Yayım tarihi: Pazartesi 23 Kasım 2009

FDI: İspanyol Mahkemesi Çin Eski Cumhurbaşkanı Jiang Zemin Dâhil Çin Komünist Partisinin Üst Düzey 5 Yetkilisi Hakkında İşkence ve Soykırım Suçlarından Dava Açtı
—Sanıklar 4 ile 6 hafta içinde cevap vermek zorundalar ve büyük ihtimalle Uluslararası Çapta Tutuklama Emriyle karşı karşıya kalacaklar
Minghui/Clearwisdom muhabiri tarafından

NEW YORK - İspanya Ulusal Mahkemesinden bir yargıç Falun Gong uygulayıcılarına karşı yürütülen işkence ve soykırım suçlarında aktif role sahip Çin Komünist Partisi (ÇKP) eski lideri Jiang Zemin dâhil ÇKP’nin üst düzey beş yetkilisi hakkında emsali olmayan bir karar verdi. Mahkemenin duyuru mektubunda, eğer sanıklar suçlu bulunursalar en az 20 yıl hapis cezası ve aynı zamanda tazminat ile karşı karşıya kalacakları belirtildi.

Çin Komünist Parti eski lideri Jiang Zemin, 1999 yılında tek başına aldığı kararla, anakara Çin’de “Doğruluk-Merhamet-Hoşgörü” ilkelerine göre uygulama yapan Falun Gong uygulayıcılarına karşı bir “yok etme” kampanyası başlattı. “Şöhretlerini yık, ekonomik açıdan iflas ettir, fiziksel olarak yok et ve işkence sonucu ölenleri intihar etti olarak say” gibi soykırım politikaları, geçmiş yıllar boyunca çok sayıda Falun Gong uygulayıcısının tutuklanmasına, işkence görmesine, dövülerek öldürülmesine ve kaybolmasına neden oldu. Hatta onlarının birçoğunun büyük karların döndüğü organ nakli ticareti için hala canlılarken organları toplandı. Diğer dört sanık, Luo Gan, Bo Xilai, Jia Qinglin ve Wu Guanzheng, Jiang Zemin’in sadık taraftarlarıdır. Bu beş sanık, Falun Gong’a karşı yürütülen acımasız zulmün baş sorumlularıdır.

Sanıkların mahkemenin kararını cevaplamak için 4 ile 6 haftalık zamanları bulunmaktadır. Sonrasında davada adı geçen sanıklar İspanya ile suçluları iade sözleşmesi imzalayan herhangi bir ülke sınırları içine girdikleri anda İspanyol yasalarına göre İspanya’ya iade edileceklerdir. Bu karar “evrensel yargılama hakkı” yasal maddesine göre alındı ve bu maddeye göre soykırım ve insanlığa karşı suç işleyenler suçların meydana geldiği yer ne olursa olsun davanın açıldığı yerli mahkemeler tarafından yargılanabilmektedir.

İki yıldır süren bir araştırmadan sonra İspanyol Ulusal Mahkemesi Yargıcı Ismael Moreno geçen hafta İnsan Hakları Hukuk Vakfının (HRLF) avukatı Carlos Iglesias’a bir dilekçe yollayarak mahkemenin Çin’deki beş sanığa ayrı ayrı Falun Gong zulmü ile ilgili sorular yönelten sorgulama mektupları (talep mektupları) yollamayı kabul ettiği bilgisini verdi. Mahkemenin sanıklara karşı bu kararı, İnsan Hakları Hukuk Vakfının avukatı Bay Carlos Iglesias ve diğer çalışanlar tarafından verilen evraklar ve sunuşlar sonucu alındı.

Avukat Bay Iglesias, “İspanyol bir yargıç tarafından verilen bu tarihi karar, Çin Komünist Parti liderlerinin işledikleri acımasız suçlar için şimdi adalet önünde yargılanmaya bir adım daha yaklaştıkları anlamına gelmektedir. Soykırım ya da işkence suçunu işleyen biri, sadece Çin vatandaşlarına karşı değil aynı zamanda uluslararası topluma karşı bir suç işlemiştir. İspanya, insan haklarının ve evrensel adaletin savunulmasında bir öncü olmuştur.” dedi.

