Paying Attention to Cell Phone Security

(Minghui.org) Cell phone security has been a decade-long issue among Falun Gong practitioners. In our area, careless use of cell phones has led to several group arrests of practitioners and caused great losses to our local cultivation environment. More than a dozen practitioners were severely persecuted and sentenced to prison, with the longest term amounting to 11 years. Multiple materials production sites were destroyed and hundreds of machines confiscated by the police.

By sharing what we have learned below, I hope that fellow practitioners will pay more attention to cell phone security. I hope that we can all improve based on the Fa and avoid unnecessary losses in the future.

Indiscriminate Cell phone Use Results in Huge Losses

The series of arrests in our area started with two practitioners destroying a Mao Zedong statue. They were seen by a taxi driver, who followed them home and reported them to the police.

Police officers broke into both practitioners' homes and arrested them the next morning.

One practitioner believed that being totally open, as suggested by the officers, would be the best for him. He told them many things he was involved in to validate the Fa. In the end, he was sentenced to a six-year prison term.

The other practitioner, a local coordinator, was savagely beaten, tortured, and shocked with electric batons by police officers. Unable to bear the interrogation, he provided information about several technically savvy practitioners who were in charge of material supply and equipment maintenance.

In fact, the police had been monitoring this coordinator practitioner for a long time and intercepted many of his emails before he was arrested. He was in contact with many practitioners, always carried three cell phones with him, yet paid little attention to cell phone security.

As a result, three technical practitioners and his son were also arrested. Hundreds of machines were confiscated by the police, and a materials production site that had been operating for many years was lost.

The losses were simply huge, but that was not all.

Long-term Phone Surveillance

When the coordinator was arrested, the police also arrested his brother, who was also a practitioner and kept in close contact with him.

His brother's home was a Fa study site. During the police raid, his brother and sister-in-law, and another elderly practitioner who were studying the Fa there, were arrested. All three practitioners were later sentenced, and the coordinator's brother was tortured to death, which turned the rest of his family against Falun Gong.

Meanwhile, the police also pursued another practitioner who was in regular contact with the coordinator. While the police attempted to break into her home to arrest her, she called another coordinator in a nearby county to tell them about the dangerous situation and ask them to take action to protect themselves.

But she didn't realize that her phone had been monitored for a long time as well. Following her arrest, she was sentenced to prison. Another couple that she often contacted was also implicated.

After the second coordinator received the call, he called several practitioners on his cell phone, but many of them did not answer the phone. Those who answered were later harassed by police officers.

The second coordinator later made an appointment with a practitioner to tell her about the situation. However, as soon as that practitioner arrived, the police, who had been waiting there, showed up and arrested them. And a third practitioner who answered a phone call from this coordinator before he was arrested was also arrested and detained for several days.

While interrogating the practitioners, the police told them that much of the information they had obtained was gathered through long-term cell phone surveillance.

Contamination and Interference

Upon looking within after the heartbreaking losses, it became apparent that there were several gaps taken advantage of by the old forces, with one being the attachment to overstocking cash and raw materials on hand.

However, the main intent of this article is to warn against the careless use of cell phones and how much information we provide to the police. Although cell phones provide a lot of convenience for practitioners, it can also become a convenient tool for police officers to monitor us.

Master said,

“You are carrying a listening device on you. Besides spies and governments, anyone is able to monitor you at will, and it's very simple.” (“Fa Teaching at the 2016 New York Fa Conference”)

We should really take this issue most seriously. There have been so many articles on the Minghui website about cell phone security. The losses caused by this issue is not something that we can afford.

In fact, some practitioners had asked the coordinator to take the security issue more seriously. Instead of taking the warning to heart, he blamed them for having the attachment of fear and found excuses to continue contacting practitioners with his cell phones.

Learning from the hard lesson, we should look at ourselves, whether we have several cell phones with us all the time, and whether we only turn off the cell phones and take out the battery after we arrive at Fa study sites or materials production sites.

Any cell phone use that could compromise our security or invite police surveillance, such as making appointments over the phone, or sending text messages, should be immediately stopped.

In addition to the security issue, I would also like to remind fellow practitioners that some practitioners are using cell phones to browse the Internet or interact with others on social media. This is a mishmash of all kinds of bad things that could contaminate us and interfere with our cultivation.