The State Department has decided to fund a group run mainly by practitioners of Falun Gong, a Buddhist-like sect long considered Enemy No. 1 by the Chinese government, to provide software to skirt Internet censorship across the globe.
State Department officials recently called the group, the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, offering it $1.5 million, according to Shiyu Zhou, one of the group's founders. A State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed the offer.
The decision, which came as the United States and China have recently moved to improve ties after months of tension, appears likely to irritate Beijing just as the two are set to resume a dialogue on human rights Wednesday for the first time in two years.
The decision to fund GIFC followed a three-year lobbying campaign by Washington insiders, congressional pressure and opposition from some human rights advocates and Internet experts. It was also controversial within the Obama administration, sources said, despite the commitment of President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to Internet freedom.
GIFC was started in 2001 mostly by Chinese-born scientists living in the United States in response to a withering crackdown in China on the Falun Gong sect. China launched the repression in 1999, and scores of practitioners are believed to have died at the hands of China's police and judicial authorities. China considered the Falun Gong movement, which on one day in April 1999 mobilized 20,000 practitioners to surround Communist Party headquarters in Beijing, as the most serious threat to its one-party rule since the student-led protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Members of the group were found throughout the upper ranks of the Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army.
The initial goal of GIFC was to allow practitioners of Falun Gong access to the teachings of Li Hongzhi, the sect's leader, who is believed to live in Queens, N.Y. But by last year Internet users in other countries where governments censor the Internet had begun using its software -- Freegate and Ultrasurf. Falun Gong also put ads encouraging people to join the sect on its software download page.
But, he added, the $1.5 million funding from the U.S. government will not be enough. "We had asked for $4 million," he said. "For this little amount of money we don't expect to achieve the things we really want."
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, a State Department official said the decision to offer funding to GIFC was "done on the merits of its technology" and was not a response to political pressure. Others aren't so sure.
But Zuckerman worries about two issues. First, GIFC has refused to share its code with other Internet researchers, raising the possibility that China or other governments could crack it and use it to monitor people who believe they have evaded government detection.
Second, the tools that GIFC provides are employed by, at most, 5 percent of Internet users, even in places such as China or Iran where the Web is tightly controlled. (Source: John Pomfret, Washington Post, May 12, 2010).