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...
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.
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.
you're talking about perpetual war, different concept from winnable war
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage 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.
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'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.
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.