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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...
In fairness, concerns about the military, government, and global power in the hands of a few is not a bad concern, but this guy is just nuts...
You aren't going to stop the march towards the future this way, you'll just be locked up and ignored...
There are ways to go about it, but this isn't it...
Well?
Yeah, keep on keeping Lumsdaine! ... believing in your nutcase dreams.
Military uses everything you use in your daily life, shoes, pens, water. Everything should be banned. Ain't that right chief?
I like to imagine an engineer coming in the next morning, and crying like the Rancor handler when he beheld the work the axe had wrought.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Congrats, you just took an axe and destroyed a multimillion dollar satellite. Clearly the backers of the GPS system will now see the light and shut the project down forever ... ... or maybe they'll just build another satellite and make the average taxpayer pay an extra dollar.
Seriously, jackass, you don't "bring the public's attention to the government's attempt to control the world through modern technology" through actions that make you look like a frothing-at-the-mouth luddite.
For all his talk of doing what's right instead of what's convenient, the actual right way to bring his concerns about the government and the military to the public's eye would have been to find like-minded people, form a group, start some grassroots activism and some protests to get exposure, and work towards getting his issues on a ballot. But, no, that would be too slow and inconvienient, so he decided to go the easy route of instant gratification by smashing some satellites.
Moron is still a moron 20 years later.
Why call these nuts activists? They are just destroying public property. We call that vandalism.
Seems like you can do whatever the hell you want, just call yourself an activist to excuse your behaviour. Maybe I should go tear down the neighbours hideous lawn ornaments in order to save the world from bad art so I can be an activist.
It doesn't matter what you want to draw attention to, destroying the property of someone else should just be called for what it is: destruction of property.
The issue is not the technologies being used. The real issue is the governments that are refusing to tell us how they are using the technologies. We can not make informed decisions on what is being done in the name of the citizenry because we have no idea what they are doing.
If you want to break something, break the system of secrecy the goverments are building around you. How do we do that? I have no idea.
The common citizen doesn't have the resources -- time or money -- to accomplish real political change right now.
I would love to see the citizens have a positive debate on ways to fix things. But, as of right now, the people who seem to care the most about our current political problems are mired in some kind of bizarre left vs right blame game. As if both sides weren't actively trying to screw us. Every debate descends into who's at fault and the inevitable leap frog back through time picking examples why it was the 'other' side who started it all.
"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,"
There is no such thing as a winnable war, nuclear or otherwise, and anybody who thinks there is such a thing has either never experienced war or that person is dumber than a palette of bricks.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
To me GPS has been a huge help and i'm not military. The fact that it started as a military project, and military continues to use it, and even if it is under military control, does not mean it's military. Maps are used by military all the time and even if not exactly started as military project, very much maps and map making has been a priority for any military for as long as people have existed.
Once the Galileo project is up and running, well guess what, that's not a military project, since EU does not have a military. Only the individual countries have militaries, and they will most certainly use Galileo, but it's not a military project still. Mostly companies, especially companies moving a lot of stuff, will use it. The military will never use it as much.
To me the idea that GPS systems are mostly military and need to be destroyed is a fucking loonatic idea. And the fact that the guy still thinks he did right, by stupidly breaking couple of satelites, is a moron. Not only is the idea stupid, breaking the satelites did nothing to stop it.
"...snuck into a Rockwell International facility in Seal Beach...".
Oh, it was still on the ground. For a moment I thought they had attempted something stupid.
We'd go back to the late 1950's at worst, and the world would keep on spinning.
Major problem, obviously, but not the end of the world given that we've only had them for 50-something years. And I'm sure those 50+ years of other technologies could catch up and cope quite quickly even if ever launching a satellite again became completely unviable.
A lot of doomsaying is given about lack of modern technology, but I think we miss how new it is, how much other technologies can pick up the slack, and quite how we can adapt to cope without almost anything.
Within the space of my lifetime we gone from phones tied to a cord to phones that work on the top of the highest mountains, play games, take photos, out-process the computers of the previous era, etc. and we barely noticed them slip into modern life. Though we'd notice more slip OUT of modern life, the adaptation is not as huge a deal as we make out.
Your grandfather never had the benefits of satellite technology in his time (weather prediction, global communications, GPS, etc.). And he didn't have oodles of computers and worldwide cabled data networks and in-car computers and whatever else either. Therefore, without the satellites, life wouldn't be worse than your grandfather's, except for a small period of adjustment.
A lot of his concerns are legitimate, but he went about it the wrong way. Trying a publicity stunt like that against GPS is never going to work, because people are never going to be indignant about system that just enables you to determine your own position (and can't track anybody--GPS devices may track you but that's the device using the GPS results, not GPS itself). He chose a very poor target for the general trend he wanted to protest against.
The Unibomber said a lot of the same sort of things. His case was kind of strange, but he was right about a small technorati elite controlling a lot of power.
