Robotic ravens: American ferret satellite operations during the Cold War
Stanford conducted a lot of aeronautics research, and the aeronautics department was naturally a target. Professors and graduate students regularly stood guard in the offices overnight, protecting their notes and equipment. But the protestors soon turned their attention to the Stanford Applied Electronics Laboratory, or SEL for short, which they knew conducted classified research.
James de Broekert, a researcher at the laboratory, had stood overnight guard in his lab protecting the safe and its classified contents. In April 1969 the protests came to a peak and de Broekert vividly remembered what happened. “The student radicals, together with their outside professional advisors, took over the classified research laboratory by force and held it as ‘liberated territory’ for nine days,” he recalled three decades later. “They put posters printed in Moscow and China on the walls, including Che Guevara posters.”
“Harris took an interest in our small elint receiver,” de Broeke