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Burning down Myanmar's Internet firewall
By Shawn W Crispin
YANGON - Myanmar maintains some of the world's most restrictive
Internet controls, including government-administered blocks on
foreign news sites and the use of popular e-mail services. But when
politically sensitive fuel-price protests broke out last month in
the old capital city Yangon, government censors proved powerless to
stop the outflow of information and images over the Internet to the
outside world.
State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) authorities have
increased their efforts to curb local and foreign media coverage of
the protests and their heavy-handed response against demonstrators.
Pro-government thugs have been deployed to
harass and intimidate local journalists and camera-carriers, some
of whom have had their mobile-phone services cut.
Authorities initially ordered a blackout on all local media
coverage of the protests and have since crafted and placed articles
in mouthpiece media criticizing the protest leaders they have
detained. But the government is losing decidedly its most crucial
censorship battle: over the Internet. Despite government bans,
journalists and dissidents continue to send information and video
clips of the protests over the Internet to foreign-based news
organizations.
Exile-run media have published detailed blow-by-blow accounts and
explicit video clips of government crackdowns. Popular
video-sharing website YouTube is flush with footage of the protests
posted by citizen journalists under Burmese names, including one
posting by a user who apparently uses the same name as SPDC leader
General Than Shwe. The Thailand-based, exile-run Irrawaddy - a la
CNN - has called on the Myanmar population to play the role of
citizen journalists and send information to their newsdesk.
So why have the Myanmar authorities, who had apparently deployed
some of the most restrictive cyber-controls anywhere in the world,
so utterly failed to stem the outflow of sensitive information?
Myanmar's military government deploys various software-based
filtering techniques aimed at severely limiting the content the
country's citizens can access online.
Most Internet accounts in Myanmar are designed to provide access
only to the limited Myanmar intranet, and the authorities block
access to popular e-mail services such as Gmail and Hotmail.
According to the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a joint research project
on Internet censorship issues headed by Harvard University,
Myanmar's Internet-censorship regime as of 2005 was among the "most
extensive" in the world.
The research noted that the Myanmar government "maintains the
capability to conduct surveillance of communication methods such as
e-mail, and to block users from viewing websites of political
opposition groups and organizations working for democratic change
in Burma". An ONI-conducted survey of websites containing material
known to be sensitive to the regime found in 2005 that 84% of the
pages they tested were blocked. The regime also maintained an 85%
filtration rate of well-known e-mail service providers, in line
with, as ONI put it, the government's "well-documented efforts to
monitor communication by its citizens and to control political
dissent and opposition movements".
Myanmar's technical censorship capabilities were also reputedly
bolstered by the regime's procurement and implementation of
filtering software produced and sold by US technology company
Fortinet. According to ONI's research, the regime was as of 2005
continuing to seek to refine its censorship regime, which showed no
signs of lessening and could worsen as it moves to more
sophisticated software products.
Eschewing the censors
Two years later, thanks to the growing global proliferation of
proxy servers, proxy sites, encrypted e-mail accounts, http tunnels
and other creative workarounds, the cyber-reality in Myanmar is
actually much less restricted than ONI's research indicated.
To be sure, official Internet penetration rates are abysmally low
in Myanmar, because of the prohibitive cost and bureaucratic
hassle, including the provision of a signed letter from the
relevant porter warden that the applicant is not "politically
dangerous", to secure a domestic connection.
However, those low figures mask the explosion of usage at public
Internet cafes, particularly in Yangon, where a growing number are
situated in nondescript, hard-to-find locales. All of the cafes
visited in recent months by this correspondent were equipped with
foreign-hosted proxy sites or servers, which with the help of the
cafe attendant allowed customers to bypass government firewalls and
connect freely to the World Wide Web - including access to
otherwise blocked critical news sources.
One particularly popular proxy site in Myanmar's cyber-cafes is
Glite.sayni.net, popularly known as Glite. According to the site's
India-based administrator, the Glite program has been downloaded by
tens of thousands of Internet surfers and resides on hundreds of
private and public servers in Myanmar, allowing its users to access
Gmail accounts that the government has tried to block.
The authorities have so far moved to block three particular Glite
versions, but the program's administrator says he has in response
designed and set up more sites, of which he estimates there are
currently 11 unblocked versions, some of which are housed in
support site forums in a format that is difficult to search and
block.
He says Glite is also designed not to be indexed by search sites,
which gives Myanmar's Internet cafes their own private and secure
access and makes censor search-engine results for its site seem
deceptively sparse. Although the site's administrator says he is
"apolitical", he believes Myanmar's junta is "fighting a losing
battle" in trying to censor the Internet.
Other popular proxy servers in Yangon's cafes are Your-freedom.net
and Yeehart.com, both of which similarly maintain new, updated
versions to bypass government firewalls. The same is true for
various encrypted e-mail services, including the hyper-secure
Hushmail.com, which many local and exile-based journalists have
been trained to use and technology experts say the junta lacks the
expertise to crack.
The proliferation of evasive small-scale technologies, some like
Glite maintained by private individuals with a penchant for
programming, have in these restive times left Myanmar's junta with
few viable censorship options but to unplug the Internet
altogether. Indeed, there have been recent reports of rolling
Internet blackouts across Yangon's cyber-cafes, particularly during
the late afternoons, when journalists would normally file their
stories.
So far the authorities seem reluctant to make yet another policy
decision, on top of last month's hyper-inflationary fuel-price
hikes, that would impinge on national livelihoods, particularly the
urban-based business class, who judging by their numbers in
Yangon's cyber-cafes have grown increasingly reliant on the
Internet for cheap communications. That, of course, could change in
the weeks ahead if the street protests mount and the government
cracks down more forcefully.
Yet the comprehensive news coverage that has leaked out of Myanmar
represents an important victory for the global forces fighting to
keep the Internet free from government censorship. And when the
dust finally clears on Myanmar's popular protests, depending on the
eventual outcome, the information-driven movement could one day be
known as Myanmar's Glite revolution.
