AP’s Ted Bridis writes of a particularly boneheaded anti-terror idea from George III’s Privy Council: shutting off GPS to keep the bad guys from using it:
President Bush has ordered plans for temporarily disabling the U.S. network of global positioning satellites during a national crisis to prevent terrorists from using the navigational technology, the White House said Wednesday.
Over on Dave Farber’s mailing list, Ross Stapleton-Grey does a fine number on the idea’s shortcomings. Most notably, GPS has become so important to so much of our infastructure that it’s hard to imagine a situation in which turning it off does more good than harm. Indeed, turning off GPS is the kind of thing they would love to do to us, not vice versa.