Information Society Watch

2007, Stephanie Wang & Shishir Nagaraja, OpenNet Initiative

This bulletin examines the emerging role of ICTs in Burma and presents a technical analysis of the Burmese military junta's complete shutdown of Internet access between September and October 2007. Using the example of Burma, it concludes that ICTs can have a major impact on global coverage of events and on the events themselves, but the effectiveness of ICTs can also be severely limited by factors such as state control. The Burmese government both used and restricted Internet and mobile connectivity, not only censoring the information that Burmese netizens were able to access but more importantly preventing them from transmitting any data outside of the country. Complete state control of these technologies enabled the government to use them to prevent citizens from mobilizing around domestic political events and made the task of surveillance much easier. However, bloggers and citizen journalists transformed the Internet into a major news source to communicate their country's events to a global audience. The review provides the Internet crackdown in Burma as an illuminating case study of how bi-directional technologies have implications for the 'information wars between governments and their critics'.

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