our far-flung correspondents

no place to hide
Why a satellite system may mean 
that we will never get lost again.
november 27, 2000

1.

     I recently bought a compass that slips over the band of my
wristwatch.  It's the size of a dime, cost less than ten dollars,
and was designed for people who ride mountain bikes into the wilderness.
I don't own a mountain bike, but I do own many compasses.  Right
now, they are all lined up on my desk and pointing in the direction
of the Vatican, just north of where I live.  They work perfectly,
and I find that comforting, although I am not sure why.  Like many
men I know, I am not very good about asking for directions, yet
I rarely consult maps.  Perhaps not surprisingly, I get lost almost
everywhere I go.

     As a reporter in Washington, I once got so mixed up as I raced
off to cover a double homicide that I begged a taxi-driver to
lead my car to the scene, just a couple of miles from my home.
My family lived in Russia for several years during the nineties,
and we had a dacha not far from Moscow.  To get there required
us to drive for forty minutes along a single well-travelled road;
nonetheless, I managed, on several occasions, to steer in the
general direction of Latvia.  

     All this came to mind a few weeks ago as I flew into Colorado
Springs, a city that has quietly dislodged the North Pole as the
most meaningful place on earth for the directionally impaired.
Colorado Springs is the home of Schriever Air Force Base, where
the 2nd Space Operations Squadron of the 50th Space Wing of the
U.S.  Air Force can be found.  Its mission, with a little help from
nearly a dozen cesium clocks and three hydrogen maser oscillators
(which were created to test Einstein's theory of relativity),
is to control the global positioning system, the largest constellation
of military satellites that has ever orbited the Earth.  

     Twenty-four satellites, along with four spares, circle the
planet twice each day.  They move in six orbital planes, placing,
in effect, a giant birdcage around the Earth, assuring that there
will usually be eight satellites in range.  The satellites send
out a constant stream of radio signals that contain information
about their orbit and speed, along with the exact time.  That allows
them to deliver precise location information to anyone who has
a device that can receive the signals.  The receiver works like
a radio: to establish a location, one need only turn it on.

     The satellites function as reference points--the way stars
once did for mariners--and not since the twelfth century, when
the compass came into use, has a navigational tool promised to
more fundamentally alter the way we live.  Within a few years,
every cell phone, quartz watch, and laptop computer may come with
a tiny G.P.S.  receiver embedded in it.  In fact, by December 31,
2002, federal law will require cellular carriers to be able to
locate the position of every user making a 911 call.  That should
eventually make it possible for emergency personnel to find anyone
in America who calls 911.

     Though there are earthbound means of complying with the new
"E911" mandate, many carriers will rely on G.P.S. technology.
The National Park Service is already using G.P.S. to map trails,
keep their snowplows on the road, and even track bears.  Air routes
routinely have a geographical tag and so do coastal waterways
and shipping lanes.  It is even possible to rig a driver's air
bag so that, as it is deployed, it activates a G.P.S.  device that
reports the car's location to the nearest ambulance.  Our children
may never fully understand the word "lost"--just as few people under 
the age of ten have any idea what it means to "dial" a phone number. 

2. 

     "Will you have a G.P.S. unit in your rental car?" Lieutenant 
Jeremy Eggers, the 50th Space Wing's press liaison, asked, 
reasonably enough, when I called from the airport in Dallas to tell 
him I was on my way.  Although it is easy to rent a car with a G.P.S.  
receiver--places like Hertz add about six dollars  a day to the cost 
and they provide voice narration that will tell you when and where 
to turn--I had forgotten to reserve one.  Lieutenant Eggers sounded 
politely incredulous.  Once again, I would have to navigate the back 
roads and scrubland of a place I had never been.  I would have 
to look at that stupid compass on my watch and try to make sure 
I wasn't driving in the wrong direction.  Lieutenant Eggers must 
have heard the distress in my voice.  "This is a tricky place," he 
said.  "The roads go on forever.  People get lost all the time.  Why 
don't I just meet you at your hotel and you can follow me out to 
the base?"  Then he added, "Too bad, though.  This is exactly 
what G.P.S. was invented for."  

