The Global Positioning System (GPS) helps power everything from in-car sat navs and smart bombs to bank security and flight control, but its founder has warned that it is more vulnerable to sabotage or disruption than ever before – and politicians and security chiefs are ignoring the risk.

Impairment of GPS by hostile foreign governments, cyber criminals or even data-hungry citizens has become "a matter of national security", according to Colonel Bradford Parkinson, regarded as the architect of modern satellite positioning.

“If we don’t watch out and we aren’t prepared,” Mr Parkinson warned, countries could be denied everything from “navigation” to “precision weapon delivery”.

“We have to make it more robust . . . our cellphone towers are timed with GPS. If they lose that time they lose sync and pretty soon they don’t operate. Our power grid is synchronised with GPS [and] our banking system.”

Western governments are “in their infancy in recognising the problem”, Mr Parkinson said in an interview on the fringes of a defence conference at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory.

Military safeguards
The EU's €5 billion Galileo satellite system, an alternative to the US-controlled GPS, is equally at risk, he said.

“I don’t know anyone that is really in charge of it[in the US]. The department of homeland security should be [but] . . . they don’t have any people that understand it very well. They’ve got one person without any budget to speak of.”

Only the military was really aware of the issue, he said, and had put in place safeguards.

Mr Parkinson, now a professor at Stanford University, created GPS on behalf of the US military in the 1970s.

Powerful jamming equipment is becoming increasingly easy to acquire.

Over the past few years South Korea has witnessed huge successive jamming attacks against its GPS systems, launched by North Korea.

– (Copyright The Financial Times Limited)