The Myanmar soldiers descended on February 1 before dawn, with rifles and wire cutters. With the gun, they ordered technicians at telecom operators to turn off the internet. According to an eyewitness and a person who informed the events, the soldiers cut the wires without knowing what they were breaking.
The attacks on the data center in Yangon and other cities in Myanmar were part of a coordinated strike in which the military seized power, locked up the country’s elected leaders and took most of its internet users offline.
Since the coup, the military has repeatedly shut down the internet and cut off access to major social media sites, isolating a country that has only been linked to the outside world for the past few years. The military regime has also enacted legislation that could punish the softest opinions expressed online.
Until now, the Tatmadaw, as the Myanmar army is known, have relied on coarser forms of control to restrict the flow of information. But the military looks serious about setting up a digital fence to more aggressively filter what people see and do online. The development of such a system could take years and, according to experts, is likely to require outside help from Beijing or Moscow.
Such a comprehensive firewall can also claim a costly price: the internet disruptions since the coup have paralyzed a struggling economy. Longer disruption will harm local business interests and foreign investor confidence as well as the military’s major business interests.
“The military is afraid of people’s online activities, which is why they are trying to block and block the Internet,” said Ko Zaw Thurein Tun, president of a local chapter of the Myanmar Computer Professionals Association. . “But now international banking transactions have stopped and the country’s economy is declining. It’s like urinating wet their own face. ”
If Myanmar’s digital controls become permanent, it will contribute to the increasingly divisive walls of what would be an open, borderless Internet. The blocks also provide new evidence that more countries are looking to China’s authoritarian model to tame the Internet. Two weeks after the coup, Cambodia, which is under China’s economic rule, also introduced its own comprehensive internet control.
Even policymakers in the United States and Europe set their own rules, though they are far less serious. Technologists worry that such movements could eventually disrupt the Internet and effectively undermine the online networks that connect the world.
The people of Myanmar may have gotten online later than most others, but their enthusiasm for the internet has the zeal of the converts. Communication on Facebook and Twitter, along with secure messaging programs, has united millions of people against the coup.
Daily street protests against the army have gained momentum in recent days, despite fears of a bloody repression. Protesters have joined China’s diplomatic missions in Myanmar, accusing Beijing of exporting the instruments of authoritarianism to its smaller neighbor.
Huawei and ZTE, two major Chinese companies, built much of Myanmar’s telecommunications network, especially when Western financial sanctions made it difficult for other foreign companies to operate in the country.
Myanmar’s two overseas telecommunications operators, Telenor and Ooredo, have complied with military demands, including instructions to shut down the internet every night for the past week and block specific websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
According to the two persons with knowledge of the staff’s staff, the army placed the officers of the Signal Corps in charge of the Post and Telecommunications Division.
A 36-page draft law on cyber security distributed to telecommunications and Internet service providers the week after the coup provides an outline of draconian rules that would give the military powers to block websites and access users deemed troublesome. to stop. The law will also provide the government with wide access to users’ data, which stipulates that internet service providers must store for three years.
“The cyber security law is just a law to arrest people who are online,” said Ma Htaike Htaike Aung, executive director of MIDO, a civil society group that monitors technology in Myanmar. “If it goes through, the digital economy in our country will disappear.”
When the draft law was sent for comment to foreign telecommunications, the authorities informed the representatives of the companies that the rejection of the law is not an option, according to two people who know the talks.
The people and others who are aware of the ongoing efforts to curb the Internet in Myanmar spoke to The New York Times about the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the new regime.
The draft cyber security law follows a years-long effort in the country to expand surveillance capabilities, often following cues from China. Last year, Telenor, a Norwegian company, expressed concern about a government effort to register the identities of people buying mobile services, enabling the authorities to link names to telephone numbers.
The campaign in Myanmar has so far been unsuccessful, although it has similarities with China’s real name registration policy, which has become a keystone of Beijing’s surveillance state. The program reflected Myanmar’s ambitions, but also how far it is to achieve something close to what China has done.
In recent years, Huawei cameras have been made to detect cars, and people have also gone up in the country’s largest cities and in the underpopulated capital Naypyidaw. A top cyber security officer in Myanmar recently posted photos of such road monitoring technology on his personal Facebook page.
A Huawei spokesman declined to comment on the systems.
The Tatmadaw have ordered telecommunications companies to use less sophisticated methods to block Internet access, even as anti-Chinese protests escalate over fears of the influx of high-tech equipment. The choice is to disconnect web address addresses from the range of numbers a computer needs to search for specific websites, such as entering an incorrect number in a directory.
Savvier Internet users have been blocking virtual private networks or VPNs, but in the past week access to a number of popular free VPNs in Myanmar has been hampered. And paid services, which are harder to block, are unaffordable for most people in the country, who also do not have the necessary international credit cards to buy them.
For one of the poorest countries in Asia, however, Myanmar has developed a surprisingly robust technical mandate. Over the past decade, thousands of military officers have studied in Russia, where, according to educational data from Myanmar and Russia, they have been trained in the latest information technology.
In 2018, the Ministry of Transport and Telecommunications, then under a hybrid civilian-military government, diverted $ 4.5 million from an emergency fund to use it for a social media monitoring team that “aims to target foreign sources of interference and unrest in Myanmar. ”
Thousands of cybercriminals are working under military command, Myanmar technical experts said. Every morning, after the nightly internet interruptions, more websites and VPNs are blocked, showing the soldiers’ activity.
“We see an army that has been using analog for decades, but is also trying to adopt new technology,” said Hunter Marston, a researcher in Southeast Asia at the Australian National University. “Although it is being applied at random at the moment, they are putting in place a system to clean up everyone who posts anything that threatens even the government.”
Mr. Zaw Thurein Tun, of the Myanmar Computer Professionals Association, said he was sitting at home browsing shortly after the coup when a group of men showed up to arrest him. Other digital activists have already been detained across the country. He ran.
He is now hiding to help direct a civil disobedience campaign against the military. Mr. Zaw Thurein Tun said he was concerned that the Tatmadaw, brick for digital brick, was mounting its own firewall.
“Then we will all be in complete darkness again,” he said.