Julian Assange's first hack: Galileo plutonium launch in 1989

I've posted this previously here but with my current trip to Florida (and with Assange having recently being released from the UK hell-hole) it seemed like a good time to share again. ~ Bruce

The leaflet above was advertising a protest we organized at the space center in Florida in 1989. This was during the period from 1987-1997 where 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.

In 2011 my son Julian (a debate coach), who grew up attending these events, 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. 

 
Julian told me, "Dad, 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 launchpad 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 were gathered at the Kennedy Space Center tourist area with nothing much to do, so each day during that week we assembled as many people as we could get and held another vigil and news conference which helped us tremendously to get the word out around the world about the deadly plutonium space launch program.

In chapter 1 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'? 

 
It just goes to show that you never know who is paying attention to your efforts. Who could have guessed that Julian Assange, who has become such a courageous journalist, would be moved enough 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 I came home from a Cape protest 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. Since then I've tried to stay 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 their whole life.
 

Bruce

    Clip:
   

 "JULIAN Assange has told the story of his childhood and adolescence twice - most recently to a journalist from The New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian, and some 15 years ago, secretly but in greater detail, to Suelette Dreyfus, the author of a fascinating book on the first generation of computer hacking, Underground, for which Assange was the primary researcher ...

    ... Nothing about Assange has ever been straightforward. One of the main characters in Underground is the Melbourne hacker Mendax. Although there is no way readers at that time could have known it, Mendax is Julian Assange.

    In the late 1980s, Assange joined the underground subculture of hacking that was forming in Melbourne. By October 1989 an attack was mounted from Australia on America's NASA computer system via the introduction of what was called the WANK worm, in an attempt to sabotage the Jupiter launch of the Galileo rocket as part of an action of anti-nuclear activists.

    In an article he later published in the left-wing magazine CounterPunch, Assange would claim the WANK worm attack was "the origin of hacktivism"...