Slashdot Mirror
Pakistan Bans Encryption
An anonymous reader writes "After some rumors of this last month, Pakistan has now officially told all of the country's ISPs that they need to block all encrypted VPNs since content running over such services cannot be monitored by the government."
Iran has been accused of jamming satellite connections in the past, as has Libya. The US apparently has the capability.
As for how it's possible, Wikipedia has a brief description of the process. Because of the satellite's distance, it's signal is relatively weak when it reaches the ground (you're familiar with the inverse-square law, right?). A terrestrial broadcast will be much stronger and can drown out the signal from the satellite.
(reposting this because I forgot to login. whoops)