     Originally, the global positioning system was not intended
to help civilians at all.  "The civils," as Lieutenant Colonel 
Daniel Jordan, the young commander of the 2nd Space Operations
Squadron, calls them, came later.  From the start, the system has
been controlled by the United States military, which developed
it soon after the Vietnam War.  After years of watching soldiers
become lost in dense jungles, the Defense Department wanted a
space-based system to provide precise, three-dimensional position
information that would also help its forces avoid detection.  The
Space Wing team guides the orbit patterns and provides all the
data sent to every satellite.  It also controls defense communications
and the monitoring stations in Hawaii and the Kwajalein Atoll,
in the Pacific Ocean; at Cape Canaveral; on Diego Garcia, in the
Indian Ocean; and on Ascension Island, in the South Atlantic.

     The first G.P.S.  satellites were launched in 1978.  In 1983,
after Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down by the Russian
Air Force when it passed over the Kamchatka Peninsula--a Cold
War disaster that might have been prevented if the crew had had
access to better navigational tools--President Reagan decided
to make the five-billion-dollar system available without charge
to everyone in the world; that sent dozens of private companies
scrambling into development.  Still, G.P.S.  didn't get its first
great burst of public recognition until the Persian Gulf War,
in 1991, when more than nine thousand handheld units were distributed
to troops, letting them move about accurately in sandstorms, across
the featureless desert, and at night.  By the time the United States
started bombing Serbia, in 1999, G.P.S.-guided weapons were allowing
the military to attack targets accurately in adverse weather,
and cheap commercial versions had become widely available.  

     Prices for G.P.S.  circuits have fallen faster even than those
for computer chips, and that has begun to transform a niche device
into a common tool.  For about a hundred dollars, you can find
a G.P.S.  unit that will tell you where you are almost anyplace
on earth; the cheapest models are light enough to carry in a daypack,
or even in a pocket.  More complex systems come with color screens
and detailed maps as full of facts as any atlas.  Pilots of small
planes can purchase "terrain avoidance systems" that
combine G.P.S.  data with topographical information to keep them
from crashing into mountains.  Archeologists and fishermen and
farmers rely on G.P.S.  units.  Land surveyors have abandoned the
plumb and pole for the new technology.  One of Russia's biggest
banks has placed G.P.S.  transponders in its armored cars, so that
dispatchers can track their progress along the potholed streets
of Moscow.

     "I have been involved with G.P.S.  since 1985," Matt
Althouse, a space-systems analyst for the Scitor Corporation,
an important technical consultant to the military, told me.  "The
first user set was up on a tripod with an omnidirectional antenna
on top of it.  It was about five feet tall and had a bunch of cables
running to a big multichannel receiver, and it also had a tuner
and a power generator.  The whole thing cost three hundred thousand
dollars.  It was enormous.  You look at that right now, at something
comparable or better, and you can put it on your wrist.  What cost
three hundred thousand dollars fifteen years ago costs less than
a hundred and fifty dollars now."

     After G.P.S.  was released to the public, military planners
wanted to make sure that soldiers would receive more accurate
signals than anyone else.  So, in March of 1990, the government
inserted subtle errors, or "noise," into the clock data
that came from the satellites.  Because the military wrote the
codes, it knew how to compensate for the errors.  The policy, called
Selective Availability, was established to make sure that America's
enemies would not be able to rely on G.P.S.  to guide their weapons.
It also meant that, while the Air Force could send missiles into
windows in Baghdad, civilians would have to settle for signals good 
enough to let a helicopter find them on the top of a mountain.  By this 
spring, however, researchers--not to mention foreign governments--had
become so adept at using ground-based radio beacons to correct
for the errors that the ten-year-old policy no longer held much
value.  On May 1st, President Clinton announced that the government
would stop corrupting the signal.  The change has already begun
to have an immense impact on the industry, making devices more
accurate and easier to use (and even cheaper: compensating for
errors was expensive, requiring special software).  Receivers that
used to work to within a hundred metres are now accurate to under
twenty--better than most topographical maps.

