WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could be kicked out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London at any time as their new conservative government has been pressured by Washington to turn over the Internet activist to the US for 'prosecution of alleged crimes'. Since when is reporting on government corruption and secrecy a crime? With this in mind I wanted to repost a blog I did in 2011 after my son Julian, who is a debate coach in Taiwan, brought it to my attention that Assange had likely hacked the 1989 NASA launch from Florida that I organized protests to stop. Here is the story.
The leaflet above was advertising a
protest I organized at the space center in Florida in 1989. This was
during the period from 1987-1997 were we held one large protest after
the other against the
nuclearization and
weaponization of space. Sometimes there were 500 people there, frequently about 1,000 came, and our biggest ever was more than 5,000.
Just
today my son Julian, who grew up attending these events during his
childhood, sent me an email with a link to a book written by
Suelette Dreyfus with Research by Julian
Assange that was published in 1997. The book was called
Underground: Front Page. You can find the book
here
Julian told me, "One of the debate topics for the Harvard tournament is about
WikiLeaks and I've been doing a lot of research on Julian
Assange. Here's a link to a book he worked on...read the first chapter!!!"
So I dutifully clicked on the link.
Much
to my surprise I found that the authors began their book with an
account of the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice's 1989 campaign
to oppose
NASA's
launch of the Galileo plutonium-238 space probe that garnered
international media coverage. This was the first of three major nukes in
space campaigns that I led (the others Ulysses in 1990 and
Cassini in 1997).
The authors wrote:
For
weeks, the protesters had been out in force, demonstrating and seizing
media attention. Things had become very heated. On Saturday, 7 October,
sign-wielding activists fitted themselves out with gas masks and walked
around on street corners in nearby Cape Canaveral in protest. At 8 a.m.
on Monday, 9 October, NASA started the countdown for the Thursday
blast-off. But as Atlantis's clock began ticking toward take-off,
activists from the Florida Coalition for Peace and Justice demonstrated
at the centre's tourist complex.
That these protests had already taken some of the shine off NASA's
bold space mission was the least of the agency's worries. The real
headache was that the Florida Coalition told the media it would `put
people on the launch pad in a non-violent protest'. The coalition's
director, Bruce Gagnon,
put the threat in folksy terms, portraying the protesters as the little
people rebelling against a big bad government agency. President Jeremy Rivkin of the Foundation on Economic Trends, another protest group, also drove a wedge between `the people' and `NASA's
people'. He told UPI, `The astronauts volunteered for this mission.
Those around the world who may be the victims of radiation contamination
have not volunteered.'
I'll always remember the
1989 launch of Galileo because it was delayed over and over again for
about a week. The international media was gathered at the Kennedy Space
Center tourist area with nothing much to do so each day during that week
we'd assemble as many activists as we could get and hold another vigil
and news conference which helped us tremendously to get the word out
around the world about the deadly plutonium space launch.
In chapter one of this book is a whole section about a computer worm that got planted inside of
NASA's computers during this very time. Was the Galileo delay due to a hacker
trying to help us stop that launch? Was a hacker also trying to
symbolically "sit on the launch pad"?
The
authors wrote about NASA beginning to suspect that the worm inside
their computers was put there by protesters. (In fact at the time I
don't think I even had a computer or knew how to send email.)
NASA
was working in an information void when it came to WANK [worm planted
by hackers]. Some staff knew of the protesters' action down at the Space
Center, but nothing could have prepared them for this. NASA officials
were confident enough about a link between the protests against Galileo
and the attack on NASA's computers to speculate publicly that the two
were related. It seemed a reasonable likelihood, but there were still
plenty of unanswered questions.
It just goes to show that you never know who is paying attention to your efforts. Who could have known that Julian
Assange, who has become such a historic figure due to his courageous work with Wiki Leaks, would be
moved
enough by our campaign to feature it in the first chapter of his book?
Maybe it was because it was a classic story about out-of-control
technology and the "little peoples" reaction. Any way you cut it one has
to acknowledge that it has a nice twist.
One side story should
be told here as well. My son Julian was nine years old in 1989 and one
day during the campaign I came home and he had my gas mask on. In his most serious voice he
told me, "Don't worry Dad, if Galileo blows up I could wear this gas
mask for the rest of my life." He was trying to make me feel better. His
words cut right to my heart and my soul and virtually every day since
that time I have stayed true to the cause because I believe that no
child, my own or anyone
else's, should ever have to think of living in a radioactive wasteland wearing a gas mask for the rest of their life.
Bruce
