Jammin'

By Crispin Sartwell

"This is extremely despicable and represents yet another crime committed by the Falun Gong cult organization. We call on the international community to jointly condemn this mean act."

Thus Liu Lihua, an Official in the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry. He was referring to the successful efforts of the Falun Gong religious group to jam the satellite transmission of official Chinese government television stations and substitute its own video feed.

The Falun Gong organization is led by Li Hongzhi, who now lives in New York. It makes use of the Buddhist and Taoist teachings, and hence is connected to traditions that stretch back for millennia in China. It denies being a cult. It claims that it can give its members supernatural powers. Falun Gong also claims to have some100 million members.

It came to the attention of the world when thousands of followers demonstrated in Beijing in 1999. Subsequently, the group was outlawed, and members have been imprisoned and tortured in China.

But Falun Gong has also shown that it packs a wallop. They managed to jam state-run television over a period of a week during the soccer World Cup, and actually prevented a televised speech by president Jiang Zemin.

Such an act is apparently unprecedented, and presupposes both resources and expertise. And the Chinese government richly deserves what it's getting.

If it had simply allowed people to believe and practice whatever religion they like, the government never would have gotten into this position. And if they didn't claim a monopoly of information in the Chinese media, their propaganda couldn't have been pre-empted.

Indeed, media piracy on this scale is encouraging. All over the world, the information industries have been consolidating. That's obviously true in dictatorships, but it is also true in democracies.

Our television programming is controlled by a few huge corporations: Viacom, News Corp., and AOL/Time-Warner, for example. The same companies are in publishing. They seek dominance of the internet. As the industry coagulates, we hear voices from a narrower spectrum.

Hackers can be despicable; they can create problems of communication between average people. But in disrupting huge governmental and corporate systems, they demonstrate that all power hasn't yet been successfully consolidated, that individuals and small groups can still resist the juggernaut. There is a difference, in other words, between senseless hacking and hacking as a political act.

Every technology that creates power by the domination of information is also a potential site of the disruption of that power: something to be jammed or hacked. The more centralized the technology, in a certain sense - the fewer its sources - the more vulnerable it becomes.

Whether you like Falun Gong or not, they have demonstrated this basic fact of information technologies better than anyone. Previously, they've hacked into cable systems. But for an independent organization to jam satellite transmissions is a whole new ballgame.

In England, during the time when the government claimed a monopoly on broadcasting, pirate radio stations set up offshore. And pirate stations are relevant here as well, because the FCC claims the right to assign broadcast frequencies. We ourselves operate such stations: for example Radio Marti, which broadcasts into Cuba.

I have my reservations about Fulan Gong, which has its own authoritarian tendencies. But I look at their guerilla warfare in communications as a hopeful sign of resistance to power in the age of information.

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The writer teaches philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art.