‘An Evil Person’
Falun Gong mixes slow-motion martial arts exercises with concepts borrowed from Buddhism and Taoism. The group was outlawed by the People’s Republic of China on July 21 for allegedly spreading “superstitious, evil thinking.”
     Since then, Webmasters for many Falun Gong sites outside China report that their servers have been overloaded, preventing practitioners from accessing Web pages and causing system crashes. Others have reported being spammed by thousands of e-mails and computer-virus attacks.
     Hackers have attempted to break into at least four sites, succeeding in at least two cases. Sites in Ireland and in Nottingham, Britain, were hacked into and anti-Falun Gong articles posted.
     Bao Zhu, a Falun Gong practitioner in Dublin, Ireland, says the site he ran, www.yuanming.org.uk , came under continuous attack from July 23 to July 26. At first the attackers jammed the server so that no one could access the site. Then they hacked in, deleted all the files and replaced them with an article, in Chinese, that had previously been distributed by the Chinese government.
     The article, a negative biography of Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi, says Hongzhi “is not the ‘highest Buddha’ who brings salvation to suffering people, but an evil person who has had an extremely disastrous effect on society … Li is not bringing salvation to practitioners, but is in fact leading them to a disastrous and miserable end, and Falun Gong is doing enormous harm to both the mental and physical health of people.”

Maryland Site Attacked
Bob McWee, a Maryland practitioner who runs www.falunusa.net, says his site received a denial-of-service attack, in which the attacker sent repeated connection requests to the server from phony addresses. Because the addresses were false, McWee’s servers were unable to respond and the flood of requests tied up his server, preventing it from responding to valid requests. As a result, no one could access his Web site and the server continually crashed.
     With requests coming in at a rate of 20 per second, his site was down from July 21 through July 23, until he blocked the attacks.
     “When I finally figured out what it was and blocked it, then the attacks got heavier,” McWee says. “So they definitely were trying to bring my servers down.”
     The attacks stopped Wednesday, he says.
     One of the phony return addresses the attackers used happened to be the IP address of a U.S. Department of Transportation server. As a result, the Falun Gong sites tried to send acknowledgement messages to the DOT server, McWee says.
     When DOT officials saw the unauthorized messages coming from sites such as www.falunusa.net, www.falundafa.ca and www.falundafa.org, it contacted the operators of the sites to find out why they were being sent, according to McWee and other Webmasters.
     Bill Adams, a spokesperson for the Transportation Department, says the department won’t answer questions or confirm what happened “for security reasons.”

Embassy Disavows Knowledge
Hackers also tried to break into McWee’s site and to www.falundafa.ca but failed. McWee and Jason Xiao, the Webmaster for www.falundafa.ca, say they traced the hackers to an IP address from China that was registered with China Telecom by a division of China’s Public Security Ministry.
     “If they banned every Falun Gong site in China, why not try to block them everywhere else?” McWee says. “It doesn’t surprise me that they would attempt to do this.”
     Yu Shuing, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, says he is aware of the complaints that Falun Gong sites had been attacked, but does not know who was responsible.
     “About so-called hacking, I have no knowledge,” he says.
     In the eyes of Falun Gong practitioners, the Chinese government is trampling on the rights of not only its own citizens but of people in democratic societies.
     “We are just volunteers maintaining our own private site, right?” says Jillian Ye, a Toronto practitioner who operates www.falundafa.ca and www.minghui.ca, which were attacked and inaccessible for a week. “What strength do we have to fight back against big government if they use their full strength to try to destroy our site? It is very unfair.” 

Cuban Totalitarianism	Cuban 'Psychiatry'	Cuban 'Journalism '
'Cuba & Terrorism' (US Department of State)	Cuban-Chinese Weapons Build-up (Miami Herald)	Cuban Weapons Of 'Mass Destruction'

'An Innocent Victory?'
( Ithaca Journal: 06/01/00 )

 

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