Bu davadaki sanıklar arasında eski Çin Komünist Parti (ÇKP) lideri ve Çin Halk Cumhuriyeti Cumhurbaşkanı Jiang Zemin’de yer almaktadır. Herkesin bildiği gibi, Jiang Zemin 1999 yılında tek başına Falun Gong’a karşı “yok etme” kampanyası başlattı. Sanık Luo Gan ise ülke çapında şiddet kampanyasına liderlik etmek için kurulan gizli polis birimi olan 610 Ofisinin başındaki sorumludur. Çinli avukatlar 610 Ofisini, acımasızlığı ve yasal otoritenin üstünde yetkisi ile Nazi Almanya’sındaki Gestapo’ya benzediğine dikkat çekmektedir.

Diğer üç sanık ise sırayla: Şu andaki Chongqing Parti Sekreteri ve eski Ticaret Bakanı Bo Xilai; Parti hiyerarşisinin dördüncü en büyük üyesi Jia Qinglin; ve ÇKP Disiplin İnceleme Komisyon Başkanı Wu Guanzheng. Bu üç kişi için alınan kararda, Liaoning, Pekin ve Shandong Eyaletlerinde en üst düzey lider konumundayken ellerindeki gücü Falun Gong uygulayıcılarına acımasızca zulmetmek için kullanmaları temel alınmıştır.

Wall Street Journal gazetesinden Ian Johnson’ın Pulitzer ödüllü makalesinde Wu Huanzheng’in Falun Gong zulmüne aktif olarak katılmayan hatta yerli vatandaşlara işkence yapması için memur göndermeyen alt birimlere nasıl ceza verdiğini hatta bazılarının ölümüne bile neden olduğunu açığa vurdu.
HRLF avukatı Iglesias, “Yargıç tarafından yapılan araştırmada 15 Falun Gong uygulayıcısından yazılı ifade ve işkence kurbanı ve Çin’de gözaltında öldürülmüş bireylerin akrabaları dâhil yedi uygulayıcının sözlü ifadelerinin de yer aldığı diğer kanıtları değerlendirildi. Karar da tüm bunların yanında Uluslararası Af Örgütü, İnsan Hakları İzleme ve Birleşmiş Milletler İnsan Hakları Komisyonu gibi uluslararası kuruluşlar tarafından hazırlanan raporlara da dayanak oluşturdu.” dedi.

Çince metin: http://www.minghui.ca/mh/articles/2009/11/20/212992.html
İngilizce metin: http://www.clearwisdom.net/html/articles/2009/11/21/112511.html

DAHA FAZLA BİLGİ İÇİN LÜTFEN FALUN DAFA BİLGİ MERKEZİ İLE İLETİŞİM KURUN

İlgililer: Gail Rachlin (+1 917-757-9780), Levi Browde (+1 646-415-0998), Erping Zhang (+1 646-533-6147), or Joel Chipkar (+1 416-731-6000)

Fax: 646-792-3916 E-mail: contact@faluninfo.net, Web sitesi: http://www.faluninfo.net/

İlgili link: http://faluninfo.net/article/924/?cid=84

Clearharmony'de yayınlanan tüm makaleleri kopyalayabilir ya da çıktı alabilirsiniz, fakat lütfen kaynak belirtiniz.

http://www.tr.clearharmony.net/articles/200911/6763.html

 

By Cindy Chan
Epoch Times Staff Created: Oct 21, 2009 Last Updated: Oct 21, 2009

It was in 1973 that the late Dr. Hendon Harris Jr. published a book documenting what he believed was proof that the Chinese discovered and colonized America thousands of years before Columbus arrived.

His proof centred on a world map he found in an old map book a year earlier in an antique shop in Korea.

Entitled “Everything under Heaven,” the ancient Chinese map not only showed known major land masses such as Asia, Africa, Australia, and Europe, but located China’s fabled Fu Sang—literally “land to the east”—in the region we now know as North and South America.

Harris, a third-generation missionary born to American parents in Kaifeng, China, knew he had stumbled on something big.

He was aware of Fu Sang from his knowledge of “Shan Hai Jing,” or “Collection of the Mountains and Seas,” a Chinese classic believed to be written over 2,000 years ago. The classic documented ancient Chinese travels and described the geography and legends of China and its neighbouring regions overseas.

