How Activists Tried To Destroy GPS With Axes 247
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."
Ok then... (Score:5, Insightful)
...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...
Re:Ok then... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Ok then... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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When Hollywood has invested tens of millions of dollars not only developing a story, but promoting it into the collective consciousness, it is not crazy to leverage that as a shorthand to express your point.
Unfortunately, many crazy people do use this shortcut, so it makes it tricky to use without also appearing crazy yourself - whether you are, or are not.
Re:Ok then... (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Science fiction, as a whole, has no innate purpose.
Some science fiction his constructive criticism of society. Some is totally nonconstructive criticism, some is about abstract philosophical concepts, and some is just about cool robots fighting.
Terminator leans toward the latter.
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No. Science fiction, as a whole, has no innate purpose.
Some science fiction his constructive criticism of society. Some is totally nonconstructive criticism, some is about abstract philosophical concepts, and some is just about cool robots fighting.
Terminator leans toward the latter.
While it leans toward the latter, there is criticism of society, at least, in The Terminator and Terminator II.
Behind those robot fights there is criticism of the destructive consequences of the constant accumulation of power and resources by some small groups, a trend which may eventually turn against them. If you exclude the technological layer, it immediately becomes an ages old story of people struggling to survive a sieging or occupation power in almost hopeless disadvantage.
The aspect that the most
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There are also comments on society in Harlequin romance novels. And comic books, And Broadway plays. And probably every other genre of every media every used.
I'd ask you what your point is, but obviously, there isn't one that isn't forced. And apparently irrelevant.
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I have watched the terminator, and if you think there's meaningful subtext there, it might be that James Cameron is a self loathing man hater. Or he wrote that in the hopes of getting laid. I mean, hell, that quote right there. Colt, Smith and Wesson, those aren't names of guns. Those are names of companies. Guns tend be named more like 9mm, or AK-47, or AR-15, or 1911.
And god forbid if a company be named after the founder. Cuz you know, that only happens in the land of fire arms. That quote you just
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I was still a young punk when Terminator (1) hit theatres, and it was my little brain's first grappling with a causal loop.
"Okay, so he has to go back in time to save the mother of the son who will one day lead the human resistance in the war against the machines... oh shit, and he's John Conner's father... but wait, don't the computers know the timeline cannot really be altered?"
Re:Ok then... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Ok then... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sarah Connor is supposed to come accross as an unreasonable, crazy sociopath, because she is. She is a bad mother, is quick to resort to violence and killing, and has an irrational hatred of men, however much we might understand how she was driven to that perspective. In that quote there she bangs on about the mystical power birth and pregnancy and its life affirming power shortly after trying to murder a man in cold blood in the house his wife and children are sleeping in. You are not supposed to like her, pity her maybe, but not like her.
Compare her to Ripley from Alien and Aliens, who is a far more idealized. Connor from Terminator 2 is a critique of a particular brand of feminine fetishizing feminism, not an endorsement of it.
Re:Ok then... (Score:5, Insightful)
A man also painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, discovered a vaccine for polio, and invented Cookie Crisp cereal. It's almost as if some people can do good things and some people can do bad things. And sometimes, and this is totally crazy, the same person can do some good things and some bad things!
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"You're too stupid to exist."
And if you people had paid more attention to some of your own prophetic writers (Jean Raspail, Michel Houellebecq, et. al.) a few years ago, your ancient continent wouldn't be the jihadist colony it is becoming today.
Re:Ok then... (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Ok then... (Score:5, Insightful)
Protip: If your anti-government, anti-military, anti-establishment stance is greeted with no warmness on /., you probably need to do a little soul searching.
Re:Ok then... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ok then... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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International treaty that, if every actually finished, will get ignored by war mongering countries/states.
Re:Ok then... (Score:5, Insightful)
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/... [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re:Ok then... (Score:4, Insightful)
Privacy of whom? The same general public posting their entire lives all over facebook and twitter?
I also wonder if these 2 idiots have twigged that the entire internet is also a former military project. I bet that doesn't stop them using it though.
They're just a pair of paranoid crazies. Calling them luddites is being unfair to the latter. At least luddites had a sane reason for what they did , not just OMG , The Sky Will Fall!!!
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I use my twitter account mostly to find news on rare occasions (one per month approximately), barely ever write. I don't even have a facebook account at all. I am part of the general public. Because some people use twitter and FB to self-expose everything, is not a basis for supporting government intrusion into every person's private life.