I think some people get carried away and lose sight of the big picture. The world has always been under control by elites who had their secret plots, all the way back to priests being the only ones who talked to gods. What else is a King's court but a place to gather other elites? The military isn't important, it's who directs it that counts. Really, what's under attack is the well armed Militia, or specifically, the local police force with a Local Sheriff that's elected by the citizens. The police are being militarized and increasingly federally controlled to quash dissent (in NY they have an anti-extremist squad roaming about with long rifles and machine guns looking to put down any protests). DHS is a federal police agency -- We don't need it. Protip: Anti-war protesters, civil-rights protesters, and women's rights protesters have all been considered "anti-American extremists" in the past; Never forget COINTELPRO.
The local police is the last line of defense from a hostile dictatorship takeover, asside from picking up pitchforks... Eisenhower saw the writing on the wall, and warned us of everything that has come to pass.
Personally, I can accept the GREAT risk of driving my car. If I'm not afraid to drive to work, then I'm not going to be afraid of Terrorists. I don't think we need all this "anti-terrorist" bullshit, let them come and get their asses kicked; We're such a great nation that terrorists can't even scratch us. 9/11 was 1/200th of the car accidents that we have every year.
Removing the human element from military and law enforcement (red-light cameras, drones, etc) is far more threatening than GPS. Putting more power in the hands of the few means you not only lose less lives due to drones, but it also takes far less people to suppress another group. It means you have to convince less soldiers to go against the constitution and attack their own. The NSA's databases were hacked by a damn contractor, so we pretty much know that China and Russia has spies with access to far more of their systems -- So the National Security Agency has become a big threat to national security itself.
There will always be powerful elites, it's when their power is unchecked that we have problems. Right now the citizens can still keep the governments in check, but as we reduce the number of people required to operate an enforcement detatchment, perhaps through automated systems like drones and vehicles, phones, and PCs that respond to remote kill switches, or even self driving cars (doors lock, go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200), the power ballance may shift too far out of the reach of citizenry. Even just having a giant federal agency like the DHS install itself in every facet of life from travel to sports arena security is a reduction of local citizen control.
The 2nd amendment was good enough when the might of our forces came from people with firearms. We're actually long past due for a new amendment: The Right to Bear Technology (including encryption). I really think If we're garaunteed such constitutional rights the Information Age may not destroy the USA. Without said right, as more of our lives are intertwined with computing machines the more erosion of our freedoms will continue. You already can't buy a car without a tracking device "black box" installed... Phones must have remote kill switches... The fork in the road ahead is impossible not to see.
Got Root?
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.
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.
To be fair, the system's primary role is arguably figuring out where you are without a sextant. They'd have done it even if they couldn't have used it for bombs and cruise missiles because it didn't work at higher speeds or something.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
that the dual purpose of GPS birds is to detect treaty-restricted space detonations of nukes. That sounds like a win for the good guys and was part of the deal that got our nav systems up there in the first place.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I mean, if there's ever an appropriate place for the term, it would probably be here.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Thank God he did this. If the GPS system had been launched we'd all be dead by now.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
That's a lousy analogy. A better analogy in this case would be that someone offended by apartheid took an axe to the bus, and after being arrested, ranted about the white people's plot to breed black people into Morlocks. Does that help clarify why Lumsdaine is such a counter-productive "activist"? His attempt was doomed to fail -- it would not stop either the military-industrial complex, or even the particular program he went after, but would put off practically everyone who disagreed with him and some of those who did agree with him.
That is likely fair; though I would be curious to know if construction of the system would have been delayed by some years or decades if it turned out to be useless for those purposes: GPS is much more elegant and powerful, as well as useful for timekeeping and available more or less worldwide; but there were various RDF/ADF systems in use in specific areas at least as far back as WWII, and something like the LORAN system was comparatively mature and, being all ground based, cheap, before the first GPS satellite ever launched.
Sooner or later something GPS-like would almost certainly have become either cheap or compelling enough to be put into place (if the mind-blowing money pit that was the Iridium constellation before it was sold at bankruptcy to the present operators could be rationalized, GPS certainly could); but if it didn't offer something compelling to munitions and missiles I would not have been surprised if ships and troops and civilian applications had been allowed to handle themselves with existing radio beacon technologies and other inferior-but-available options for years, maybe a decade or two, longer.
....we can't have nice things" sub-thread in 5....4....3....2....1.... .....oh, wait.
Seriously, though - these are the kind of people that just make me want to walk up to them and just stare at them, wide-eyed, for about 2 minutes and calmly say "What is wrong with you". These are the same kind of people that used to throw rocks at my car when I drove up the hill to 1 Cyclotron Drive in Berkeley to work at Lawrence Berkeley Lab in the 80's - total nut-jobs who, despite their obviously misguide attempts at trying to make the world a "better place", are utterly clueless as to making the world a truly "better place".
I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!
Lesson: you want credit for your comments, don't be an anonymous coward. Nobody wants to waste mod points on ACs.
