Tech-savvy dissidents continue to report despite a total internet shutdown, says linton chiswick |
 |
Were it not for the reach of internet technology, the Burmese authorities might have considered thousands of defiant monks a purely internal problem, and restored order the way they dealt with their previous popular political uprising - by closing the borders and sanctioning a quick and wholesale slaughter.
But by the time the junta turned its attention to prioritising the disruption of electronic communication, the world had access to an unprecedented stream of amateur photographs, film and blog chatter from the inside.
Now, almost a week after the Burmese authorities tried to secure their electronic borders by shutting down the country's internet service providers, some believe the genie has already escaped and, with the world's attention on images of red-robed monks and state-sanctioned thuggery, the
|
|
 |
 |
|
The tipping point came after a video showing a Japanese photographer being shot by a soldier appeared on YouTube
|
|
|
junta cannot dare repeat the kind of atrocities committed 19 years ago.
It's an optimistic view. And it may be proved cruelly wrong. But certainly, as the authorities continue a deadly cat-and-mouse game with the country's technologists, citizen journalism is at least achieving something.
Ironically, the regime's own crude attempts to regulate electronic media have proved a perfect training ground for a generation of wily politicised technologists, many of whom were mere infants in 1988. Less than one per cent of the Burmese people have internet access; there are only two (state-sanctioned) ISPs; and internet cafes are ordered to monitor customers' activities by taking regular screenshots.
So when the authorities responded to the uprising by introducing a 'walled garden' (blocking email and denying access to foreign websites), Burma's young bloggers were familiar with the use of foreign 'proxy' sites to disguise themselves and break through to the wider web. They managed to continue sending out live news to either free web  |
Burma's forbidden city