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Nanny state or not, I would argue that multmillionaires and especially state governors should expect to be more publicly scrutinized than the average God fearing, church going, blue collar family. As a governor, you are a public figure, you have thrust yourself into the spotlight and successfully won the trust of the people. And the rich naturally draw attention because, by definition, they control more of what everybody wants than the average person does.
Some of the nanny state is the powerful elite turn
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It's not really hard at all to defend Assange. In fact, he should never have needed a defense in the first place. Though he may be something of an attention-seeking douchebag; he's also never, to my knowledge, been either a citizen or resident of the United States. So there's no legitimate reason for him ever to be subject to our laws or for him to pay heed to them in any way whatsoever. Our government's subversion and manipulation of both the Swedish and British justice systems in order to (try to) get
Re:Ok then... (Score:4, Informative)
Even with the editing, 'Collateral murder' showed normal legal war.
Assange is useless. Wikileaks doesn't do anything Cryptome didn't do better first.
Re:Ok then... (Score:5, Insightful)
What i'm wondering most, you start off by calling them crazy, but are they?
For starters, if we get into a war with the machines, we're going to need heavier firepower than an ax. Even a sledgehammer or a hacksaw would be better. Second, this sort of Luddite behavior is a terrible strategy. It only keeps you from being able to compete/fight with machines. Any side which wins such a war is going to be a heavy technology player.
Third, this sort of thinking has already resulted in a considerable disparity to humanity's disadvantage. After all, there's almost no regulatory and cultural obstacles to improving machines (or for that matter a variety of lab animals) provided by human societies, but there's a vast number of obstacles to improving humans. That's because we value the lives of the few people who could be exposed to harm in a medical experiment more than the billions of people whose lives could be improved greatly by the results of the medical experiments.
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As we increase our population, we increasingly rely on machines and technology to support that population.
As we develop machines and technology, we are reducing the machines dependence upon us.
Surveillance, lack of privacy, the end of secrets, these things all place advantage in the hands of whoever "knows all" and reduces the risks traditionally associated with wars, or any kind of intervention by force. And, the machines have first access to all this information.
Clearly, if these trends continue, it will
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What does one uppity black chick refusing to sit in the back of the bus have to contribute?
The guy with the ax was early, let's hope the next one isn't late.
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Re:Ok then... (Score:4, Insightful)
What i'm wondering most, you start off by calling them crazy, but are they?
For starters, if we get into a war with the machines, we're going to need heavier firepower than an ax...
For starters, to even get to a stage where we would even possibly be at war with machines would imply that we don't destroy ourselves before reaching that level of technological advancement. It is far more likely that we destroy our civilization within the next century through a mixture of extremism, resource wars, and general human stupidity than developing some sort of AI that will wipe us out.
The guy in the article is crazy. Technology is not the problem. People are, and you're not going to convince people to support your cause by doing pointless/crazy things like hacking up satellites with an ax.
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There are ways to go about it, but this isn't it...
I'm curious, which ways are that?
Find ways to avoid taxes (as opposed to evading them) like incorporating and writing everything off. Wars run on taxes.
Also, sneaking in and smashing something that's insured will just delay the inevitable. If you must take direct action, make it meaningful, and not just a fuckoff waste of time.
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" Seriously, prove them wrong "
And you are a Russian spy that is under deep cover planing the overthrow the US government and enslave all of us.
Seriously prove me wrong...
See the problem. You can not in any way prove me wrong but the idea is very crazy. If you want change Russian for space alien to push it a little farther into crazy.
When you take a violent action and justify with sci-fi movie you are will into the crazy range.
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Crazy is, by definition, the far end of the scale.
Not right, not wrong, different.
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Violence is the last resort of the incompetent.
Re:Ok then... (Score:4, Insightful)
No.
L. Long
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You can prove them wrong but it's like playing chess with a pigeon - you think you're winning, and then the pigeon shits on the board and flies off. Point being that reasoning with these people is a waste of everyone's time because their concerns are not based on reason, so reason can't defuse them. More likely that they'll see you as some sort of government operative, the existence of which PROVES that they're right!
That said - why is this guy crazy, you ask? Well first of all:
There are ways to go about it, but this isn't it...
I'm curious, which ways are that?
Well clearly it's not his way
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thank you, exactly
stoner philosophy is what we are dealing with here, but because they commit violence, we have to take their "deep thoughts" seriously?
if someone has actual insightful thoughts, they are a strong mind, and they don't resort to violence. if they resort to violence, that's proof we are dealing with a weak mind and mediocre thoughts
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Jury box gets you fined for contempt when you won't agree with your peers.
