NYT : In Crackdown, Myanmar Junta Unplugs Internet

In Crackdown, Myanmar Junta Unplugs Internet

BY SETH MYDANS | October 4, 2007

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 last 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 posts 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 called Irrawaddy, whose Web site has been a leading source of news over the past weeks.

His Web 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 of whether the much-vaunted role of the Internet in undermining repression can stand up to a determined and ruthless government — or whether a tiny, economically isolated country like Myanmar is an exception.

“The crackdown on the media and on information flow is parallel to the physical crackdown,” said David Mathieson, an expert on Myanmar with Human Rights Watch, “and it seems they’ve done it quite effectively. Since Friday we’ve seen no new images come out.”

There are just two Internet service providers in Myanmar, and it was not complicated to shut them down, he said. 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.

In keeping with the country’s self-imposed isolation over the past half-century, Myanmar’s junta seemed prepared to cut itself off from the virtual world just as it had from the world at large.

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

In one final, hurried telephone call, Mr. Aung Zaw said, one of his long-time 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 any more. We are down. We are hunted by soldiers, we are down.”

There are still images in the pipeline, Mr. Aung Zaw said, and as soon as he receives them and his Web site is back up again, 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 by breaking the files down and reassembling them.

It is not clear, though, 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 around themselves.

“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, an onlooker who was the only person who recorded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Before last 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-mails and on daily blogs, according to some of the exile groups that received their 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 reporters used in the past to carry out film and news — handing their material to embassies or nongovernment organizations that had access to 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.

Other 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 when people could watch a war for the first time 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.”