Before dawn on Feb. 1, Burmese soldiers arrived with rifles and wire cutters. They pointed their rifles at technicians of telecommunications operators and ordered them to shut down the Internet. According to an eyewitness and a source, the soldiers cut the wire, but it was not clear what wire was cut.
The raid on data centers in Yangon and other Burmese cities was part of a coordinated operation by the Burmese military to seize power, imprison democratically elected leaders and take most Internet users offline.
Since the coup, the military has repeatedly cut off the Internet and blocked major social media sites, re-isolating a country that has only been connected to the outside world for the past few years. The junta has also introduced legislation that could criminalize even the mildest opinions expressed online.
So far, the Burmese military, known as the Tatmadaw, has relied on simpler, more brutal forms of control to restrict the flow of information. But they also appear to be focusing on building a digital fence to more aggressively filter what people see and do online. Experts say developing such a system could take years and would likely require outside help from Beijing or Moscow.
Such a comprehensive firewall could also come at a heavy price: Internet outages following the coup crippled the struggling economy. A longer disruption would damage local business interests and the confidence of foreign investors, as well as the military’s own substantial business interests.
“The military is afraid of what people are doing online, so they are trying to block and shut down the Internet,” said Ko Zaw Thurein Tun, president of the local chapter of the Myanmar Computer Professionals Association. Thurein Tun said. “But now that international banking transactions have stopped, the country’s economy is in decline. It’s like pouring your own urine on your own face.”
If Myanmar’s digital controls become permanent, it will become yet another global wall that increasingly separates an otherwise open, borderless Internet. The blockade would also provide new evidence that a growing number of countries are seeking to use China’s authoritarian model to tame the Internet. Two weeks after the coup, Cambodia, which is dominated by Chinese economic power, also unveiled its own sweeping measures to control the Internet.
Even U.S. and European policymakers are making their own rules, though they are far less draconian. Technologists fear that such moves could eventually cause the Internet to fall apart, upending the online networks that link the world together.
Burmese may have come to the Internet later than people in most other countries, but they are no less enthusiastic about it. exchanges on Facebook and Twitter, as well as encrypted messaging apps, have united millions of people against the coup.
Despite fears of a bloody crackdown, the daily street protests against the military have been gathering strength in recent days. Demonstrators gathered at the headquarters of the Chinese diplomatic mission in Myanmar, accusing Beijing of exporting authoritarian tools to the small neighboring country.
Two major Chinese companies, huawei and ZTE, have built most of Myanmar’s telecommunications network, especially as Western financial sanctions make it difficult for other foreign companies to operate in the country.
Myanmar’s two foreign-owned telecom operators, Telenor and Ooredoo Telecom, have complied with numerous requests from the military, including cutting off the Internet every night for the past week and blocking specific websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
The military placed officers from the Signal Corps in charge of the department, according to two people with knowledge of the post and telecommunications ministry’s personnel.
A week after the coup, a 36-page draft cybersecurity law was distributed to telecommunications and Internet service providers that outlines tough provisions that would give the military broad powers to block websites and cut off access to users deemed problematic. The law would also allow the government broad access to user data and require Internet providers to keep user data for three years.
“This cybersecurity law is just a law used to arrest people who go online,” said Ma Htaike Htaike Aung, director general of MIDO, a civil society organization that tracks technology developments in Myanmar. “If it is passed, our country’s digital economy will cease to exist.”
When the draft law was sent to foreign telecom companies for comment, authorities told the companies’ representatives that they had no option to reject the law, two people familiar with the matter said.
These and other people with knowledge of the ongoing crackdown on the Internet in Myanmar asked The New York Times to keep them anonymous because of the sensitivity of the new regime.
The draft cybersecurity law is part of a multi-year effort within the country to build surveillance capabilities, an effort that has often drawn on Chinese precedents. Last year, Norwegian state-owned company Telenor Norway raised concerns about the government’s push to buy cellphone service under real names, which would allow authorities to link names to phone numbers.
China’s real-name registration policy has become a cornerstone of the surveillance state established by Beijing, a plan in Myanmar that has so far been unsuccessful despite similarities to China. The program reflects Myanmar’s ambition, but also reflects the distance from where China has arrived.
In recent years, there has also been an increase in Huawei surveillance cameras used to track cars and people in Myanmar’s largest city and sparsely populated capital, Naypyidaw. A senior cybersecurity official in Myanmar recently showed off photos of this road surveillance technology on his personal Facebook page.
A Huawei spokesman declined to comment on the system.
For now, even as anti-Chinese protests grow with concerns about the influx of high-tech devices, the Defense Forces have ordered telecommunications companies to use a less advanced method of blocking Internet access, which is to decouple a Web site address from the series of numbers a computer needs to find a particular site, an operation similar to writing the wrong phone number next to a person’s name in a phone book.
Sophisticated Internet users can bypass the barrier using a virtual private network (VPN). But access to some of Myanmar’s popular free VPNs has been blocked in the past week. And fee-based services that are not easily blocked are unaffordable for most people in the country, who also lack the international credit cards needed to purchase them.
However, as one of the poorest countries in Asia, Myanmar has developed a surprising amount of technological prowess. Over the past decade, thousands of military officers have studied in Russia, where they have been educated in the latest information technologies, according to Education data from Myanmar and Russia.
In 2018, the Ministry of Transport and Telecommunications, then led by a mixed civil-military government, allocated $4.5 million from its contingency fund for a social media surveillance team “aimed at preventing foreign sources from interfering and fomenting unrest in Myanmar.”
Myanmar’s technology experts say thousands of cyber-soldiers operate under military command. The soldiers have been working overtime, visible every morning as more websites and VPNs are blocked after nightly Internet shutdowns.
“We’ve been able to see the military using simulations for decades, but they’re also trying to adopt new technologies,” Hunter Marston, a Southeast Asia researcher at the Australian National University (ANU) said. “Although the current applications are not chapter and verse, they are building a system to sweep out anyone who publishes a threat to the regime.”
Zaw Doeun Tun of the Myanmar Computer Operators Association said that shortly after the coup, a group of people came to arrest him while he was surfing the Internet at Home. Many digital activists have already been arrested across the country. He escaped.
Currently in hiding, he helped launch a civil disobedience campaign against the military. Zoduendoun said he fears the IDF is assembling its own digital firewall little by little.
“Then all of us will be in total darkness again,” he said.
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