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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."
Well?
There are ways to go about it, but this isn't it...
I'm curious, which ways are that?
I find it hard to say what to think about such people. They're on the far end of the scale, but they do have a point. We all react more strongly to some things than to others, and they focus on that. What i'm wondering most, you start off by calling them crazy, but are they? Seriously, prove them wrong (or rather, they're being proved right a bit more every day). It's just not the immediate end of the world as they may view it, but is being more sensitive to such things being crazy?
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.
Their claims are what identify them as crazy.
From the summary:
When they start comparing reality to sci-fi apocalypse movies then there is a problem.
And when they start destroying things because of it, they've gone into "crazy" territory.
They've identified a legitimate problem, although they don't have a solution.
As it turned out, technology has wound up monitoring our daily lives. We have what amounts to a Telescreen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... monitoring everything we read and write.
Except for cash, federal agencies monitor every bank deposit and withdrawal, and every financial transaction.
(That's how Elliot Spitzer got caught hiring an escort -- and he was a multimillionaire governor of New York State.)
And they can seize cash.
If you're ever arrested, you have a police record that you can never escape.
We have license plate scanners and facial identification in the works that will be able to follow every car and every face.
The government is owned by campaign contributors. We spend $1 billion on every presidential candidate, and if you can't pay you don't play.
Maybe when there's a threat to the public welfare that everybody is ignoring, smashing a $50 million satellite will raise the alarm and get some people interested. Sometimes it works. Unfortunately it didn't work this time.
He's lucky he only got 18 months. Today he might have been convicted on a terrorist offense, and gotten 20 years, longer than a lot of murder sentences.
I wish he had touched off a movement to protect our privacy, but it didn't work. Good try, though.
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?
Probably. In any case, several female scientists were directly involved in the Manhattan Project, so... false. And of course, my favorite genius starlet, Hedy Lamarr, invented a frequency hopping wireless technology for torpedo guidance (which was, naturally, rejected but not because she was female). I guess women just aren't big on gunpowder firearms.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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.