Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad like to blame the uprising in Iran on outside influences. They particularly like to point their fingers at the British and the Americans, along with a requisite nod in the direction of the Zionists--a time-honored pretext for avoiding blame for discontent in their country. But, for all the phantom rabble-rousers, there’s one outside influence that has actually helped shape events: the Falun Gong.
To most metropolitan Americans, the Falun Gong are the yellow-shirt-wearing adherents of a Chinese religious sect who hand out flyers on street corners. Those flyers describe the group’s struggle against the Chinese government, which has banned the Falun Gong and subjected its members to organ-harvesting, electroshock therapy, and gulags. But, as the Chinese have escalated their efforts to stamp out the Falun Gong, the group has grown ever savvier in outwitting its oppressors. And it was the protestors in Iran who benefited from this savvy.
As the streets of Tehran erupted in the days following Mir Hossein Mousavi’s bizarrely lopsided defeat, the regime’s repressive apparatus kicked into full gear. Among its top priorities: shutting down access to the Internet. But, at this critical moment in the Islamic Republic’s history, some of the government’s Internet filters failed. Indeed, the most utopian proponents of the Internet’s liberating powers seemed vindicated--as social-networking sites organized mass demonstrations and YouTube videos documented the brutal truncheons of the basij and the making of martyrs.
When these dissident Iranians chatted with each other and the outside world, they likely had no idea that many of their missives were being guided and guarded by 50 Falun Gong programmers spread out across the United States. These programmers, who almost all have day jobs, have created programs called Freegate and Ultrasurf that allow users to fake out Internet censors. Freegate disguises the browsing of its users, rerouting traffic using proxy servers. To prevent the Iranian authorities from cracking their system, the programmers must constantly switch the servers, a painstaking process.
The Falun Gong has proselytized its software with more fervor than its spiritual practices. It distributes its programs for free through an organization called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC), sending a downloadable version of the software in millions of e-mails and instant messages. In July 2008, it introduced a Farsi version of its circumvention tool.
While it is hardly the only group to offer such devices, the Falun Gong’s program is particularly popular thanks to its simplicity and relative speed. In fact, according to Shiyu Zhou, the deputy director of GIFC, the Farsi software was initially so popular that the group shut it down soon after introducing it. Iranians had simply swamped their servers, even outnumbering Freegate’s Chinese users. (Iranian Internet restrictions are more lax than the Chinese, allowing much heavier outbound traffic than the GIFC is accustomed to handling.)
But, on the day after the presidential election this past June, the engineers reopened Freegate to Iranians, as a gesture of solidarity. And, once again, they were overwhelmed. “From then on, it got out of control,” Zhou told me. Within 20 hours, the number of Freegate users doubled to an estimated one million. Zhou and his comrades were faced with a wrenching decision. They could continue helping the Iranians, which might flood and wipe out all of their operations. Or they could focus on trying to preserve lines of communication for their core users in China. “We had to restrict the traffic in Iran or else all of our servers would crash,” Zhou said.
During the cold war, the dominant metaphor for describing the repression of totalitarian regimes was The Berlin Wall. To update that metaphor, we should talk about The Firewall. (The Great Firewall is what they call it in China.) There’s a dream that the censors manning it will be overcome and the Internet will be used as a force of liberation--giving closed societies a tantalizing glimpse of the West, allowing repressed people to build social movements. And all that’s a distinct possibility. But the Web is not nearly the implacable force for freedom that some of its champions have portrayed. The world’s authoritarians have shown just as much aptitude for technology as their discontented citizens. Indeed, the race to beat the Internet censors is a central battle in the global struggle for democracy--a cat-and-mouse game where the fate of regimes could rest in no small measure on the work of the Falun Gong and others who write programs to circumvent Web censorship.