No it doesn't. It just results in a hung jury.
Re:Ok then... (Score:4, Interesting)
"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 [youtube.com]
Brezinski at a press conference
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kmUS--QCYY [youtube.com]
The real news:
http://therealnews.com/t2/ [therealnews.com]
http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverted-Totalitarianism/dp/069114589X/ [amazon.com]
http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Government-Surveillance-Security-Single-Superpower/dp/1608463656/ [amazon.com]
http://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Government-Michael-Glennon/dp/0190206446/ [amazon.com]
Look at the following graphs:
http://imgur.com/a/FShfb [imgur.com]
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html [ucsc.edu]
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 [businessinsider.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnkNKipiiiM [youtube.com]
Free markets?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349 [youtube.com]
Free trade?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju06F3Os64 [youtube.com]
http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Illusion-Literacy-Triumph-Spectacle/dp/1568586132/ [amazon.com]
"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/ [williamblum.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcA1v2n7WW4#t=2551 [youtube.com]
Re:So which way do you propose? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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The difference here is that Rosa Parks did not destroy the bus
So would that make them hacktivists then? (Score:5, Funny)
Well?
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they used axes, not hacksaws
so axtivists
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you're such a hack
Comment subjects need more letters, i can't put a (Score:2, Funny)
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?
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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 ha
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The Aftermath (Score:5, Funny)
I like to imagine an engineer coming in the next morning, and crying like the Rancor handler [wikia.com] when he beheld the work the axe had wrought.
Well done, smart guy (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Don Quixote. Or possibly Don Quichotte, if you're an opera fan.
Or were you referring to Donald Quichote? If so, my bad....
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Re:Well done, smart guy (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
That is awfully naive. A presidential election costs each candidate $1 billion, and they raise the money mostly from billionaire contributors and corporate interests. Politicians don't listen to grassroots activists, they listen to $100,000 contributors.
A lot of people did just what you described to try to stop the Iraq war. It didn't work. So we killed 650,000 innocent people and handed over Iraq to ISIS. Good work, Bushie! (BTW, there were no WMDs.)
A lot of people did just what you described, after Obama was elected, to push for a single payer health care system, and when that didn't work, for a public option, but they couldn't match the big lobbying groups, like the drug industry, the hospitals, and the insurance companies. So now you have to pay $8,500 a year for health care.
Even Martin Luther King couldn't get anywhere without some pretty powerful supporters who could raise a lot of money and pull some political strings. (And the FBI was tapping his phones.) I'm not sure MLK could have done it today. He might have wound up with a 20-year sentence for terrorism.
The U.S. is getting economically more unequal, the plutocrats are running the country, the Republicans have figured out a way to fool most of the people most of the time (TV), and I don't see a way out. If some radical wants to take direct action, doing something crazy that seems pointless to me, I can't tell him that I have a better way. If we're going to talk about futile destruction, destroying a $50 million satellite makes a lot more sense than signing up to fight in Iraq.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/kateno... [buzzfeed.com]
Bernie’s Reasons Why Not
The progressive champion weighs running for president. “The situation is fairly dismal.”
Kate Nocera and Ben Smith
BuzzFeed
March 4, 2015
(Bernie Sanders may not run against Hillary Clinton for 2 reasons: (1) It has to be done well, or people will say that the ideas themselves don't have support. (2) It may be impossible to raise enough money to compete with Hillary Clinton, whose network plans to raise $500 million.)
“The depressing part about that is that even if you did something phenomenally well — say you have 3 million people giving a $100 contribution each, which would be an enormous achievement — you’d be raising one-third of what the Koch brothers say they are spending.”
“The question then occurs whether or not at this point in history you can beat the money folks,” he muses. “It may be that they have too much power and too much money and a real progressive may not be able to take them on.”
Re:Well done, smart guy (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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No actually Obama handed Iraq to ISIS. I can agree Bush went in there with some very naive thinking and it was probably a bad idea. After the fall of Sadam and some initial missteps by Rumsfeld and Bremer the Bush administration learned from their mistakes.
The Iraq situation was in point of fact one of nearly continuous improvement from that point forward until Obummer took office. Obama having campaigned on getting out of Iraq elected to ignore all of the advice the out going Bush people tried to pass
Re:Well done, smart guy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well done, smart guy (Score:5, Interesting)
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".
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Chemical weapons are WMD's. Whether they should be so included or not is debatable, but they ARE listed as a type of WMD.
And there is no doubt whatsoever that Saddam was using chemical weapons on his Kurdish population.
In other words, yes, there were WMD's.
