Burma’s generals may have underestimated the power of the Internet during the 2007 uprising, but they are now playing catch-up

The Burmese military government has found a new enemy—the growing number of “cyber dissidents” who are gaining popularity both inside and outside the country. The bad news is that the junta usually finds a way of defeating each new enemy.

During the September 2007 uprising in Burma, citizen reporters and bloggers played a key role in exposing the junta’s brutality.

Burma’s state-controlled media and privately owned journals operate under tight controls and, understandably, shy away from accurately reporting the situation in the country.

And so it fell to citizen reporters—equipped with cell phones, digital cameras and memory sticks—to connect with the exiled and international media.

Digital technology facilitated a fundamental contrast between the two mass uprisings in recent times—1988 and 2007.

In 1988, millions of Burmese took to the streets. However, the international community, the media and the people of the world had only a vague idea of what was truly happening on in Burma.

Although about 3,000 demonstrators were killed between March and September 1988, images of casualties were scarce. In those days, a person walking the streets with a camera would be suspected of being a spy or informer and be picked up immediately.

Now, thanks to cell phones (still very expensive in Burma at around US $1,500 for a SIM card alone), satellite phones, the Internet and e-mail in the hands of eyewitnesses, thousands of images came out of Burma during the 2007 uprising. 

News traveled very fast; photographs and accounts arrived at our desks in The Irrawaddy office within seconds, and we were able to tell the world what was really going on inside the country. In 1988, the protesters on the streets stood alone.

The vivid images of the September 2007 uprising were unforgettable, such as the barefooted monks marching in the rain with their alms bowls turned upside down. Consequently, the amount of airtime devoted to Burma by BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera, was startling.

Suddenly, Burma was attracting the full attention of the international media, world leaders and ordinary people around the globe. The success of the grassroots media invigorated the demonstrators—they knew the world was watching and what they were fighting for.

Just before last year’s uprising, a group of bloggers inside Burma began communicating and occasionally meeting in person—almost as if they were anticipating the events and bloodshed that were to follow.

The virtual forum linked activists inside Burma with those outside the country and strong bonds were established.

Several young Burmese who had been studying in Singapore returned home, bringing with them new technology, ideas and, most importantly, proxy settings.

Although less than one per cent of the total population have access to the Internet in Burma, the effective use of Google and proxy Web sites were instrumental in the exchange of information during September’s crisis.

Until then, the Myanmar Blogger Society had about 1,000 members. On September 1, 2007, they held a seminar at Myanmar Information and Communication Technology Park in Rangoon. They mostly posted personal opinions about romance, skyrocketing prices and the electrical blackouts in Burma. But it was rare for anyone to get overly political.

After the demonstrations began, the bloggers went underground and a new group was born—“Bloggers without Borders.”

These “chat room” blogs overnight became virtual news agencies providing news (and sometimes rumors) to international publications. Images of the demonstrations, the crackdown, indiscriminate killings and reprisals were all captured digitally and sent abroad.

The regime effectively barred professional journalists and photographers from entering Burma during the crisis. However, it was powerless to stop the citizen reporters.

During the September uprising in Burma, as with Hurricane Katrina, the Asian tsunami, 9/11 and the London bombings, citizen reporters showed that they were able to send some of the most effective messages and pictures that the world would see.

The footage and images may not have been as well framed or steady as the ones taken by trained, professional photojournalists, but they definitely proved to be newsworthy and appeared as powerful statements of political dissent and people’s aspirations for change and a democratic society.

Traditional news agencies are no longer the sole gatekeepers of breaking news. The participation of the public is astounding—the ordinary people who don’t just sit back and watch the news on TV, but who go out into the streets and actively report the events that can shape the flow of news to the world.

During the uprising, a handful of journalists working for international news agencies, such as The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse produced professional work. Citizen reporters, however, follow their own rules; often the reports were accurate, other times wildly exaggerated and based on word of mouth.

But, thanks to citizen reporters, we now have more information, more voices, more interviews, more images and more sources on the ground.

More significantly, the young people of the blogger generation are entirely different from those in 1988. They are computer literate and are connected with the outside world. Many have been to neighboring countries such as Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia, if not to the West.

Digital technology brought in from these countries has enabled activists, young journalists and computer geeks to bypass the Burmese authorities’ strict censorship.

However, despite the generation gap in technology, the old Burmese generals refused to sit idly by. They fought back. 

The Internet Blackout—A Counterattack

Before the monk-led demonstrations in September, the Burmese generals underestimated the potential of the Internet and soon realized they were being defeated in the media.

The regime moved to cut the flow of information. Nonetheless, a reporter with a news agency in Japan was shocked to learn how little knowledge police officers in the Burmese special branch had of the Internet.

During his interrogation in Rangoon, officers repeatedly asked how live video footage had been smuggled out of Burma so quickly and appeared on international broadcasts by BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera.

“They didn’t realize that the Internet was doing all the miracle work,” he said.

Finally realizing that these lines of communication were essential for journalists and the democracy movement, the Burmese authorities belatedly cut off mobile phone services and Internet lines, preventing citizens and journalists from reporting instantly from the field. Internet cafés were shut down.

People with cameras were singled out and chased down by soldiers. Under shoot-to-kill orders, Japanese cameraman Kenji Nagai lost his life.

Burma observers speculated that the junta’s intelligence apparatus had lost technological sophistication since the downfall of Gen Khin Nyunt, the feared head of the secret police, in October 2004.

To activists and bloggers, the internal wrangling among the top leaders and the dismantling of Khin Nyunt’s powerful spy agency was a blessing.

If Khin Nyunt were still in power, most young Burmese bloggers estimate that the spy chief would have ordered Burma’s sole Internet provider, Bagan Cyber Tech, to shut down its connections at the first sign of unrest.

Indeed, Khin Nyunt would most certainly have pulled the plug before ordering troops to shoot demonstrators. However, the current regime unwittingly allowed the Internet to operate during the early days of the uprising. 

A journalist in Burma told The Irrawaddy in 2001: “Intelligence officers are standing behind Bagan Cyber Tech, keeping a close eye on everything we upload.”

Perhaps not close enough in light of the citizen reporters’ successes in 2007. Nonetheless, the authorities have now moved to reduce Internet speed and bandwidth, making it more difficult to send and receive high resolution images or bulky files. 

Bloggers in Burma are increasingly paranoid about Internet surveillance. Rumors circulate of Russian experts hired to monitor messages and analyze e-mail accounts. A girl in her early 20s said, “They are checking my e-mails; I’m too scared to send anything.”

Owners of Internet cafés have been forced to record the personal details of all users and to program automatic screen “captures” every five minutes on each computer. A blogger Nay Phone Latt was arrested in January.

The regime has also recruited its own propaganda specialists to counter cyber dissidents.

Since early last year, apologists for the regime have been setting up blogs to counter the pro-democracy bloggers. Aside from personal attacks, the junta’s bloggers leak false news and propaganda, such as support for the seven-point “road map to democracy” and the regime’s “Three National Causes.”

The junta is now keeping a close eye on bloggers like the mysterious “OA6,” who suggested that 2007 be declared the “Year of the Blogger.”

“In political terminology, we are like a democracy—you can write freely and criticize freely,” OA6 wrote. 

The Burmese junta’s cyber police will undoubtedly be working to prove OA6 wrong.