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policy

January 26, 2012

Supreme Court Ruling on GPS-Aided Monitoring Leaves Issues Unresolved

istock photo

A U.S. Supreme Court opinion released this week (January 23, 2012) ruled that warrantless GPS-aided monitoring of a suspect violated the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures."

But it will probably not be the court’s last word on the subject and may, in fact, provide Congress and state legislatures with enough incentive to address the subject more fully than they have to date.

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By Inside GNSS
January 19, 2012

GPS – The DoD’s Profit Center

Why Washington continues to talk about deficits while the country is talking about jobs and foreclosures is kind of a mystery, but let’s play along.

Following the failure of Congress’s would-be budget-cutting committee that wasn’t so super, the Department of Defense is facing about $500 billion in mandatory cuts over the next 10 years.

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By Dee Ann Divis
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New Austerity Squeezes GPS as DoD Tightens Its Belt

Embracing the need for debt-driven discipline, the White House has revised its strategy for the nation’s defense, taking a more fiscally constrained approach that reduces the number of troops and future spending on defense systems.

The new plan, formally announced January 5, was already being put into effect last summer. “The strategic guid­ance was the compass by which we steered the budget review leading to the president’s budget for fiscal year ‘13 and the years thereafter,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter told reporters.

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By Dee Ann Divis
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December 1, 2011

Galileo Regains Momentum with Financial, Management Framework Proposals

Paul Weissenberg of the European Commission’s Enterprise and Industry directorate

After years of arduous political navigation filled with delays and disappointments, Europe’s GNSS programs appear to have found firmer ground as it heads into a crucial deployment phase.

Today (November 30, 2011), the European Commission (EC) proposed a €7 billion (US$9.41 billion) allocation for Galileo and EGNOS in the European Union’s next budget cycle (2014–2020) and delegation of the programs “exploitation” to the European GNSS Agency (GSA) and the systems’ deployment, to the European Space Agency (ESA).

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By Inside GNSS
November 30, 2011

LightSquared Postpones International Expansion Effort

A GPS app on a Japanese smartphone. The GPS Council there told the FCC that any signal degradation could jeopardize the Global Positioning System’s standing as a global standard.

LightSquared has dropped, for now, efforts to expand its wireless broadband plans to markets in other countries, Inside GNSS has learned.

The Virginia firm was working this summer on proposals to the International Telecommunication Union, including one aimed at addressing compatibility issues between ground stations or “complementary ground components” of mobile satellite services and other frequency-using services.

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By Inside GNSS
November 25, 2011

FCC Supplies FOIA Data Dump for LightSquared/GPS Interference Issue

[Updated November 25 2011] For those wondering what to do on Black Friday …

In another holiday special, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced creation of a public web portal for documents related to the LightSquared/GPS interference issue that will , in the agency’s words, “provide ready access to publicly available documents and other responsive documents not otherwise exempt from release under the FOIA [ Freedom of Information Act].”

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By Inside GNSS
November 16, 2011

Oh No! Not LightSquared Again!

Please.

Please. Please. Please. 

Can we please talk about something besides LightSquared?

Not yet? You mean, they are still here?

And we have so many other GNSS-related topics that deserve comment: 

Some peculiar cuts in civil GPS funds and GPS III budgets being proposed by congressional committees. 

A re-examination — aka analysis of alternatives — of GPS and PNT options in general. Space weather and an impending solar max. Warrantless GPS-aided tracking before the Supreme Court.

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By Inside GNSS

LightSquared: Who Pays for GPS Receiver Fixes Yet to be Devised?

With more testing on the horizon and a potentially alarming homeland security report about to be released, LightSquared’s efforts to begin work on its proposed wireless broadband service are stuck in the procedural mud.

The delays, which are never good for a commercial company, are piling up just as the firm’s coffers are thinning and need to be replenished with a new round of fund raising.

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By Dee Ann Divis
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