Internet Lights Out in Myanmar

The repressive regime in Myanmar has a lock on the country's media outlets, and when columns of monks led massive street protests last week, traditional media outlets were stifled. Photo credits from inside the South Asian nation in the New York Times, for instance, lack names, presumably to protect the identity of any staff inside. Few, if any, Western journalists are reporting from Yangon.

Instead, news filtered out through nontraditional channels like YouTube. The Journal put it this way, "Citizen witnesses are using cellphones and the Internet to beam out images of bloodied monks and street fires, subverting the Myanmar government's effort to control media coverage and present a sanitized version of the uprising."

Now, the government has reportedly turned off the Internet. (What, exactly, are the logistics of a feat like that?) At first, Internet cafes were shuttered, but apparently for the last three days the e-mail service has been down, and now the Times is reporting that faking "technical problems" has become a widespread tactic of silencing flows of information.

The brief disruptions are known as “just in time” filtering, said Ronald J. Deibert of OpenNet. They are designed to quiet opponents while maintaining an appearance of technical difficulties, thus avoiding criticism from abroad.

Journalists inside the country have been transmitting information out of the country via text message; they have communicated developments by updating Wikipedia pages. Curiously, the "Burma" page (the former name of the country), has been closed to editing by unregistered users due to vandalism. See the page here.

In old-fashioned styles of repression, a Japanese photographer was shot dead in the street. Japan is threatening to withhold aid.

Diplomacy has proved so difficult that it took days for a special UN envoy to even gain access to the country's leadership, and just tonight UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said, "You cannot call it a success."

(Satellite image of Myanmar from Google Earth.)