Slashdot Mirror
How Activists Tried To Destroy GPS With Axes
HughPickens.com writes Ingrid Burrington writes in The Atlantic about a little-remembered incident that occurred in 1992 when activists Keith Kjoller and Peter Lumsdaine snuck into a Rockwell International facility in Seal Beach, California and in what they called an "act of conscience" used wood-splitting axes to break into two clean rooms containing nine satellites being built for the US government. Lumsdaine took his axe to one of the satellites, hitting it over 60 times. The Brigade's target was the Navigation Satellite Timing And Ranging (NAVSTAR) Program and the Global Positioning System (GPS). Both men belonged to the Lockheed Action Collective, a protest group that staged demonstrations and blockaded the entrance at the Lockheed Missiles & Space Co. test base in Santa Cruz in 1990. They said they intentionally took axes to the $50-million Navstar Global Position System satellite to bring the public's attention to what they termed the government's attempt to control the world through modern technology. "I had to slow the deployment of this system (which) makes conventional warfare much more lethal and nuclear war winnable in the eyes of some," an emotional Kjoller told the judge before receiving an 18-month sentence. "It's something that I couldn't let go by. I tried to do what was right rather than what was convenient."
Burrington recently contacted Lumsdaine to learn more about the Brigade and Lumsdaine expresses no regrets for his actions. Even if the technology has more and more civilian uses, Lumsdaine says, GPS remains "military in its origins, military in its goals, military in its development and [is still] controlled by the military." Today, Lumsdaine views the thread connecting GPS and drones as part of a longer-term movement by military powers toward automated systems and compared today's conditions to the opening sequence of Terminator 2, where Sarah Connor laments that the survivors of Skynet's nuclear apocalypse "lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against the machines." "I think in a general way people need to look for those psychological, spiritual, cultural, logistical, technological weak points and leverage points and push hard there," says Lumsdaine. "It is so easy for all of us as human beings to take a deep breath and step aside and not face how very serious the situation is, because it's very unpleasant to look at the effort and potential consequences of challenging the powers that be. But the only thing higher than the cost of resistance is the cost of not resisting."
Burrington recently contacted Lumsdaine to learn more about the Brigade and Lumsdaine expresses no regrets for his actions. Even if the technology has more and more civilian uses, Lumsdaine says, GPS remains "military in its origins, military in its goals, military in its development and [is still] controlled by the military." Today, Lumsdaine views the thread connecting GPS and drones as part of a longer-term movement by military powers toward automated systems and compared today's conditions to the opening sequence of Terminator 2, where Sarah Connor laments that the survivors of Skynet's nuclear apocalypse "lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against the machines." "I think in a general way people need to look for those psychological, spiritual, cultural, logistical, technological weak points and leverage points and push hard there," says Lumsdaine. "It is so easy for all of us as human beings to take a deep breath and step aside and not face how very serious the situation is, because it's very unpleasant to look at the effort and potential consequences of challenging the powers that be. But the only thing higher than the cost of resistance is the cost of not resisting."
"Step away from the crazy person..."
You aren't seeing the world how the leaders are seeing it behind the scenes. Most have no clue what's really going on in the world... the elites are afraid of political awakening (aka global revolt). i.e. they fear you stopping voting for politicians and causing social and political change because the democratic system is a sham.
This (mass surveillance) by the NSA and abuse by law enforcement is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttv6n7PFniY
Brezinski at a press conference
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kmUS--QCYY
The real news:
http://therealnews.com/t2/
http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverted-Totalitarianism/dp/069114589X/
http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Government-Surveillance-Security-Single-Superpower/dp/1608463656/
http://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Government-Michael-Glennon/dp/0190206446/
Look at the following graphs:
http://imgur.com/a/FShfb
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
And then...
WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap
http://www.businessinsider.com/wikileaks-haiti-minimum-wage-the-nation-2011-6
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnkNKipiiiM
Free markets?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349
Free trade?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju06F3Os64
http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Illusion-Literacy-Triumph-Spectacle/dp/1568586132/
"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.
In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture—attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies—to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion."
