Febuary 21 2006, Falun Gong News Bulletin

Special Internet Edition

• AP: CHINA CRITICS SAY CRACKDOWN REACHES U.S.
  
• FINANCIAL TIMES: INTERNET GIANTS GRILLED ON CHINA POLICIES
  
• FORBES: CRACKS IN THE WALL
  
• BUSINESSWEEK: OUTRUNNING CHINA’S WEB COPS
  
• WSJ: CHINESE INTERNET CENSORS FACE ‘HACKTIVISTS’ IN U.S.

ASSOCIATED PRESS: CHINA CRITICS SAY CRACKDOWN REACHES U.S.
WASHINGTON DC (2-15-2006) – “Peter Yuan Li was beaten, tied up, blindfolded with duct tape and robbed of two laptop computers last week by three Asian men who burst into his suburban Atlanta home with a gun and knife. He and other Chinese-Americans suspect it was no ordinary robbery.

Li, who works for a newspaper and Web site critical of the Chinese Communist Party, is one of several people tied to China’s banned Falun Gong spiritual movement who say they have been harassed and hit with break-ins in the United States by Chinese agents. They say China has carried its crackdown on dissidents to this country…

Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based press freedom group, has seen attacks on Falun Gong members in South Africa, Hong Kong and Australia, but said the one in the Atlanta area might be the most serious case yet.”

FINANCIAL TIMES: INTERNET GIANTS GRILLED ON CHINA POLICIES
WASHINGTON DC (2-16-2006) – “The giants of the internet industry were put on the defensive on Wednesday when [at a Congressional hearing] US lawmakers compared their compliance to Chinese censorship laws with the use of IBM’s technology in the organisation of the Holocaust…

Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican legislator, emphasised the Chinese government’s persecution of minorities in China, and introduced Peter Yuan Li, a Chinese-born American who was beaten in his home in Georgia this month…

In a Financial Times interview, the Falun Gong practitioner described being subjected to a ferocious beating at his home by Chinese and Korean speaking men who stole two laptops and his home telephone.”

FORBES: CRACKS IN THE WALL
NEW YORK (2-26-2006) – “Google is under attack for allowing its Chinese site to be hijacked by the authorities. Type the Chinese characters for ‘Falun Gong’ (prominent among China’s many outlawed spiritual movements) into google.cn, hit search the ‘entire Web’ and you get 626,000 hits of Communist Party propaganda…

A footnote at the page bottom, easily overlooked, tells Chinese surfers their search wasn’t complete. Meanwhile, a Falun Gong search in Chinese characters on Google in the Free World comes up with 4 million pages of all sorts, from supportive to hostile.”

BUSINESSWEEK: OUTRUNNING CHINA’S WEB COPS
NORTH CAROLINA (2-20-2006) – “From an undisclosed location in North Carolina, Bill Xia is fighting a lonely war against China’s censors. From morning till well into the night, the Chinese native plays a cat-and-mouse game, exploiting openings in Beijing’s formidable Internet firewall and trying to keep ahead of the cybercops who patrol the Web 24-7…

A member of the banned Chinese sect Falun Gong, Xia is so fearful that Beijing will persecute his family back in China, that he refused to be photographed for this story, reveal where exactly he was born, or even provide his age beyond saying he’s in his 30s…

Chinese citizens hoping to read about the latest crackdown on, say, Falun Gong or the most recent peasant rebellion in the provinces can use technology provided by Xia’s Dynamic Internet Technology Inc. to mask their travels to forbidden Web sites…

Says Xiao Qiang, who teaches journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and runs the China Internet Project: ‘These tools have a critical impact because the people using them are journalists, writers, and opinion leaders.’”

WSJ: CHINESE INTERNET CENSORS FACE ‘HACKTIVISTS’ IN U.S.
NEW YORK (2-14-2006) – “Surfing the Web last fall, a Chinese high-school student who calls himself Zivn noticed something missing. It was Wikipedia … For Zivn, trying to surf this and many other Web sites…brought just an error message. But the 17-year-old had had a taste of that wealth of information and wanted more. ‘There were so many lies among the facts, and I could not find where the truth is’…

Then some friends told him where to find Freegate…Behind Freegate is a North Carolina-based Chinese hacker [and Falun Gong practitioner] named Bill Xia.…Freegate has advantages over some of its peers. As the product of ethnically Chinese programmers, it uses the language and fits the culture…

… Zivn says he uses Freegate three to four times a week to read domestic and international news. Besides the BBC site, he frequents Radio Free Asia and the Epoch Times, a newspaper that champions Falun Gong. All have Chinese-language news services normally blocked by China’s firewall.

Zivn says he isn’t a member of Falun Gong and describes his political slant as ‘neutral.’ … ‘I am just gradually getting used to the truth about the real world,’ he writes.”

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(2/21/2006 2:10)