[Reader-list] Myanmar Junta Unplugs Internet

[Rana Dasgupta]

from today's NYT.

R


Myanmar Junta Unplugs Internet
By SETH MYDANS

BANGKOK, Oct. 3 — It was about as simple and uncomplicated as shooting 
demonstrators in the streets. Embarrassed by smuggled video and 
photographs that showed their people rising up against them, the 
generals who run Myanmar simply switched off the Internet.

Until Friday television screens and newspapers abroad were flooded with 
scenes of tens of thousands of red-robed monks in the streets and of 
chaos and violence as the junta stamped out the biggest popular uprising 
there in two decades.

But then the images, text messages and postings stopped, shut down by 
generals who belatedly grasped the power of the Internet to jeopardize 
their crackdown.

“Finally they realized that this was their biggest enemy, and they took 
it down,” said Aung Zaw, editor of an exile magazine based in Thailand 
called The Irrawaddy, whose Web site has been a leading source of 
information in recent weeks. The site has been attacked by a virus whose 
timing raises the possibility that the military government has a few 
skilled hackers in its ranks.

The efficiency of this latest, technological, crackdown raises the 
question whether the vaunted role of the Internet in undermining 
repression can stand up to a determined and ruthless government — or 
whether Myanmar, already isolated from the world, can ride out a 
prolonged shutdown more easily than most countries.

OpenNet Initiative, which tracks Internet censorship, has documented 
signs that in recent years several governments — including those of 
Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan — have closed off Internet access, or 
at least opposition Web sites, during periods preceding elections or 
times of intense protests.

The brief disruptions are known as “just in time” filtering, said Ronald 
J. Deibert of OpenNet. They are designed to quiet opponents while 
maintaining an appearance of technical difficulties, thus avoiding 
criticism from abroad.

In 2005, King Gyanendra of Nepal ousted the government and imposed a 
weeklong communications blackout. Facing massive protests, he ceded 
control in 2006.

Myanmar has just two Internet service providers, and shutting them down 
was not complicated, said David Mathieson, an expert on Myanmar with 
Human Rights Watch. Along with the Internet, the junta cut off most 
telephone access to the outside world. Soldiers on the streets 
confiscated cameras and video-recording cellphones.

“The crackdown on the media and on information flow is parallel to the 
physical crackdown,” he said. “It seems they’ve done it quite 
effectively. Since Friday we’ve seen no new images come out.”

In keeping with the country’s self-imposed isolation over the past 
half-century, Myanmar’s military seemed prepared to cut the country off 
from the virtual world just as it had from the world at large. Web 
access has not been restored, and there is no way to know if or when it 
might be.

At the same time, the junta turned to the oldest tactic of all to 
silence opposition: fear. Local journalists and people caught 
transmitting information or using cameras are being threatened and 
arrested, according to Burmese exile groups.

In a final, hurried telephone call, Mr. Aung Zaw said, one of his 
longtime sources said goodbye.

“We have done enough,” he said the source told him. “We can no longer 
move around. It is over to you — we cannot do anything anymore. We are 
down. We are hunted by soldiers — we are down.”

There are still images to come, Mr. Aung Zaw said, and as soon as he 
receives them and his Web site is back up, the world will see them.

But Mr. Mathieson said the country’s dissidents were reverting to 
tactics of the past, smuggling images out through cellphones, breaking 
the files down for reassembly later.

It is not clear how much longer the generals can hold back the future. 
Technology is making it harder for dictators and juntas to draw a 
curtain of secrecy.

“There are always ways people find of getting information out, and 
authorities always have to struggle with them,” said Mitchell Stephens, 
a professor of journalism at New York University and the author of “A 
History of News.”

“There are fewer and fewer events that we don’t have film images of: the 
world is filled with Zapruders,” he said, referring to Abraham Zapruder, 
the onlooker who recorded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy 
in 1963.

Before Friday’s blackout, Myanmar’s hit-and-run journalists were staging 
a virtuoso demonstration of the power of the Internet to outmaneuver a 
repressive government. A guerrilla army of citizen reporters was 
smuggling out pictures even as events were unfolding, and the world was 
watching.

“For those of us who study the history of communication technology, this 
is of equal importance to the telegraph, which was the first medium that 
separated communications and transportation,” said Frank A. Moretti, 
executive director of the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning at 
Columbia University.

Since the protests began in mid-August, people have sent images and 
words through SMS text messages and e-mail and on daily blogs, according 
to some exile groups that received the messages. They have posted 
notices on Facebook, the social networking Web site. They have sent tiny 
messages on e-cards. They have updated the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

They also used Internet versions of “pigeons” — the couriers that 
reporters used in the past to carry out film and reports — handing their 
material to embassies or nongovernment organizations with satellite 
connections.

Within hours, the images and reports were broadcast back into Myanmar by 
foreign radio and television stations, informing and connecting a public 
that hears only propaganda from its government.

These technological tricks may offer a model to people elsewhere who are 
trying to outwit repressive governments. But the generals’ heavy-handed 
response is probably a less useful model.

Nations with larger economies and more ties to the outside world have 
more at stake. China, for one, could not consider cutting itself off as 
Myanmar has done, and so control of the Internet is an industry in itself.

“In China, it’s massive,” said Xiao Qiang, director of the China 
Internet Project and an adjunct professor at the graduate school of 
journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

“There’s surveillance and intimidation, there’s legal regulation and 
there is commercial leverage to force private Internet companies to 
self-censor,” he said. “And there is what we call the Great Firewall, 
which blocks hundreds of thousands of Web sites outside of China.”

Yet for all its efforts, even China cannot entirely control the 
Internet, an easier task in a smaller country like Myanmar.

As technology makes everyone a potential reporter, the challenge in 
risky places like Myanmar will be accuracy, said Vincent Brossel, head 
of the Asian section of the press freedom organization Reporters Without 
Borders.

“Rumors are the worst enemy of independent journalism,” he said. 
“Already we are hearing so many strange things. So if you have no flow 
of information and the spread of rumors in a country that is using 
propaganda — that’s it. You are destroying the story, and day by day it 
goes down.”

The technological advances on the streets of Myanmar are the latest in a 
long history of revolutions in the transmission of news — from the 
sailing ship to the telegraph to international telephone lines and the 
telex machine to computers and satellite telephones.

“Today every citizen is a war correspondent,” said Phillip Knightley, 
author of “The First Casualty,” a classic history of war reporting that 
starts with letters home from soldiers in Crimea in the 1850s and ends 
with the “living room war” in Vietnam in the 1970s, the first war that 
people could watch on television.

“Mobile phones with video of broadcast quality have made it possible for 
anyone to report a war,” he said in an e-mail interview. “You just have 
to be there. No trouble getting a start: the broadcasters have been 
begging viewers to send their stuff.”