Based on the map and about 30 similar maps that came from the original “Shan Hai Jing,” Harris theorized in his book, “The Asiatic Fathers of America,” that seafaring Chinese reached the Americas beginning approximately in 2,200 B.C., and were the ancestors of the American Indians.

Only a few copies of Harris’ book were distributed, but by the time he died in 1981, he had collected seven similar map books and found 23 other maps in famous museums worldwide.

The oldest of the Harris maps are thought to be from the Ming dynasty (1368 to 1644), but the world map in each book is believed to have descended from a much earlier Chinese map.

Charlotte Harris Rees, one of Harris’ daughters, was initially skeptical of her father’s theory, and for years his map collection sat neglected under her brother’s bed.

But last year Rees published her own book, “Secret maps of the Ancient World,” which puts forward a compelling case that her father was right, that ancient mapmakers from Asia came to the Americas and documented the terrain of the New World long before Columbus arrived.

Secrets Hidden in Plain Sight

Currently on a speaking tour, Rees, who lives in Virginia, spoke on Tuesday at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University.

“Up until now it’s almost like the Da Vinci Code—secrets that have been hidden in plain sight,” Rees told The Epoch Times.

“It’s not that [the maps] have never been seen before, but people have misunderstood, and a lot of books are saying these are part real and part imaginary because they couldn’t believe that people could have come to America that early.”

In 2003, Rees was prompted to earnestly examine her father’s theory after reading “1421,” a book by Gavin Menzies which sparked worldwide debate. Menzies maintained that the Chinese discovered America in 1421, 71 years before Columbus.

Rees sent an email telling Menzies about her father’s maps showing that the Chinese discovered America much earlier than 1421. She also brought her family’s map collection to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where it stayed for three years while experts came from China to study it.

Meanwhile, she embarked on a five-year research effort that convinced her that her father was right.

Throughout her research, she was mentored by Dr. Cyclone Covey, Professor Emeritus of History at Wake Forest University, North Carolina, who for more than 50 years has studied ancient American history and its association with China.

With Menzies’ help, Rees was invited to speak at the Library of Congress in 2005. And to help her father’s book reach more readers, in 2006 Reed published an abridged version of his 800-page volume.

Dr. Hwa-Wei Lee, retired Chief of the Asia Division of the Library of Congress, has called Rees’ research “a major contribution to the early history of the Americas and the relations to China and other parts of Asia.”

Abundance of Evidence

But Rees has also run into resistance. “There are a few people who are very much against this. Anytime you’ve rewritten history, it’s hard to change it,” she said.

For example, an international group of academics runs a Web site that disputes Menzies’ theory. And Rees said that although schools were still teaching in the early 20th century that the Chinese had been in America for at least 1,000 years, this information was removed from textbooks when Columbus Day was declared a U.S. national holiday.

However, Rees is undeterred.

“There is so much evidence coming in from so many different areas, including DNA evidence, finding [ancient] Chinese writing in multiples places in the Americas, and people who have been comparing the Mayan calendar to the Chinese ancient calendar.”

Many independent studies have been completed or are taking place, and her book cites over 200 works containing evidence from various disciplines including science, archaeology, oceanography, philosophy, anthropology, art, linguistics, and mathematics, Rees noted.

Greater Glory, New Respect

How did the Chinese cross the Pacific as early as 2,200 B.C.?

According to historical records, 4,000 years ago the Chinese were already very advanced, said Rees. “They had writing. They had silk. They were ocean going.”

She added that a warm ocean current exists in the North Pacific that actually “acts as a conveyor belt” and pushes objects east from Asia to the Americas and then down the coast, with a return current at the equator.

Rees said her father believed that ancient Chinese and other Asians made many trips to the New World, but a great deal of evidence has been lost. In particular, China began a policy of self-imposed isolation in the mid 1400s. “It became a capital offence to go to sea, and they burnt their maps and their ships,” she said.

For 250 years, some European scholars have speculated that Fu Sang was in fact America. But without a map showing Fu Sang, they couldn’t prove it. When Harris discovered the ancient map in Korea, he was the first in recent times to make the association, said Covey.

Evidence continues to grow. Meanwhile, Rees is content to let more people know about her and her father’s research.

“The final result of these revolutionary discoveries will be the greater glory of China, East India, Japan, and Korea and a new respect for and the appreciation of the Indians of North, Central, and South America,” wrote Harris in his book.