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And you know how I know you're full of shit?
The idea that the plutocracy is solely a republican thing.
Oh no doubt, they bear half the blame, but the country is and has always been majority democrat: and hell, congress was a democratic lock for what, 50 years?
I've always been astounded at the cognitive dissonance necessary for tendentious people like yourself to assert that "it's all those dirty republicans".
For every Koch (which you invoke with the trembling nervousness of some medieval priest talking about
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Politicians don't listen to grassroots activists, they listen to $100,000 contributors.
Yup. This is largely due to the fact that voters don't listen to grassroots activists either - they do whatever the ads on TV tell them to do, maybe augmented by whatever the union boss or preacher down the street tells them.
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"We have to pass it and THEN find out what's in it."
How stupid a sheeple do you have to be to be to believe that drivel? Every single word was written in plain English in a bill that had been largely published for years, and then amended with language which *by law* is read aloud to the congressmen (they don't even have to know how to read) as long as they are actually at their workplace during business hours and don't decline the reading. Every. Single. Word.
You are a fucking moron for believing what you h
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Right or not, once you refer to people as "sheeple", your argument is invalid.
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You have no idea how bills are passed, do you?
It really shows.
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Yeah - innocent. Being an Iraqi doesn't make you magically guilty. ISIS were born from the Iraqi insurgency, which was only as successful as it was because Bush removed Saddam and disbanded the army (returning thousands of weapons-trained men to civilian life, without a salary and without security). Whether Saddam wanted everyone to know he had WMDs or not doesn't matter, as the US simply made up their intelligence. We know this. It doesn't matter if the person after Bush made it better or worse - with
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In news at hand: (Score:2, Funny)
Moron is still a moron 20 years later.
Why call them activists? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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I would call them vandals too - I assume you are referring to the Boston Tea Party. The lead up to the American Revolution was mostly a series of thinly justified acts of vandalism, hooliganism, and general recalcitrance by the American colonists, fueled by an alarming amount of anti-royal paranoia. While Parliament and the royal governors often responded to these provocations tactlessly, it does not excuse the colonists' bad behavior. The fact that the Revolution was successful, and that much good ultim
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The "Tea Party" was the destruction of property by a bunch of hooligans.
If you actually read history, you should know that there were other cities in the colonies that simply refused the tea to be unloaded from the ships. The question was of 'taxation without representation', so they blocked the tea from unloading unless they also had representation in proportion to the taxes they would have to pay from it. The ships in Philadelphia and New York returned home without unloading the tea as dictated by the loc
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The real issue is not the technology. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Exactly. There's nothing wrong with technology or tools. It's how they're used that makes all the difference.
Which is why I'm feeling kind of hopeless about the ubiquitous surveillance thing. Yes, encryption is great. It is definitely better than no encryption. But you still can't trust it.
Are the algorithms secure? NSA already intentionally weakened one. And they employ more mathematicians than anyone else in the world. They could have cracked AES and SHA-2/3/whatever years ago and how would you know?
Can't
There is no such thing... (Score:2, Insightful)
"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.
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If the two of us ever get into a fight to the death, I'll gladly be the loser walking away.
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If the two of us ever get into a fight to the death, I'll gladly be the loser walking away.
This.
And Mr. "There is no winnable war" needs to re-examine even some recent history. Does he really think that reborn, modern economies like Germany's represent the outcome of a war not won by those who reacted to that country's earlier aggression? Does he really think that the communists now running Vietnam didn't win their conflict? Does he really think that the rebels in the American colonies didn't win their war with the British crown?
Gaseous platitudes about such things made in an attempt to wi
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you're talking about perpetual war, different concept from winnable war
It all makes sense now... (Score:2)
"...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.
Wrong target (Score:2)
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.
Ever read the Unibomber Manifesto? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Unibomber said a lot of the same sort of things. [youtube.com] 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 [theguardian.com] 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. [wikipedia.org]
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. [youtube.com]
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?
Pity he didn't realize (Score:2)
Activists? How about Hacktivists? (Score:2)
I mean, if there's ever an appropriate place for the term, it would probably be here.
Thank God (Score:2)
Thank God he did this. If the GPS system had been launched we'd all be dead by now.
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No regrets, are they still under arrest? (Score:2)
So...wait, let me get this straight... (Score:2)
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.
From the article (Score:2)
(Morbo voice) "GPS Does Not Work That Way!!!"
Google and robotics (Score:2)
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
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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
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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 ho
Re:Funny Quote from Article (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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Re:Funny Quote from Article (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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