The Pentagon said on Friday that it won't limit the accuracy of positioning information that's beamed to civilian global positioning system (GPS) receivers.

In fact, the military says in its new standard that it's boosting civilian GPS quality. The government claims it "now provides civil users a horizontal positioning accuracy of 36 meters, compared to 100-meter accuracy" in the 1995 standard. But as the military campaign against Afghanistan enters its third week, the Defense Department could take steps to limit the usefulness of GPS receivers in the hands of Taliban forces. GPS units receive signals from orbiting satellites and compute their location and what time it is. That would mean only military GPS receivers -- in planes, ships and in the hands of U.S. special forces -- would work within the targeted area. Eggers wouldn't say if a selective denial would be precise enough to hit just Afghanistan, or if neighboring nations like Pakistan and Uzbekistan would be affected too. He'd only say that the "region can be very well defined." Selective availability (SA), which globally degraded the quality of GPS available to civilians, has been turned off since a May 2000 executive order signed by President Clinton. It's been replaced by selective deniability, which allows the military to geographically pinpoint areas should it choose to degrade GPS quality.