For more information, visit www.harrismaps.com.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/24170/

 

Hacking the Regime

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.

The Chinese assault on the Falun Gong has been ruthless. Since 1999, when the government outlawed the group, hundreds of its practitioners and most of the group’s leading figures have been arrested and then abused. A January 2002 Human Rights Watch report on the crackdown said, “[S]erious human rights violations--including restrictions on freedom of thought, belief, and expression, wrongful detention, unfair trials, torture, and deaths in custody--have accompanied the Chinese government response to Falun Gong.” Unlike many international human rights groups, whose sites will sporadically load, the Falun Gong pages have been comprehensively blocked.

For the Falun Gong, whose members are treated like terrorists, the Web is the only vehicle for connecting its underground to the world. Following the July 1999 crackdowns, the Internet also became the only venue for the group to counter the Chinese government’s propaganda campaign against it.

The Falun Gong does not keep records of its membership in the United States or around the world. Nor does the group have a formal hierarchy. The closest thing the organization has to a leader is Li Hongzhi, whom practitioners call “teacher” and who currently resides in New York state. Falun Gong’s practitioners happen to include a number of talented engineers employed by tech companies like Microsoft and Google, as well as by government agencies like NASA. And, in the face of the crackdown, and at the height of the dot-com bubble, the Falun Gong launched its own tech division, the GIFC.

For all their cleverness, members found themselves constantly outmaneuvered. They would devise a strategy that would break past China’s filtering tools, only to find their new sites quickly hacked or stymied. In 2002, though, they had their Freegate breakthrough. According to David Tian, a programmer with the GIFC and a research scientist at nasa, Freegate was unique because it not only disguised the ISP addresses, or Web destinations, but also cloaked the traffic signatures, or the ways in which the Chinese filters determined whether a Web user was sending an e-mail, navigating a website, sending an instant message, or using Skype. “In the beginning, Freegate was rudimentary, then the communists analyzed the software, they tried to figure out how we beat them. They started to block Freegate. But then, we started hiding the traffic signature,” says Mr. Tian. “They have not been able to stop it since.”

Even in the United States, this is risky work. In 2006, one of the GIFC’s chief engineers, Peter Li , was attacked in his suburban home outside of Atlanta by three or four Asian men pretending to deliver water. He was bound and beaten, and two of his laptops were stolen. There’s no way to prove this was not a random attack. But there was good reason to believe that the Falun Gong had managed to significantly irk its adversary.

This has led GIFC to keep their work under wraps. Their code is a tightly held secret, according to Shiyu Zhou. “The Chinese will constantly have people block you, reverse-engineer the tool, sabotage the tool,” he says.

 

The Falun Gong was hardly alone in developing this kind of software. In fact, there’s a Coke-Pepsi rivalry between Freegate and the other main program for skirting the censors: The Onion Router, or TOR. Although TOR was developed by the U.S. Navy--to protect Internet communication among its vessels--it has become a darling of the libertarian left. The TOR project was originally bankrolled, in part, by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the group that first sued the U.S. government for warrantless wiretapping. Many libertarians are drawn to TOR because they see it as a way for citizens to shield themselves from the prying eyes of government.

TOR uses an algorithm to route traffic randomly across three different proxy servers. This makes it slow but extremely secure--so secure that both the FBI and international criminal gangs have been known to use it. Unlike the Falun Gong, the TOR programmers have a fetish for making their code available to anyone.

There’s an irony in the EFF’s embrace of TOR, since the project also receives significant funding from the government. The Voice of America has contributed money so that its broadcasts can be heard via the Internet in countries that have blocked their site, a point of envy for the GIFC. For the past four years, the Falun Gong has also been urging the U.S. government to back Freegate financially, going so far as to enlist activists such as Michael Horowitz, a Reagan administration veteran, and Mark Palmer, a former ambassador to Hungary, to press Congress. (Neither was paid for his work.) But, when the two finally persuaded Congress to spend $15 million on anti-censorship software last year, the money was redirected to a program for training journalists. Both Palmer and Horowitz concluded that the State Department despised the idea of funding the Falun Gong.

