper with them, try to flee or stray too close to a school or other forbidden area.

By law, Los Angeles County must conduct monthly reviews and yearly evaluations of its program contractor. But, officials said, they did not review Sentinel Offender Services’ work until problems surfaced elsewhere.

In June, Orange County discovered multiple failures in Sentinel’s GPS and home detention systems, prompting the county to cancel its contract. That triggered a Los Angeles County audit.

From Aug. 1 through Sept. 11, Los Angeles County had 23 high-risk sex offenders on GPS monitors, along with 196 felons who had finished their prison terms and been released into the county’s care.

Probation department officials say they do not know how long Sentinel’s devices had been failing, or how many probationers went untracked.

The audit showed that one probationer wore a tracker that Sentinel knew to be faulty for 45 days. Another told investigators that his GPS device had to be replaced four times in the month after he was released from prison. And a Sentinel employee, whose name was redacted from the report, told an auditor that a third felon’s monitor apparently had not worked since the day it was strapped on.

In several cases, probationers were released without GPS devices because the company had run out of working equipment, documents show. In three other instances, Sentinel on its own decided to stop tracking the locations of some offenders — and did not resume monitoring one felon until contacted repeatedly by his probation officer.

Under its contract, Sentinel is required to document each time a device worn by an offender experiences a false alarm or fails to work, as well as record all other interactions with probationers. County investigators checking the system found those records for only three of 139 offenders before July, and no notes on 87 offenders after that date. Those missing files might have alerted county officials earlier to the problems within its GPS program.

In a detailed written response to the audit, sent to the county Nov. 27, Sentinel contended that the majority of the problems were caused by untrained probation officers and felons who had failed to follow directions.

The county employees mistook dead batteries for malfunctioning equipment, the company said; problems also developed when homeless probationers followed “inconsistent” patterns in recharging their trackers, thus shortening the battery life. A probation official noted that a large proportion of those the county tracks by GPS are transients and have uncertain access to electrical outlets.

Sentinel’s chief business development officer, Mark Contestabile, also complained that his firm had “sought direction” from L.A. County on fixing the problems, but had not gotten a response for four months. Even so, he said, the company in late October began holding training sessions for county probation officers, and started replacing all of the GPS devices with newer models.

DoT Disses DoD’s GPS Chops

As reported by GPS World: The departing Deputy Secretary of Transportation, John Porcari, wrote a letter in the closing days of 2013 opposing the U.S. Air Force’s announced plans to begin broadcasting Civil Navigation (CNAV) message-populated L2C and L5 signals as early as April 2014. 

Military personnel are incensed over what they see as Porcari’s impugning, when not ignoring, the Air Force 35-year track record of broadcasting the gold standard of global navigation satellite signals — something in which Transportation has zero experience.

Porcari alludes in his December 27 letter to “non-standard engineering tools” and “non-standard operations” that he believes would come into play for early CNAV broadcast. “These have the potential to inject human error, which may result in unacceptable GPS constellation operation.”

What Porcari means by “non-standard” he does not specify, although he confesses to unease as “the ability to monitor these signals, [without which] the system will not know if the L2C and LS signals are within specification. Given these risks, DOT is concerned that the CNAV messages could provide hazardously misleading information, impacting GPS safety-of-life, protection of property, and economic security applications.” The full text of the Porcari letter is available here.

In addition to questioning Air Force 2 SOPS ability to broadcast an accurate, compliant signal containing CNAV, the letter appears to ignore — or be ignorant of — the 17 official U.S. government/military monitoring sites for GPS distributed around the world, not to mention thousands of other monitoring sites run by government agencies such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and by many universities such as Stanford, Ohio State, Cal Tech, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and many other international institutions around the world. Many of these sites collaborate under the rubric of the International GNSS Service.

Finally, two private corporations monitor and correct all GPS signals both from space and on the ground: John Deere and Trimble Navigation. Both companies run commercial, automated GPS signal monitoring systems that that report any glitch, change, power fluctuation, or anomaly in the navigation message for all GPS signals with an average two-second notification time.

“This letter is so much BS,” fumed one source who wished to remain anonymous, “coming from an agency that is in arrears in its GPS payments to the tune of more than $70 million and has no clue how to represent the global GPS user. GPS is a ubiquitous system, not just a tool for the DOT and the Federal Aviation Administration. GPS needs to implement these signals for all users and as a modernization program that was promised to be in place years ago.”

Porcari is leaving for the private sector.

A Month of Surveillance by GPS Is up to 6,875 Times Cheaper Than Using People

As reported by Business Week: When the U.S. Supreme Court said two years ago that hooking a GPS device onto someone’s car to track his movements for a month is unconstitutional, the FBI acknowledged that it had about 3,000 such devices installed around the country. Presumably, the agency would have to go back to trailing these people in unmarked cars. A paper published by two prominent privacy researchers on Thursday in the Yale Law Journal puts some numbers behind the obvious conclusion that doing so would be nearly impossible.

Kevin Bankston, policy director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, and Ashkan Soltani, an independent researcher, quantified the per-hour costs of following someone around using various techniques. In order to do the work of those 3,000 GPS devices, the FBI would have to devote every single one of its special agents to surveillance 24 hours a day, and then go out and hire an additional 1,215.

The point of this thought exercise is to solve a question that privacy scholars have been mulling since the Supreme Court said in the 2012 United States v. Jones case that GPS surveillance amounted to a violation of the Fourth Amendment. It’s legal for the police to follow a suspect’s movements in public, but at some point automated surveillance fundamentally changes the equation. A previous Supreme Court ruling has established that putting a beeper on someone’s car, which allows two people to do the work of five people, is legal. You’ve crossed the line once you’ve put a GPS tracker on a car. But where, exactly, is that line?

Bankston and Soltani boil the question down to cost. First, they calculate the per-hour cost of various ways you could track someone’s movement for 28 days. Here are their numbers:

• Assigning a single FBI agent to do it on foot: $50/hr
• Giving that guy a car: $105/hr.
• Having five agents form a “surveillance box” around a suspect: $250/hr
• Giving all those guys cars: $275/hr.
• Giving a single agent a car and attaching a beeper to the suspect’s car: $105/hr
• Using a device called a “stingray” that serves as a simulated cell phone tower, tracking a suspect’s phone: $105/hr
• [Somewhere in here is the line. Ready?]
• Hooking a GPS device into the car’s electrical system: $0.36/hr
• Asking the cell-phone carrier to track his movements: between $0.04/hr and $1.19/hr, depending on the network.

They then come up with an equation that would allow for beeper surveillance, but not GPS surveillance (since that’s what the Supreme Court had ruled.) Here’s their rule of thumb: “If the new tracking technique is an order of magnitude less expensive than the previous technique, the technique violates expectations of privacy and runs afoul of the Fourth Amendment.”

In the future, a judge contemplating whether some new surveillance technology required a warrant could consider this cost equation. The only problem is that GPS tracking seems quaint in the post-Snowden world. Not only does the marginal cost of tracking someone approach zero with mass surveillance, the values are essentially undefined once law enforcement is scanning the population at large, rather than setting a target. Any of the National Security Agency’s surveillance techniques exposed over the last six months would clearly raise the red flag, says Bankston. “Basically, the government has to fish with a pole rather than a net,” he says.