GPS transmission- open door to hackers?

Global Positioning System (GPS) transmissions have been around for decades but its initial establishment was direct towards military use. It was not until 1983, when President Ronald Reagan declassified the GPS system and expanded its use towards the general public. While the declassification was established, the prevalence of GPS would not take full force until much later.
GPS transmissions through public use began to spread when the World Wide Web was unveiled in the early 90’s. Since then, new found technology has been incorporating new and intuitive ways of implementing GPS transmissions. GPS transmissions are widely known to transmit information wirelessly through the use of satellites. But given such ease with the service, does that mean private valued information may be intercepted as well?
Just this past year, several researchers from Virginia Tech and Cornell University have uncovered vulnerability in GPS navigation by “spoofing” the GPS receivers with falsified information. The concern here is that GPS usage has never been thought to have any vulnerability concerning loopholes and potential hacking. Given this new found vulnerability, researchers hope to patch the vulnerability to prevent further problems from arising in the future. According to Mark Psiaki, associate Professor at Cornell University, "Our goal is to inspire people who design GPS hardware to think about ways to make it so the kinds of things we're showing can be overcome." The idea here is that while there are vulnerabilities to anything, the key is identifying such flaws internally as to prevent third party hackers from further complicating the technology with more security flaws and problems.
GPS transmissions have expanded from its initial focus for tracking individual movement, to convenient navigational tools which are used ritually by millions of American citizens. Integration of GPS technology into mobile devices began in the late 90’s; but nowadays, such technology has become programmed into mobile phones as a core service. Consumers are not the only ones benefiting from GPS services, many corporations have integrated GPS services into their systems to monitor inventory, update tracking progress on various items, as well as maintain remote monitoring on each particular location. GPS technology has become a valuable fundamental stepping stone in our country. If it were attacked, it would be highly detrimental to our society. It is essential for further research to be established to aid in identifying further loopholes which may compromise valuable consumer data as well as personal information which could lead to an increase in identity thefts.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.dspdesignline.com/news/210604818;jsessionid=L2LUUDC4GANHIQSNDLQCKH0CJUNN2JVN
http://home.online.no/~sigurdhu/GPS_history.htm
http://www.articlesbase.com/gps-articles/the-history-of-gps-technology-732921.html
http://www.w3.org/History.html