Time Magazine Reports Falun Gong Practitioners' Satellite Overriding
By Matthew Forney
07/08/2002 [Practitioners] of the Chinese spiritual practice Falun Gong often use high-tech tools to spread
their message in China, where the [group] is banned. But the group's latest tactic--overriding
Chinese satellite Sinosat 1 and replacing its regular programming for 10 minutes last week with
fuzzy text reading " Falun Dafa Is Good"--stunned government officials with its
sophistication. ( Falun Dafa is the name given to the group's beliefs.) To pull off the feat, the [practitioners] needed a nearly 30-ft. satellite dish [...] that would
fire a perfectly tuned beam at Sinosat 1. Since two beams on the same frequency yield nothing but
static, someone in Beijing had to shut down the official programming to let the [overriding] message
through. The override was not a failure of Sinosat's encryption technology, says Ian Barnard, who runs
China operations for the South African firm MIH, provider of the encryption software. So was it
inept technicians? Or are there Falun Gong sympathizers somewhere in the state-run broadcasting
industry? COLOR PHOTO: VINCENT YU--AP Practicing Falun Gong is banned in China
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