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Lu, you wrote:
"In the GPS World article, it was noted that a jammer emitting only milliwatts 
of power could jam GPS over an area of several miles; such a transmitter 
would be almost impossible to locate -- and its low power consumption would 
allow it to run for weeks on ordinary batteries. Aircraft navigation is 
becoming increasingly dependent on GPS; imagine putting one of these in a 
piece of checked luggage on an airliner!!"

Yeah, there are lots of scenarios that one can imagine. How about just walking 
through the neighborhoods of Long Beach (or Shanghai) for a few weeks 
dropping off dozens of these things in scattered locations. Then you throw 
the switch... Or you put them in common electronic devices destined for 
containerized shipping. Then when the English Channel is full of afflicted 
containers... For that matter, GPS tagging is apparently widely used to track 
containers within the shipping yards. Just jamming the land-based facilities 
of a major port would cause an enormous and expensive disruption.

And you wrote:
"For a real-world story about the vulnerability of GPS to even 
inadvertent jamming and the difficulty of identifying the jammer, one 
has to look no further than the story of the jamming of GPS signals in 
Moss Landing Harbor in California."

And yet, there it stands: Moss Landing is the poster-child for GPS jamming 
even after all these years (this incident was eight years ago). If this were 
really a common problem, then we should be able to find some harbor right now 
suffering from accidental GPS jamming. GPS jamming is a real issue, but so 
far it appears to be a very low probability problem. Will that change in the 
next few years? I think so, because there's so much money in it. It's bound 
to attract the attention of criminals of all stripes.

-FER



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