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Falun Gong Hacks Chinese Satellite
maetenloch writes: "Last week Falun Gong hackers in China were able to briefly take over the Sinosat-1 satellite and broadcast a banner for several minutes on all channels of China Central Television. This was apparently repeated several time on different channels on Sunday but so far the Chinese government has imposed a news blackout on the incident. However thanks to the Internet and the millions of witnesses, word has leaked out. Surprisingly, security on satellites can be very weak - often transponders are left on when not active and will continue to rebroadcast whatever is beamed at them. It's believed that Falun Gong used a 3 meter dish antenna mounted on a vehicle to overpower the government's uplink signal. This is not the only time that satellite signals have been hacked - there was the famous 'Captain Midnight' incident in 1986 and it's believed that Iraq has been attacking Kurdish satellite tv channels for several years. Hackers have even (discreetly) made use of the U.S. Navy's FleetSatCom satellites."
Friends of Falun Gong
The Falun Gong take on the story is here:
Revealing Broadcasts Are Truly Serving the People-- From the Editors of FalunInfo.net: Falun Gong Practitioners Risk their Lives to Tell the Truth
If you would like to help out the cause, there is a page about it here:
Become a Friend- Alleviate the Suffering, End the Injustice
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Because the Chinese government aren't exactly great at the whole freedom of speech thing.
Because they've been imprisoning Falun Gong members for years now.
Because Falun Gong feel that they have no way of expressing their views to the population.
Saying that, this isn't exactly a clever thing to do. I can't imagine the Government are going to take it very well. Of course, unless the government are doing it themselves to discredit Falun Gong, but that's getting a bit Ollie Stone for me...
Not true... I was using circa 1970 equipment in the mid 90's when I was doing satellite control/operations.
I've not read the parent... but I'll just comment on Falungong anyway. I have no respect for them.
They lie about being the ones to develop qigong (which has been around for thousands of years)
They use spirituality to promote their own political agenda.
And, what makes me the most mad, their leader hides out in NY while he has his followers in China gettings themselves killed (both by burning themselves and pulling stunts like this)
I'd call it a personality cult.
Oh -- and they have no political plan that's viable. This, in my opinion, is very irresponsible and dangerous. Many millions of people would die should there be revolution in china. many millions more would die if there wasn't a VERY strong government after the revolution.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
Considering the PRC government's stance and actions in regard to Falun Gong, you can imagine what a hot little item a video tape containing any of these broadcasts would be, and how long you'd sit in a prison cell for even showing it to the neighbors.
It's somewhat reminiscent of this quote: Leia: "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You need to read Stratfor, and maybe some Foreign Affairs magazine.
Fulan Gong originally had no political aspirations at all. Mostly just a self help group drawing on an odd collection of Chinese cultural traditions.
But then the communist gov't decided there were too many of them (and a huge number of them were party officials themselves) and decided to repress them.
All attempts to change the opinion of the Chinese gov't have failed, leaving the multitudes of followers with a choice:
1. Disappear
2. Foster regime change
Since most members were part of the emerging middle class it is not surprising to see the kind of sophisticated hacking taking place. At least one hacking team has been caught and disappeared into the Chinese prison system. Which just shows that this group is far more sophisticated and robust than any had thought. They must have several teams out there. They are not just hacking satellites either- but also hijacking cables.
Most of the attacks have taken place in North Eastern China- The Rust Belt of China. This area has the highest unemployment of the Nation, and has seen many demonstrations against the Gov't in the past several years. Again, this shows the sophistication of the group's planners and reveals their goal: change the gov't to one that will allow for freedom of expression and religion.
As for comments by people calling them zealots and criminals, I'd take this lot over the lot of Zealots and criminals that has been running China for the past 50+ years any day!
China is a great place (lived in Taiwan and Asia for 5 years), but the communists have done tremendous damage to Chinese culture (most notably during the Cultural Revolution)
Does that help you understand?
Fa = Rules, methods, ways
Lun = a wheel.
Gong = a closest term in English is 'breathing excise', this is exactly the same word 'kung' as in the popular term 'Kungfu'. Of course, Gong always refer to prolong practice which will eventually lead to ultima goal of getting harmony with the Universe. Some people would consider practising 'Gong' as a method of making themselves stronger, to fight better, etc.. In fact, there are a lots of different 'Gong' in Chinese's history.
I'm not a memeber of Fa Lun Gong, and I really not in position to speak for them, but to my best of the knowledge, their 'Gong' is strongly related to religion as the 'FaLun' is an equipment being used by the monks of Buddhism. The 'FaLun', in buddhism, is a symbol of the Universe.
FaLun Gong, thus, is a 'Gong' to practise in order to build a 'FaLun' within your own body.
Their theory seems so unrealistic to me.
Sounds like somebody from the Blue Cube, the USAF Satellite Control Center in Sunnyvale, CA. That place had the Technology that Put Men On the Moon, the same Philco green-screen consoles that NASA Houston used for Apollo. The computers were UNIVAC and Control Data mainframes from the same period. That old gear was used into the 1990s. The upgrade project in the 1980s ("let's put it all on an IBM mainframe") didn't work, but finally, in the 1990s, control was moved to UNIX boxes and to a USAF base elsewhere.
Channel Zero by Brian Wood is a great graphic novel that has a subplot similar to this.. Just change the setting to NYC under Giuliani, and the Falun Gong to a totally disaffected super-hacker-chic trying to wake-up the general populace to the insanity and brutality of the city government.
The recent political philosophy work "Empire" by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri cites this condition as a hallmark of the new world order of Empire, centered of course in America, but nonetheless active in all sovereign governments working by or towards the power of capitalism. In the long run, China probably qualifies here.
Note their characterization, and how it compares to the Falun Gong and to Channel Zero:
"[These events] are educational lessons in the classroom of administration and the chambers of government -- lessons that demand repressive instruments. The primary lesson is that such events cannot be repeated if the processes of capitalist globalization are to continue. These struggles, however, have their own weight, their own specific intensity, and moreover they are immanent to the procedures and developments of imperial power. They invest and sustain the process of globalization themselves. Imperial power whispers the names of the struggles in order to charm them into passivity, to construct a mystified image of them [e.g. slashdot], but most important to discover which processes of globalization are possible and which are not. In this contradictory and paradoxical way the imperial processes of globalization assume these events, recognizing them as both limits and opportunities to recalibrate Empire's own instruments. The processes of globalization would not exist or whould come to a halt if they were not continually both frustrated and driven by these explosions of the multitude that touch immediately on the highest levels of imperial power." [Empire, Pp. 59]