     Lieutenant Colonel Jordan, who was dressed in a crisp blue
flight suit, led me around the Master Control Station operations
floor.  To get there, authorized personnel must pass through the
Entry Control Facility's booths, where they swipe their I.D.  cards,
are weighed, and enter a PIN number.  Schriever Air Force Base
sits like a lonely village in the flat plains east of Colorado
Springs.  "It's remote out here," Lieutenant Colonel
Jordan told me.  "You have to be committed.  But we are.  People
get juiced from the work they do."  They also get great technical
training, Lieutenant Colonel Jordan added, and are regularly recruited
by civilian firms.

     He took me down a hallway painted in military beige, filled
with signs admonishing people to be careful what they said.  After
walking by so many locked doors and warnings, I expected to find
something out of "Fail Safe."  Inside, though, it was a bit of a 
letdown.  Apart from a model of the globe and the satellites
that surround it, and the prominent "Top Secret" stickers
attached to every computer monitor, "the pit"--as Lieutenant
Colonel Jordan called the room--reminded me of a Citibank branch:
it was big and blue, and had a large electronic Julian clock on
the wall.  About a dozen men were there when I visited--all of
them clean-cut, inordinately polite, and young.  It looked like
the high-school science club.

     Lieutenant Colonel Jordan asked me to sit at one of the monitors
and introduced me to his crew, who were tracking the telemetry
information that comes out of the satellites and making sure the
solar arrays that power them were up and running.  Every ten minutes
or so, a new satellite would slide into range and the team would
beam up coördinates.  Lieutenant Colonel Jordan and his team
explained that the computer in a G.P.S.  receiver calculates its
position by triangulation.  To do that, the unit measures how long
it takes for a radio message to travel from a satellite.  One satellite
alone, however, won't do much good; it requires a minimum of three
satellites, each one measuring my location from a different orbiting
position, to tell me exactly where I am.  Standing in the control
room of the Space Wing, for example, I am eleven thousand miles
from the nearest G.P.S.  satellite.  But I could be exactly the
same distance from it if I were fishing in Siberia.  "So you
lock in a second satellite," Lieutenant Colonel Jordan explained,
"one that is twelve thousand miles away."  That would
narrow my position to someplace in a circle covered by signals
from those two satellites.  But it's still a pretty big circle:
I could be standing in the Space Wing or in front of the Sears
Tower, in Chicago.  That is why I would need a third signal, which
would reduce the possible places I could be standing to two--one
of which would be in outer space.  A fourth satellite would allow
me to determine my altitude.  The more satellites in use, the more
precise the information, and precision is essential: at the speed
of light, clocks that are off by a billionth of a second would
be accurate to within a foot; a thousandth of a second translates
into nearly two hundred miles.

     I asked one officer if he ever found such technical work dull.
"Sir, I'm twenty-two years old and I am monitoring a system
used by tens of millions of people," he replied.  "The
world is relying on us.  So that is interesting to me."  I
nodded and started to walk away.  Then he added, "We do other
things here, you know, like watching for signs of the detonation
of a nuclear device.  That can be really useful, too."

3.

     I could see that G.P.S.  would help people find their exits
on the highway, and no doubt it will eventually make it less likely
that my luggage will get lost.  But calling it "a revolutionary
tool of the digital world," as James Spohrer did when he
described to me how ubiquitous G.P.S.  would become, seemed a tad
extravagant.  Spohrer is a chief technical officer at I.B.M.  and
an eloquent advocate of the idea that once you have information
attached to a specific place--once you put a geographical tag
on nearly every spot on earth--the real world will start to get
much more exciting.  

     Spohrer has written about a near future where it will be possible
to walk into an unfamiliar airport, slip on a pair of glasses
that contain a G.P.S.  receiver, and watch as a virtual red carpet
leads you to your gate.  He is convinced that people will soon
climb mountains and tour cities with devices that, connected to
an earpiece or a handheld display, will tell them what they're
seeing and how to find the nearest Chinese restaurant.  Spohrer
told me about an I.B.M.  senior executive who has challenged his
research team to develop a system that will use facial-recognition
software, an earpiece, and, if needed, G.P.S.  satellites, to whisper
the name of any employee who walks by.  "Sounds ridiculous,
I know," Spohrer said.  "Believe me, it's not.  Devices
that know where they are will soon be everywhere.  And everything
is going to know where it is.  We are going to map every metre
of this planet.  And not just this planet, either."  