That’s a reasonable conclusion. The Chinese government views the Falun Gong almost the way the United States views Al Qaeda. As Richard Bush, a China expert at the Brookings Institution, puts it, “An effort to use U.S. government resources in support of a Falun Gong project would be read in the worst possible way by the Chinese government.”

Still, there will no doubt be renewed pressure to direct money to the likes of the GIFC and TOR. In the wake of the Iran demonstrations, three bills to fund anti-censorship software are rocketing through Congress, with wide support. Tom Malinowski, the Washington director for Human Rights Watch, argues that such software “is to human rights work today what smuggling mimeograph machines was back in the 1970s, except it reaches millions more people.”

 

In the brief history of the Internet, there’s been an assumption that the little guy (the blogger, Apple, Firefox) has an advantage over the slow-footed giants of the world. With Web circumvention tools, the little guys might ultimately prevail, too. When the Iranian regime deliberately slowed down the speed of its Internet and deployed its full resources to squash traffic, it made it very difficult to upload video to social networking sites--but those videos have still trickled through.

The authoritarian regimes of the world, however, understand their new vulnerabilities. Many aren’t exactly known as technology leaders. Yet countries like Russia have pioneered cyber-warfare--and can devastate a website if they desire. A key component in Russia’s battle plans against Georgia last summer was a swift denial-of-service attack on government computers in Tbilisi. Even North Korea has developed an offensive cyber-warfare capability, according to U.S. intelligence.

And, while the Falun Gong has managed to win the upper hand in its battle with the Chinese government, it has reason to be less sanguine about the future. The Chinese have returned to the cyber-nanny model that U.S. libraries have deployed. This notorious project is called the Green Dam, or, more precisely, the Green Dam Youth Escort. Under the Green Dam, every new Chinese computer is required to come with a stringent filter pre-installed and, therefore, nearly impossible to remove. As the filter collects data on users, it relies on a government database to block sites. If anything, the Green Dam is too comprehensive. In its initial run, the software gummed up computers, crashing browsers and prohibiting virtually every Web search. In August, Beijing announced that it would delay the project indefinitely. Still, China had revealed a model that could, in theory, defeat nearly every Web-circumvention tool. 

When I asked David Tian, the GIFC programmer, about Green Dam, he spoke about it with a mix of pride and horror. The pride comes from the fact that the GIFC’s successes have placed the Chinese on the defensive. “One of the reasons they started this Green Dam business and moved the filter to the computer is because they cannot stop our products with the current filters,” he said. But he conceded that Green Dam will render Freegate useless.

In the world of product development--and freedom fighting--you innovate or die. The Falun Gong is determined not to go the way of the Commodore 64 into technological irrelevance. It has released a beta version of a new piece of software to overcome the Green Dam. Without a real chance to test it, it’s hard to tell whether it will work. But it has overcome the first hurdle of product development. It has marketed its product with a name that captures the swagger of the enterprise. It is called Green Tsunami.

Eli Lake is a contributing editor at The New Republic and a national security correspondent for The Washington Times.

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/hacking-the-regime

 

US Could Help Disrupt China's Internt Censorship

The means exist to rupture Internet censorship in China and Iran -- if the State Department will cooperate.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

THE MOST interesting question President Obama fielded in China came over the Internet, via the U.S. Embassy, from a Chinese citizen who asked, "Do you know of the firewall? Should we be able to use Twitter freely?" In response, Mr. Obama, speaking at a town hall in Shanghai, did not directly address China's massive Internet censorship operation -- "the firewall" -- and he confessed that he does not use Twitter. But he said, "I'm a big supporter of not restricting Internet use, Internet access, other information technologies like Twitter."

By Shar Adams
Epoch Times Staff Created: Nov 18, 2009 Last Updated: Nov 19, 2009

AUSTRALIA—Sun Xiaodi, a warehouse manager at China’s No. 792 uranium mine in Gansu Province, was ignored when he first began to report on corruption and radioactive contamination by mine operatives in 1988.

The military-run mine, located in Gansu’s Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, one of China’s most important bases for uranium, was pouring radioactively contaminated water into the Bailong River, Sun said, selling contaminated equipment, and ignoring safety guidelines for workers.

In 2006, after finally gaining serious attention by being detained for eight months, Sun was still petitioning and reporting on the mine’s frightening practices. Nothing had changed there.

