ABC NewsRadio, Asia Pacific December 7, 2002
CHINA: Falungong denies it hacked into satellite
In a move that has baffled TV engineers, satellite hijackers cut into the China Sinosat-1 broadcasts disrupting the World Cup soccer finals and the fifth anniversary of Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule. Beijing has blamed the banned Falungong group, but its information arm in New York says it doesn't known who tapped into the satellite signals.
Presenter/Interviewer: Duncan Ness
Speakers: John Pike, former head of the Federation of American Scientists space policy division
PIKE: Well basically you would do this by overpowering the authorised signal by beaming a higher power signal from some other transmitter on earth. Now normally when you're controlling these satellites you're going to be using a large ground station with a dish that might be a dozen metres in diameter - this is not something that you can buy at your local electronics shop; it would be a multi-million dollar installation; it's not something that amateurs could do on their own. This is really without precedent and I'm somewhat puzzled as to how a private organisation like Falungong would have been able to get the large installation required to do this sort of activity.
NESS: Well who would have this sort of knowledge? Who would be able to achieve this?
PIKE: Well this is basically something that would require a fairly substantial technological investment. In principle, it's not complex to do this - in practise though, it requires a pretty substantial piece of hardware and you would almost certainly be having to do it from a neighboring country. And it's not clear to me how you would be able to construct this sort of station without the local authorities knowing that you had done it.
NESS: It's been said that it's one thing to interrupt the signal but quite another to broadcast your own material as they have done.
PIKE: Well, the thing I find puzzling about it is that it's easy to explain how they would be able to disrupt the signal because you're basically just jamming it. If you transmit pure noise to the satellite at a higher power level than the authorised transmission, you're going to overwhelm the authorised transmission and people aren't going to be receiving anything. To actually be able to gain control of the satellite and have it transmit your own programming it could be technologically much more difficult because normally there's going to be some sort of encryption in place to enable the authorised users of the satellite to use it but to prevent unauthorised users. So it's a little difficult to see how a private organisation would be able to jam the satellite; even more difficult to understand how they would have the capacity to gain control of the satellite and to transmit their own programming. Now none of this is physically impossible, and it's certainly plausible that all of these things have happened as the Chinese are claiming, but if so, it would certainly represent a quantum leap in space warfare or information warfare by a non-governmental organisation - it would go far beyond anything that anyone had done previously.
NESS: What can the Chinese do to prevent this sort of thing happening again?
PIKE: Well, I think that one thing the Chinese are going to have to look into is the question of where the transmitter dish was that conducted the interference, because under the rules of the International Telecommunications Union you're not supposed to be doing this and if the Chinese were able to find out what country allowed this to happen I'm sure that they would express their annoyance to that government.
NESS: Would the US Intelligence have the capability to monitor such an attack?
PIKE: It's entirely probable that the United States was aware of the transmissions that were coming down from the satellite - whether the United States would have been monitoring the uplinks that would have been interferring with it is a little more difficult to gauge. But certainly the United States would have the technical potential to do that whether in fact they were doing so I think is a different question.
12/7/2002
Copyright 2002, Australian Broadcasting Corporation
