Exerpts from an interesting and slightly disturbing essay in World Affairs Journal by Ethan Gutman;
Before 1999, Falun Gong practitioners hadn't systematically used the Internet as an organizing tool. But now that they were isolated, fragmented, and searching for a way to organize and change government policy, they jumped online, employing code words, avoiding specifics, communicating in short bursts. But like a cat listening to mice squeak in a pitch-black house, the 'Internet Spying' section of the 6-10 Office could find their exact location. What emerged was a comprehensive database of people's personal information — including 6-10's Falun Gong lists — and a wraparound surveillance system that was quickly distributed to other provinces. The Chinese authorities called it the Golden Shield.”
I also talked to Chen Yonglin, who was a Chinese diplomat based at the Sydney consulate until 2005, when he suddenly requested protection from the Australian government. We met in a private home in the suburbs eighteen months later. Careful and media-savvy, Chen began by authenticating his point that there were a thousand or more Chinese agents on Australian soil and then went on to explain that the vast majority were employed not to go after military technology, but to monitor Falun Gong and other dissidents in the Chinese communities of Melbourne and Sydney.
Judging from the witnesses I interviewed in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, these sorts of Chinese infiltration activities never met with any particular governmental or intelligence-operational resistance in the West. It was as if the battle for the Chinese diaspora had already been ceded. In the United States in particular, the intelligence community was clearly distracted by terrorism, and pacified by occasional Chinese military and intelligence cooperation on terrorist networks, even if the information given was sketchy and unclassifiable.
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While I don’t use Gmail, Yahoo’s lawyers recently informed me that there had been a “rare” and “unusual” security breach into my e-mail account. That is consistent with the smash-and-grab of files in my car while I was interviewing Falun Gong practitioners in Montreal, and the questioning and forced deportation of my research assistant when he tried to enter Hong Kong. He was recently on a tour bus in Montreal with Falun Gong members who discovered that their tires had been carefully slashed to induce blowouts when the bus had reached highway speed.