Important history:
http://williamblum.org/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcA1v2n7WW4#t=2551
Because intention matters. No matter how misguided these people were, they didn't do what they did because they wanted to destroy property as such, they wanted to slow down GPS deployment as much as they could. That makes them activists rather than vandals. Not necessarily effective activists, or morally good activists, but activists all the same.
Actually Iraq handed over Iraq to ISIS since as usual:
1. most they had similar religious beliefs so why would they fight them
2. some ran away dropping their weapons
3. rest got overrun and executed
And actually there were WMDs and they found them. Problem was that they were made by allies to the US and they didn't want to embarrass them. Side note BBC had a great documentary that covered the buildup. Essentially they had one guy that was feeding the CIA info on WMDs but they were skeptical. Problem was higher ups (Wolfowitz and Cheney) decided to take him on face value until it was literally too late.
It takes a pretty straight face to describe GPS satellites as being analogous to 'equipment used for health care' in 1992, when the system's major use had been its (largely successful) guidance of assorted munitions and troops during Desert Storm...
At least now you have a much wider variety of civilian applications, some even not related to tracking, to point to in addition to the system's primary role.
I'm not sure MLK could have done it today. He might have wound up with a 20-year sentence for terrorism.
King probably would have had his plagiarism and adultery exposed in the media, which would have served to discredit him. That's how they do it these days.
I'm reading a book about airliner hijackings, "The Skies Belong to Us" and one of the central hijacker subjects was an African American whose father was a career Navy sailor. He was assigned to a station in Coos Bay, Oregon until his family was basically driven out by the town's racist behavior -- thugs at their house, demanding they move, his mother spit on by women(!) at the grocery store and his 10 year old son beaten in school so bad he was hospitalized. All of this happened to a basically middle class black family in the Pacific Northwest, not to some sharecropper in Alabama, and something that never made the news or became a publicized incident.
So on the other hand, it's difficult to really grasp the magnitude of racial discrimination and hostility of that era in today's era. I think even Fox News viewers would find some of the pre-Civil Rights era behavior shocking and repulsive, so it's hard to know exactly how the public would treat someone nonviolently resisting this kind of oppression even if he was "exposed".
one thing the crazies never fail to achieve is to bring back a topic
"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject". - Churchill
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
LORAN-C had lots of limitations, range from the transmitter, the fact that it did not directly read out as a location, instead gave a pair of time delays, limited accuracy, etc. I was working around small coastal boats back in those days, and I can tell you that GPS even then when it had limited hours of daily coverage due to an incomplete constelation in the late 1980's was already revolutionary for even small craft. I still have a small handheld GPS from those days, well not small by todays standards, it read out Lat, Long, speed, heading, etc. on an LCD screen, a set of batteries lasted about 8 hours, so it was best to plug into external power, took 5+ minutes for a cold boot, and 1-2 minutes for a warm sync if you were lucky.
Really? /. is the mediator of all things moral I guess?
This guy had a point and correctly analyzed the military uses of this technology long before it was widely part of the public consciousness. What he says is still true and it doesn't take much thought to envision some pretty horrific self-locomoting autonomous weapons that GPS makes much more likely. The problem slashdotters may have with this guy is that he might be a luddite (or he could have just been a visionary protestor without an inherent hatred of tech) -- but in looking like a luddite, there is a knee jerk reaction. Like most knee jerk reactions, it's rather poorly thought.
There is also the possibility that /. has been subverted into a pro-government, pro-military, pro-establishement mouthpiece by the numerous shills of such groups. Maybe you're one of them.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Really? /. is the mediator of all things moral I guess?
No, I think they were saying that /. is typically sympathetic to those causes and if they give somebody fighting for those causes the cold shoulder, there is something else besides those causes that is clouding the issue, probably the actions, intents, and realistic expectations of the people that are being given the cold shoulder. A rational person should be able to preach to the converted.
I find myself in the same situation with politicians all the time. They say they are in favor of some cause and I'm like "Ya, I'm on board!" Then I ask, "How do you plan to do that?", research and do some reading, and find out that their actual plan is not something that I consider even logical, let alone rational, and don't give it a chance in hell of doing what they think it will do.