     I must not have looked convinced.  "I'll tell you what
to do," Spohrer said.  "Go see Steve Feiner at Columbia
University.  Then let me know if you have any more questions."

     One afternoon soon after that, I took the subway to 116th Street
and Broadway and walked to the Computer Graphics and User Interfaces
Laboratory at Columbia.  Steven K.  Feiner, a professor of computer
science, is forty-eight years old and has slightly shaggy graying
hair.  His office looked as if it had been constructed as a set
for a film about an absent-minded professor: laptops--whole and
disassembled--digital cameras, special optics, and antique computer
mice were everywhere.  There were reprints of articles from the
days when transistor radios were making news, and several bottles
of Taittinger champagne sat on a table in the center of the room.


     Feiner is Walter Mitty with a government grant.  He works with
technologies that take simple reality--such as basic information
about where you live--add something to it, and make it richer.
Feiner spends his time trying to blend G.P.S.  computer graphics
and wireless communication systems so that they all come together
to enhance common experience.  He asked me where I lived.  When
I told him Rome, he clapped his hands, leaped to his feet, and
said, "Yes!"

     He was silent for a moment; clearly, his mind had started to
race.  "You know," he began, "if you go to the Forum
and look around, you quickly realize that the glory that was Rome
is not amazingly well reflected in the strewn pieces of column
parts and what is left standing.  It's a fabulous ruin, of course,
but if you want to know what it was like you have to buy those
little books that have old photos of Rome overlaid with the columns
and buildings etched in their original form.  That's not enough
for me.  I would love to go there without having to look at the
artist's rendition.  I would like to put on a pair of glasses and
literally look around and go back in time.  I want to see the buildings
exactly as they were, maybe with pieces from contemporary life
thrown in.  I want the chariots whizzing by and the giant throngs
in the streets and the markets full of whatever they sold.  I want
the fantasy and I want it to stop only as they are getting ready
to throw me to the lions."

     He sat down, and I wondered what this had to do with G.P.S.
"As long as you can put a label on any physical object, on
any building or monument or tree," Feiner explained, "you
can take a pair of glasses with G.P.S.  built in and with more
sophisticated stuff which tracks the motion of your head.  Those
devices will know what you are looking at, so all you have to
do is supply the software they need to tell you about it.  That
is what we are trying to do."

     He picked up a pair of glasses with bluish anodized frames
and small prisms embedded in the left lens.  "We are not there
yet," he said.  "The system is heavy, it's unwieldy.  I want
it to be slick, like an MP3 player, and cheap.  It's really
just a question of time."  Feiner led me across the hall,
to his lab, where two of his graduate students were waiting with
all sorts of gear.  There were computer parts loaded onto a backpack,
wall-sized monitors, and a large black device, resembling a stationary
helicopter rotor, that helps track the movements of your head
as you walk around a room.

     "This work is based mostly upon the notion that there
is someplace that you don't know but that you will be exploring,"
he said.  "Maybe it's tourism or work or war, which is how
we got into it.  Much of my work is funded by the Office of Naval
Research.  It wants the marines and other soldiers to have all
the right information: Where are the power lines?  Where are the
underground tunnels?  Who might lie beneath the spot where I am
standing, ready to blow me up?  In essence, we are merging the
physical world with the virtual world.  We can label buildings
with their names and show full-size 3-D models of underground
tunnels as if they were being seen with X-ray vision."

     Feiner has built a contraption that attempts to do all that.
It consists mainly of the backpack computer--called "a real-time
kinematic G.P.S."--which can pinpoint the location of a person
to within several centimetres, and a visor that looks like a pair
of good ski goggles.  The first such system weighed forty pounds
and the next one weighed thirty pounds.  Now, with a computer powered
by a seven-hundred-megahertz Pentium III chip, and a fast graphics
card, it is down to twenty pounds.  

