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The Global Positioning System may be free for the whole world to use, but it wasn't always that way. Originally the satellite-based system was for U.S. military only because they developed and launched the satellites, but also feared that giving the public access could potentially harm the U.S. in combat. After all, this was a system used to help missiles find targets. So what changed their mind?
The military originally had no intentions on opening the system to the public. But then in 1983, a Soviet SU-15 shot down a Korean passenger jet as it strayed from its intended route into Soviet prohibited airspace. Realizing world-wide GPS could have prevented the tragedy—and could prevent more in the future—President Ronald Reagan opened this system to the public on September 16, 1983. There was a catch, however. The public version would have its accuracy fuzzed to a radius of about100 meters to ensure that only the U.S. military had the best data available. Youtuber Real Engineering explains in detail:
In 2000, President Bill Clinton signed a bill to stop the scrambling—presumably because the advantage had become outdated—therefore making the system much more accurate for everyone. The free, accurate GPS that resulted made all sorts of things, most notably the modern smartphone and its mapping apps, possible.
Although this system was released to the public, the United States has jammed signals in places like Iraq by releasing radio waves to disrupt those coming from the satellite. Jamming the systems is not a hard task to do, but it's also easy for people to tell where the jamming is coming from, so you can't do it in secret.
Of course, at any time the U.S. could simply take this system away from the public and cripple many business across the world, so countries have begin to create their own GPS systems to compete. But without the unshackling of that very first system, the world would be a very different place.
Source: Real Engineering