Safety and Security: Practitioners' Email Accounts

By an oversea Falun Gong practitioner

(Clearwisdom.net) Recently through conducting a comprehensive examination of all the local email servers, we found that many practitioners' account passwords had been stolen. The accounts had been compromised for long periods of time without being noticed by the owner, resulting in the serious problem of private information being stolen. Among the practitioners who own these accounts, some were key personnel of various projects and some routinely communicate with practitioners in China. Very important information such as practitioners' situations, notices from the Falun Dafa Association, government related work, and rescue effort details were stolen. This has brought great losses to Dafa work.

I recalled that a few months ago, some practitioners in China told me that their friends working in the police department had told them that the police could read all the Falun Dafa conference articles including those not publicly posted and those not read during the conferences. I did not really believe them before. As a matter of fact, all our conference articles have been sent via email. Learning that the email servers had been invaded, what they told me was not groundless.

Probably everyone still remembers the blacklist given to Icelandic Airlines in 2002 by the Chinese government. We have been trying to figure out why so many practitioners had been recorded on the blacklist. These practitioners included those who had remained out of the spotlight and even old ladies who almost never left their homes. Many practitioners who went to China told us the national security police interrogated them. The police claimed that they had the travel plans of all practitioners in their hands. In addition, the consul of a Chinese consulate in the US had threatened on TV that they knew the situations of every practitioner in a certain area.

Did these losses result from our lack of maintaining email security? The old forces may have exploited security gaps.

The details of how we clarify the truth to governments were stolen. For example, during Falun Dafa Month we sent out many truth clarifying materials to a few thousand officials of the local governments of some areas, but many of the officials had already received materials defaming Dafa from the Chinese consulates. This created many un-necessary difficulties in our truth clarification work.

The information about the activities concerning mainland China, such as sending truth clarifying materials and rescuing practitioners attracted special attention from the evil. The price of divulging this information is the lives of practitioners in China. Many activities were sabotaged when the activities were about to succeed. Many practitioners were abducted and some were brutally tortured. Some were brainwashed and made to "reform," and some even lost their lives. The losses are severe.

Notices from Falun Dafa Associations are transmitted to the Falun Dafa assistance centers around the world through email. The teleconference notices of different project groups are also sent out through email. Thus our teleconference numbers and passwords could be easily stolen at any time. By invading our email accounts the evil could find out our activity plans in detail. This could lead to our activities easily been interrupted.

Some practitioners may think that they do not work on projects that need to pay attention to security, or that they personally do not contact practitioners in China, so why should they pay attention to security. Actually, even if you yourself do not receive or send information that needs to be secured, other practitioners you are in contact with may. If the bad people are able to break through your security, and they can collect information on other practitioners you are in contact with that may be in contact with practitioners in China or practitioners that have other secure information.

Some practitioners even stored the passwords of other email accounts explicitly in his/her email account. Thus one email account being compromised could result in multiple accounts being compromised. The compromised email accounts might even include accounts that manage mailing lists. The evil can then easily make use of our negligence to further spy on personnel arrangements and internal discussions for projects related to the particular mailing lists.

From the beginning of the persecution until now, security has always been a concern. Every one of us should think seriously and look inside for any shortcomings. This is not a simple problem of one person or several people because if one person had a problem in this aspect, it would involve the whole group. When this kind of problem happened to our email system, the first words of many practitioners were, "Why didn't they pay attention to safety and security?" They would complain about others for not paying attention to security and they only look at others for shortcomings.

November 12, 2004

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