I wonder how the court system handled their destruction of Millions of dollars of equipment at a company working on a project for the United States? Their UN-repentant attitudes should have gotten them life for that magnitude of damage.
These NUTBALLS break into a secure facility, WITH WEAPONS and maliciously damaged a multi-million dollar satellite system...... and they got 18 months. Meanwhile, go into a theatre w/ a cell phone and cam a movie and receive life in a gulag. Yep.. our justice system is working as intended.
I would say my comment was tongue in cheek, but I'm afraid that appendage has already been chewed off.
If I sound stupid, it's not me talking....
(Morbo voice) "GPS Does Not Work That Way!!!"
You know when it's okay to shout fire in a crowded theatre? When it's on fire.
1992 is not 2015. Just a thought!
This story only proves that Hollywood has more influence than god over people's beliefs and actions.
-It's too bad the satellite lab didn't have a surplus of giant yellow barrels of explosive fluid stacked conveniently among the servers like they are in the movies.
As it stands, the unique signal weakly broadcast from the chip on my credit card can be tracked from orbit. And General Keith B. Alexander, even retired from the NSA, remains the kind of lying sack of shit who learned how to do so while looking you straight in the eyes.
So, in a battle between automatic rifles and flint-locks, which side has the advantage? You might need over 10 flint lock equipped soldiers to take down each soldier on the other side who is carrying an AK-47.
Now, give one side sextants and binoculars and the other GPS and aerial imagery of the battlefield. If the flint locks get the GPS, they've got a fighting chance of 1:1 parity... if it goes the way it did in Desert Storm, the winning side has lower casualty rates in-theater during battle than they do back home during training.
The difference here is that Rosa Parks did not destroy the bus
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.
Truckers don't need gps to drive, ships can be navigated w/o gps, even ICBMs don't need gps (inertial guidance systems would still work fine). Airliners can still be navigated as well. The only ones at total risk are the idiots who, when their in-car gps says "turn right now" do so without even looking. They'll just have to park and hitch-hike, which will be an improvement.
And the cloud? Come on - it's just servers. The lack of a super-accurate timing signal will have no more effect than it does on your home pc.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
There's an interesting article in today's WSJ (03/06/15) about a current DARPA contest involving humanoid robots. A Tokyo-based company lead the early trial run. That company was just bought by Google who then withdrew that robot from the competition. Google has been quietly acquiring similar companies including Boston Dynamics. It appears that Google is trying to flex some moral muscle to keep robots out of military hands. Sure, there will be other companies that will fill the void but I'd venture to say that Google is going to try to sue them all for patent infringement.
Am I the only person who read "axes" in the headline as "plural of a Cartesian coordinate axis", not "sharp metal wedge on a stick"?
I was expecting the summary to talk about confusing GPS using an esoteric mathematical axis transformation, not hitting it with an ax!
And nuclear war winnable?
This guy is a moron. GPS (and other technologies) make precision guided munitions possible. Which means smaller and fewer warheads are needed to take out a target. So, they reduce collateral damage and the need to escalate to strategies like carpet bombing. Or nuke the entire region to take out a few select targets.
Have gnu, will travel.
Extremist are rarely able to reconsider their opinions when proven wrong. That is what makes them extremists in the first place.
If anyone did this nowadays they'd be facing 20 years minimum.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
He wanted to bring attention to the future problems of GPS. Fine. But I think he went about it in the worst way possible:
Grab an ax and start banging it on the side of a satellite.
Yeah, that will work great, because people generally think highly of people wildly swinging an ax around while destroying public property.
The goal of GPS is to make weapon more accurate, which is a good thing.
When your weapon are inaccurate, you compensate with more firepower and it results in more collateral damage. It's because of low accuracy that we had monstrosities like the 100Mt Tsar Bomba. The idea was that even if we missed the target, the blast was big enough to take it down.
Using forged steel axes instead of stone axes. Fucking hypocrites. I'd have jumped up and down howling and beat it with animal bones.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
The original "hacktivists"
Historically, tech developments like gunpowder, splitting the atom, air flight and GPS are double-edged swords and it's rare that they don't entail some risks to human society. Once the tech is invented, fighting it with an axe is pretty much pointless. There's no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. The best thing to do is promote the beneficial uses and try to take the edge from the destructive uses. All the guy with the axe did was cost the taxpayers some money.
I was going to say, 'Put your tin foil hat on son'. But the tin foil hats never worked. The trouble was the voices were already inside. 'They told me to do it, destroy the evil machine people who lived inside the satellites. I had to do it.' ... Now everything's much better, nice and empty and the voices have gone.' Oh hang on I'm dead the government must have done it. Now where's my foil hat?
'I solved the problem now, took a big drill to my skull, drilled out a nice big hole and scooped out
[sarcasm]
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
We have to let the world go as it will. Maybe our time here is truly meant to be finite.
Back then, $1 million was about what a person could expect to earn in a lifetime. Such deliberate damage, with malice of forethought, should be treated the same as if he had murdered 50 people.
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