The Internet tactics of the Chinese and Iranian governments began innocently enough in American libraries. To meet federal preconditions for funding, libraries installed cyber-nanny software that blocked the ISP addresses of pornographic websites. This software developed by Silicon Valley companies like Macafee became widely available. And some repressive regimes like Iran simply repurposed it.
China, however, had a keener understanding of how technologically sophisticated youth might find their way around such filters and set out to create a more stalwart firewall. According to Chinese dissident Harry Wu, the state spent $800 million and enlisted the help of U.S. tech giants like Nortel and Cisco Systems to develop an initiative called the Golden Shield. This was a massive effort to harness technology to control and monitor the citizenry, leading to the creation of digital identification cards containing a microchip that stores a person’s vital statistics (age, name, address, etc.) and a database that gives the state the capacity to recognize the voices and faces of its 1.3 billion people.
From the start, the Golden Shield was positioned to build an impenetrable firewall. That’s because China’s Internet traffic enters the country in fiber optic cables at only three locations. At these chokepoints, filters block many sites that have been flagged as unacceptable and scan unfamiliar sites for keywords (like “falun gong”) that suggest subversiveness. Robert Guerra, the project director for Freedom House’s Internet Freedom Initiative, compared China’s Internet infrastructure to a national highway system that is riddled with potholes and speed traps. “Even if you drove a Porsche on that highway, you would never be able to drive the car to its full capacity.”
Success doesn’t merely depend on technology. A large bureaucracy is deployed to fine-tune and enhance the filters--giving the Chinese the capacity to allow users to read The New York Times while denying them articles in the Times that the regime deems dangerous. And that full-time bureaucracy is supplemented by hundreds of thousands of nationalistic part-timers who are paid to post pro-government comments on blogs and to drown out dissenting voices in Web forums. These bloggers are called the Fifty Cent Army, indicating that Chinese Web labor is cheap.
The Golden Shield has become the envy of the authoritarian world. China has exported its technology to countries like Cuba and Belarus, according to Reporters Without Borders. And others, such as Iran, have studied their model. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard, for instance, has gotten into the game of Web censorship as part of a new initiative to counter what the regime dubs “soft revolution.”
For all the success of the Golden Shield, there are still gaps that it can’t fill. Censors have struggled to squash homegrown blogs, which can’t be blocked at inbound chokepoints (although newfangled local Internet providers have censored these sites). The Falun Gong understands the gaps. It has probed for them and then rushed through them.
Ecumenically, the Falun Gong can be more readily captured if you imagine Cat Stevens, Madonna, Tom Cruise, Carrie Prejean and Shirley MacLaine discussing soul searching while channeling Merlin on Dr. Phil.
Remember that scene in Hannah and Her Sisters when Mickey Sachs [no relation to Goldman] stumbles through la-la land in search of something to obviate the abyss? Well, it's like that only more infantile. It approaches Heaven's Gate but without the alien spacecraft.
Lost souls everywhere flock to stuff like this. Even Maoism is less batty. Well, if more deadly.
Be that as it may, repressive regimes everywhere are no doubt fighting a losing battle in keeping these reality challenged folks from lopping off some of the comrades infected by their own corrosive agenda. They are really both two different ways of reducing the human mind down to the mindlessness of "mass man". Someday they will march under the same banner: "Dittoheads of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but what's left of your brain!!"
The closest we come to to it here is The Holy Trinity: the worship of pop culture, mindless consumption and celebrity. You probably know some of these automatons yourself, don't you?
As for the relationship between Falun Gong and Reverend Moon, as an employee at the Washington Times, Lake may be able to nail that one down for you.
george
Alan Bersin reveals the Obama administration's plan to invest more in Mexico's broken judicial and law enforcement systems once violence is under control. Bersin is the Assistant Secretary for International Affairs and Special Representative for Border Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security.
Intellectual rigor. Honest reporting. Influential analysis. Don't miss another issue of the magazine considered "required reading" by the world's top decision-makers. Subscribe today.
Read Full Article »