The OpenNet Initiative has produced a chilling report about the Burmese military regime’s total takedown of electronic communications. The regime (like many other authoritarian governments), has always censored political content. But the government’s response to the Fall 2007 protests is shocking even by its own standards. As OpenNet notes:
The targets for censorship expanded exponentially from Web sites that are critical of the junta to any individual with a camera or cell phone and direct or indirect access to the Internet.
The military junta correctly understood that the revolt’s center of gravity was its reliance on electronic media. The junta’s command of a ruthless and disciplined security and surveillance regime was more than sufficient to subdue the rebellious monks and students. However, electronic media such as blogs, cell phone cameras, and email focused disproportionate attention on the regime’s injustices, raising the specter of foreign interference.
Most ominous for the military regime, however, was the role electronic media played in organizing the protests and amplifying their domestic effect.
It is clear that new media made up for the protest movement’s weakness in the face of the authoritarian state. But this dependence also made it vulnerable. All the regime needed to do to contain the revolt was to “unplug” Burma, a task the junta was capable of given its total control over national information infrastructure.
Access to any form of communications technology was completely shuttered, plunging Burma into an information blackout. This disoriented the opposition and gave the government space to unleash the full force of totalitarian power upon them. In a cruel irony, many of the images of protest featured in the international media are being used by the regime to identify dissidents.
DOMINATING THE INFORMATION BATTLESPACE
The success of this strategy suggests that total blockage of electronic media will become an increasingly common tactic in the developing world. It is the information war equivalent of the "Hama option"--a massively brutal and quick quashing of the rebellion before it metastizes into a wider threat.
Many observers have predicted that the Internet and global trade would open up even the most despotic regimes. However, this is only true in states where regimes lose out by utterly disconnecting themselves. China, for example, would suffer a disastrous loss in influence if it were to adopt such despotic measures.
But the ruling elites of impoverished authoritarian states like Zimbabwe and Burma care only about ruthlessly securing their own power. They can afford to remain disconnected from the outside world as long as they manage to feed their militaries. And with the opposition scattered and weak and the populace struggling merely to survive, the rule of despots will remain secure.
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