"We have collected hard evidence,” Sun told Sound of Hope Radio at the time, "We took the samples of the water at about one in the morning one day. The samples indicate that residents near and downstream of the Bailong River, as well as residents in cities along the Yangtze River, are in for big trouble. Ores soaking into the water are being washed by the water, which means that uranium is moving through the water and thus contaminating the water."

Although the mine had been officially closed in 2002—allegedly resources had been exhausted—it had only changed hands and continued to pump out uranium illegally.

"All of their written reports were false,” Sun said,” They simply changed a military enterprise into a civilian enterprise, and continued with large-scale mining. They are still mining the uranium on a large scale."

Sun has since been arrested again, but this time his 26-year-old daughter, Sun Dunbai, was implicated and the prison term was longer. Non-government organization, Human Rights in China (HRIC) reported in July this year, that both father and daughter were sentenced to a year and half of re-education through labor (RTL). They were accused of inciting the public “with libelous slogans of ‘nuclear pollution’ and ‘human rights violations.’” Sun Xiaodi was also accused of stealing information from the mine and giving it to his daughter to supply to overseas organizations.

Australian Uranium

It is into this world that Australia has just sent its second shipment of uranium, its first from Olympic Dam in South Australia.

The first shipment to China, from the Rio Tinto Ranger mine in the Northern Territory, was sent last year.

Both deals were made possible by a 2006 agreement between the previous Howard government and Beijing on a nuclear safeguards pact. They have occurred way in advance of the agreed date for the first shipment, which was not anticipated to take place until 2010.

The Rudd government is not holding back in pushing uranium exports to China. Foreign Minister Stephen Smith accidentally let slip in April this year that negotiations were underway to export more uranium to China from the BHP Billiton-owned Olympic Dam.

Documents, which the minister later admitted were tabled to Parliament in error, said Australian officials had attended talks in Beijing earlier in the year to discuss a proposal by BHP Billiton to sell uranium-infused copper concentrate to China, the ABC reported.

The sale will require expanding the Olympic Dam mine, and will need Federal government permission to do so. The expansion is expected to increase output six-fold.

According to the Australian Uranium Industry Association, Olympic Dam is the world's largest uranium deposit and presently the world’s third largest uranium mine. Australia is considered to have nearly 40 percent of the world’s recoverable uranium but only 19 percent of the world market.

Australian resource minister, Martin Ferguson, is blunt about where the Australian government’s interests lie.

"Expansion of the uranium industry could generate up to $17 billion in GDP for Australia to 2030 and avert up to 15 billion tons in carbon emissions through the use of uranium in the global power sector,” he said in a statement.

For David Noonan, spokesperson for the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), this sort of statement sounds alarm bells.

“We believe it is unacceptable for the Australian government and BHP to look the other way and to claim that they can conduct trade simply for profit, particularly the uranium sector, and ignore all those human rights and transparency issues that are so apparent in China,” Noonan told The Epoch Times.

The case of Sun Xiaodi highlights just some of the concerns the ACF has with the China deal.

Whistleblowers like Sun Xiaodi and his daughter are being punished for raising legitimate concerns about the environment, in this case nuclear contamination and slack environmental and workplace safety practices, Mr. Noonan said, adding that it “demonstrates clearly that China is not going to be accountable in what may happen with Australian uranium in the future.”

Ferguson said the Rudd government sees Australia's economic relationship with China as “mutually very important” and a means of “government-to-government dialogue on many fronts.”

When asked to respond to concerns about Sun Xiaodi’s case he said the “bilateral safeguards agreement Australia has with China is the strictest in the world and we have measures in place to ensure and monitor compliance with the safeguards agreement.”

The Australian Greens say China cannot be trusted to abide by international safeguards, and it is impossible to monitor how Australia’s uranium is used in China.

Noted by Greens senator, Christine Milne, is the secrecy surrounding China’s military industrial processes.
Under the joint agreement Australia’s uranium is only to be used at “declared facilities,” but Senator Milne said, declared facilities are only declared at Chinese discretion.

“The Chinese government can withdraw these facilities from IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) oversight at any time simply by stating concerns about national security,” she said.

The Greens say they want Australia to withdraw from the 2006 deal because of China’s failure to comply with Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty disarmament obligations; its failure to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; and its failure to separate its military and civilian nuclear sectors.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/25373/