SA A Beginning, Not the End.(Brief Article)

By the time an interagency hit squad filed into the James S. Brady Briefing Room on May 1 to deliver the coup de grace to selective availability (SA), the White House affair had become one of the more anticlimactic pronunciamientos in GPS's short history. This was, after all, not the Second Coming of full accuracy for civil users. That occurred during the Persian Gulf War. Nor was it even the third incarnation of unadulterated GPS, which tantalized us briefly during the Haiti police action.

No, after 10 years of beating itself against the barricades of national security, advocates for undithering GPS had passed beyond exhaustion into resignation -- a condition eased only by the grim satisfaction that real-time differential GPS (DGPS) techniques had long delivered superior results anyway.

Still, turning off SA was a consummation devoutly to be desired. …