point8six:
My understanding (and memory) is that Ronnie allowed restricted use of GPS to civilians, but Bill signed a Presidential decree allowing full usage to all and sundry (circa 1995?).
Timeline as I remember...
ok, ok... it's mostly pasted from Wikipedia:
# In 1978 the first experimental Block-I GPS satellite was launched.
# In 1983, after Soviet interceptor aircraft shot down the civilian airliner KAL 007 that strayed into restricted Soviet airspace due to navigational errors, killing all 269 people on board, U.S. President Ronald Reagan announced that the GPS would be made available for civilian uses once it was completed.
# By 1985, ten more experimental Block-I satellites had been launched to validate the concept.
# On February 14, 1989, the first modern Block-II satellite was launched.
# In 1991 Gulf War 1, soldiers were asking families to send them commercial handheld GPS receivers, since the Army wouldn't/couldn't give them to all who wanted.
# In 1992, the 2nd Space Wing, which originally managed the system, was de-activated and replaced by the 50th Space Wing.
# By December 1993 the GPS achieved initial operational capability.[71]
# By January 17, 1994 a complete constellation of 24 satellites was in orbit.
# Full Operational Capability was declared by NAVSTAR in April 1995.
# In 1996, recognizing the importance of GPS to civilian users as well as military users, U.S. President Bill Clinton issued a policy directive[72] declaring GPS to be a dual-use system and establishing an Interagency GPS Executive Board to manage it as a national asset.
# In 1997, my humble self bought his 1st receiver.
# In 1998, U.S. Vice President Al Gore announced plans to upgrade GPS with two new civilian signals for enhanced user accuracy and reliability, particularly with respect to aviation safety.
# On May 2, 2000 "Selective Availability" was discontinued as a result of the 1996 executive order, allowing users to receive a non-degraded signal globally.
Up until full elimination of scrambling on May 2, 2000, the
instantaneous horizontal plane position error was expected to be less than 100 meters 95% of the time. After that date, we're down to 20 meters. There are very few applications where this raw error cannot be reduced by some form of averaging.