When I awoke on May 2nd, 2005 I noticed that the website, FDKansas.net, had been shut down with a notice from the hosting provider to contact them.
FDKansas.net is a web site maintained by a practitioner of Falun Gong living in Kansas. It serves as the local web site for all of Kansas and the Kansas City area. It also provides information about the persecution of Falun Gong in China to the public.
At approximately 3:00 a.m. Central time on May 2nd, 2005, the FDKansas.net web site was shut down due to a CPU over utilization spike on the hosting provider's server. This triggered an automatic shutdown by the hosting provider. When I called the hosting provider, they looked at the server log files and discovered that there were over 180 simultaneous downloads of several videos exposing the persecution of Falun Gong in China. This is a very unusual traffic pattern for this site.
Upon further investigation, it was found that all of the 180 connections originated from a single IP address coming out of Shanghai, China.
According to a Harvard University Law School web site, real time testing indicates that the FDKansas.net web site is not accessible from China.
This means that the average Chinese citizen living in China is not even able to reach the FDKansas.net website. Presumably, this is due to the site being blocked to Chinese citizens by the Chinese government.
This information, coupled with the Shanghai IP address, suggests that it is likely that the connections from China were a deliberate attempt by agents of the Chinese Communist Party to shut down the FDKansas.net web site.
Unfortunately, in order to insure that the FDKansas website would be available to the general public, the folder containing the video files had to be password protected. This means that parties interested in the videos will no longer be able to access them, at least not very easily.
It is a shame that this repressive organization, the CCP, interferes with the lives of so many honest and good people, not only in China, but around the world.
Category: Opinion & Perspective