     As soon as I slipped on the headset, a virtual version of the
Columbia campus was projected onto my visor.  As I glanced about,
the gadget could tell which buildings I was looking at by monitoring
the position of my head.  Feiner loaded a documentary that he and
some of his students had made, with the help of the journalism
school, about the 1968 student uprising at Columbia, and through
the visor I could watch film clips about some of those events,
while standing exactly where they happened.  Suddenly, when I looked
off in the direction of Low Library, I heard the resonant voice
of a narrator: "It was a sunny afternoon on Tuesday, April
23rd, in the spring of 1968.  More than three hundred Columbia
students marched to Morningside Park."  As I turned my head
to look at different buildings on the campus, Feiner's program
presented film clips, sound guides, and bytes of history to go
with whatever structure came into view.

     The equipment may have been clunky and the images slightly
cluttered, but it was hard to miss the point.  "Today, if
you go to a hotel, there will usually be a rack full of informational
brochures--bus trips, museum guides, restaurant recommendations,"
Feiner said.  "You can riffle through it to get some ideas
of what to do.  But, soon enough, it will all be in the chips.
If you care about food, there will be different types of software;
for antiques others.  Pens and carpets and violins and wine will
have distinct guides.  It will be like the Internet.  Whatever your
interest is, somebody can attend to it.

     "Falk maps are brilliant," he went on.  "But they are on 
paper.  I want the thing that does it all.  Right now I am 
hungry.  I am in Paris and I want to see all restaurants in
the Nineteenth Arrondissement.  Maybe it's a Monday.  They need
to be in close walking distance and open today.  And do you know
what?  Instead of being told where they are, as I would in a guidebook,
I want something to tell me how to get there, to just say, `Turn
left here and turn right there.' All I want is the directions.
I certainly don't want to look like a tourist.  No, I want to stroll
confidently, like an arrogant Frenchman, in the direction of the
restaurant.  And someday I will."

4.

     There is a scene in the middle of "Mission: Impossible
2" when Tom Cruise injects a biometric chip containing a
G.P.S.  transponder into the ankle of his leading lady, Thandie
Newton.  He is then able to track her no matter where she goes.
It seems like boilerplate science fiction, but the day before
Halloween, at Cipriani 42nd Street--a former bank turned restaurant
that is now a palace of Old World ambience--a company called Digital
Angel.net did its best to prove that it was not.  The company demonstrated
its new product: a global tracking system that can be attached
to a person.  The device has a tiny antenna that captures not only
one's location but also such data as pulse and temperature and
transmits it to an Internet ground station.

     Richard Sullivan, the chairman and chief executive officer
of Applied Digital Solutions (which owns Digital Angel.net), told
an audience of journalists and others (including Norman Mineta,
the Secretary of Commerce) that the chips, which are about the
size of a dime, would not actually be implanted in anyone.  They
were for "external use only," he said, adding, somewhat
ominously, that anything else was "purely hypothetical at
this time."  Sullivan also showed a short video that suggested
how the chip could be used to find lost children or kidnapped
executives or people with Alzheimer's disease who have wandered
away.

     A live demonstration came next: Somebody named Steve was driving
back and forth along a road near the Long Island Expressway.  His
position and body temperature were transmitted through a G.P.S.
chip and wireless technology to East Forty-second Street, where
they showed up on three big video screens.  At one point, Steve
held the G.P.S.  chip next to the car air-conditioner.  The temperature
reading dropped instantly.  In theory, the chip could be coated
in Teflon or titanium and then placed inside a body--human or
any other.  Digital Angel.net recently merged with Destron Fearing,
a company that specializes in tracking wildlife and domestic animals.

     "This is all very profound," Charley Richardson,
the director of the labor-extension program at the University
of Massachusetts at Lowell, told me when I called to talk about
G.P.S.  For years, Richardson has been concerned about unforeseen
consequences of major new technologies, particularly for the labor
force.  "G.P.S.  will change the workplace in definitive ways,"
he said.  "Yet nobody even debates the value of that.  It's
something new, so we are just supposed to accept it.  Right now
you can drive down the Massachusetts Turnpike with a transponder
in your car," he continued.  "It signals to your account
to deduct money for the toll when you drive through a booth.  A
G.P.S.  transponder can do more, by informing the police where
you are if you have an accident.  But there is still more.  It can
also tell the police how fast you were driving.  If you call in
sick, should your boss be able to check your subway pass to see
if you were travelling all over the city of New York?  Are you
ready for that?  Because that's part of the revolution, too."