What time is it in Israel?- opinion
Physicist Nishant Sahdev argues that Israel's GPS jamming for defense degrades the precise timing that cell towers, power grids, and banks rely on, because GPS is fundamentally a clock. He warns that spoofing can silently pull receivers off true time without triggering alarms, and proposes distributing the national time over optical fiber as a solution.
Physicist Nishant Sahdev argues that Israel's routine GPS jamming, intended to disrupt hostile missiles and drones, also degrades the precise timing that underpins cell towers, power grids, and bank transactions. GPS is fundamentally a clock, not a map, and spoofing can silently pull receivers off true time without triggering alarms. Sahdev cites a Norwegian trial where a receiver was off by a full millisecond while reporting high accuracy. He notes that Israel legally has a national clock (UTC(INPL)) at the National Physical Laboratory, but telecoms calibrate against it only once a year, leaving critical infrastructure dependent on vulnerable satellite signals. He proposes distributing the national time over optical fiber and requiring dual independent time sources, arguing the cost would be less than one heavy night of interceptor fire.