Since the crackdown of pro-democracy protests began two weeks ago in Burma, many have discussed how things may differ from the similar crackdown in 1988 because of the Internet – or how they may not because of Internet filtering. I suppose these discussions, peppered with interviews with and videos of protesters, entertain audiences outside of Burma by creating suspense and making them see a distant uprising from the inside. But I almost never hear about who supports filtering or what we could DO to leverage the Internet’s potential, now in Burma and later in other authoritarian regimes.
I helped research and write the Open Net Initiative’s most recent Burma report, and hope that the publication of ONI research in February (Access Denied, MIT Press) will improve the way journalists understand filtering. One of them, writing for the Asia Times Online, misinterprets ONI’s investigations in Burma: state-controlled ISPs did not consistently block Gmail, Hotmail and 85% of the Internet until two years ago, and in any case it is not in strictly technical terms that Burma has one of the world’s most expansive web filtering system. See the ONI report’s conclusion:
Although Myanmar does not deploy its filtering regime with the same sophistication and breadth as other countries with similarly repressive online environments, the paranoid grip of the SPDC is felt in the restrictions on access, the high cost of services, and the frequently brutal clampdown on information and expression in all other spheres of Burmese life.
I also doubt that a “global proliferation” of censorship circumvention tools since 2005 explains why the Asia Times Online’s correspondent found connections to foreign proxy servers in Burmese Internet cafés. Nor did the junta innovate with last month’s Internet blackout: Burma was disconnected for 4 days in May 2006 (damage to an undersea cable was also alleged then), Nepal for a week during a 2005 coup (as one blogger remembers), and so on.
Rather, I suspect that recent changes have been not so much in Internet policy or filtering and circumvention capacities, but in people’s willingness to take risks – like a student connecting to a proxy server or perhaps an Internet café owner turning off programs that take regular screenshots of user activity. Worsening economic conditions pushed more Burmese people in that direction, as did the possibility to send reports and proofs of the crackdown outside the country.
This is where the Internet comes into play – transnationally rather than domestically. And it’s quite obvious to me that the outcome will differ from that of 1988 only if Burmese people get strong outside support, starting with personal sanctions on their leaders.
As many have noted, including Roby Alampay in a Washington Post op-ed, Burma raises questions about similar scenarios on a bigger scale and involving a greater power – most obviously, China. Here domestic actors would play a more decisive role than reluctant foreign powers. Unfortunately global institutions are not about to move control of the Internet away from national governments; for some time at least Burmese dial-up subscribers will have to use workarounds to surf beyond the small “Myanmar Wide Web,” and Chinese students (at Peking University at least) to pay an additional fee to access the “international web.” So laws against the provision of filtering software (Google & Co. in China and Fortinet & Co. in Burma) as well as advanced circumvention tools (e.g. PC users abroad offering anonymous, uncensored connections via Psiphon) are a good start — but they don’t help when governments pull the plug completely, or if China spun off its own Internet, which would be bad for Chinese people and for everybody else, as we’d be cut off from all online interactions between its citizens and government.
What about providing citizens with wireless Internet or SMS networks via satellites during democratic uprisings? The US could and should have done the opposite in Rwanda, as Samantha Power has often pointed out, by at least jamming radio broadcasts used to organize the genocide. Thirteen years later we are still paying too little attention, I find, to telecommunications in non-democratic regimes – perhaps because we still shy away from seeing communication (not just information access) as a human right.
