internet censorship in burma

In Uncategorized on 13 January 2010 with 1 comment

i have vis­ited burma twice. i love the coun­try and i love the people.

when oth­ers ask me “isn’t burma dan­ger­ous?” i always answer “no, it’s not!”. the situ­ation in burma isn’t what you see on the news. it’s not like the pic­tures shown on cnn or bbc. the people are peace­ful and aside from a viol­ent encounter in 2007, the government’s inter­fer­ence in daily life is min­imal. oth­ers would dis­agree with me, and they’d be right. of course the junta (dic­tat­orial mil­it­ary gov­ern­ment) are affect­ing life on a daily basis. but for the most part, people have the abil­ity to get on with living.

i sup­port aung san suu kyi, the imprisoned right­ful pres­id­ent and nobel peace prize laur­eate. i sup­port eco­nomic sanc­tions against burma — even though they’re not work­ing (mostly due to amer­ica, france and china).

how­ever i dis­agree that tour­ism should be banned. tour­ists are an import­ant point of con­tact for burmese people. many argue that tour­ist money goes to gov­ern­ment pock­ets and funds the junta. evid­ence sug­gests oth­er­wise. the junta does make money from tour­ism, but the amount is almost irrel­ev­ant in com­par­ison with the oil and nat­ural gas deals that the junta has with amer­ican and french com­pan­ies. the junta makes bil­lions from oil (des­pite the sanc­tions). tour­ism brings in a few mil­lion. con­sider that burma receives approx­im­ately one per­cent of the tour­ism that thai­l­and gets. if tour­ists avoid gov­ern­ment owned planes, trains, fer­ries and expens­ive hotels, then much of the money brought in can go dir­ectly to the pock­ets of burma’s citizens.

how­ever, the topic i find most inter­est­ing — which i’m going to cover here — is cen­sor­ship in burma. the gov­ern­ment has a fil­ter sys­tem to pre­vent unwanted mater­ial reach­ing its cit­izens. by far, the most cen­sored sites are news and blogs. the gov­ern­ment also attempts to cen­sor social media, which is used to spread inform­a­tion dur­ing civil unrest. burma is not the first coun­try to do this. iran and other nations also use cen­sor­ship (par­tic­u­larly focus­ing on the ban of social media) to con­trol the spread of inform­a­tion. sadly, my own coun­try (aus­tralia) is also try­ing to intro­duce fil­ters to cen­sor the inter­net. i’m 100% against it, but i’ll talk about that another time.

this art­icle was writ­ten on janu­ary 13th, 2010. the list of banned web­sites was accur­ate at that time. the junta does change their mind (con­stantly) and the list of sites which are cen­sored changes often.

for starters, my own web­site (which has cri­ti­cised burma in the past) is banned. hahahaha … oh, the irony! but the most inter­est­ing point is the com­plete lack of con­sist­ency employed by the gov­ern­ment. it seems that some influ­en­tial social net­work­ing sites are blocked (twit­ter), while oth­ers are avail­able (face­book).

here’s a look at what hap­pens when you try to access a banned web­site in burma. gmail is blocked. here’s what it looks like:

the page itself is gen­er­ated by the gov­ern­ment. no fan­fare, no ban­ners or warn­ings, no gov­ern­ment or coun­try logos. a simple ‘access denied’ and end of story. it’s import­ant to note here that the gov­ern­ment isn’t admit­ting (via this page) that the site is banned since there is a link via which a request can be sent to the ‘web mod­er­ator’ … i doubt any­one ever clicks the link.

other banned sites:

• flickr
• twit­ter
• you­tube
• dav­ids­meaton (me!!)
• explosm.net (a comic site)
• reu­ters
• abc.net.au (the aus­tralian gov­ern­ment news network)
• amnesty.org (amnesty international)
• wordpress.com (free online blogs)
• blog­ger (another free online blog host)
• mizzima.com (anti-govt news site)
• irrawaddy.org (anti-govt website)

these are all sites i tried to get access to, but only received the above ‘access denied’ screen. this is not an exhaust­ive list, it’s just a sample. i’m sure there are hun­dreds more sites … these are just some prom­in­ent ones. as stated earlier, the most com­mon cen­sored sites are news, blogs and social net­works. obvi­ously, a slew of anti-government web­sites have also been banned.

which sites are avail­able? these are (for now):

• face­book
• wiki­pe­dia
• aljaz­eera (arabic ori­ented news)
• bbc (sur­pris­ingly)
• report­ers without bor­ders (pre­vi­ously blocked)
• unicef
• united nations
• unhcr.org (un’s refugee site)
• amnesty.org.uk (anmesty international’s uk site)
• myanmarsociety.com (anti-govt website)

most inter­est­ingly was a blog i found on amnesty international’s uk site, which was strongly anti-government, but vis­ible in burma (http://blogs.amnesty.org.uk/blogs_entry.asp?eid=952) … it seems that while burma’s gov­ern­ment blocks amnesty inter­na­tional (due to their cri­ti­cism of the junta), the gov­ern­ment doesn’t block amnesty’s regional sites.

report­ers without bor­ders (www.rsf.org) has been known to be blocked in the past, but for now is available.

there’s plenty of inform­a­tion about the junta’s inter­net cen­sor­ship. this is just a small col­lec­tion of links which are blocked (for now). fur­ther inter­est­ing read­ing is also avail­able on a pdf (myan­mar inter­net cen­sor­ship).

i’ll fin­ish with another image of blocked web­sites. this one is recombinantrecords.net … a polit­ical satire car­toon­ist. his car­toons have dis­cussed orwell and total­it­ari­an­ism, but i couldn’t find any dir­ect ref­er­ences to burma.

as you can see (look­ing at the mul­tiple tabs) that the report­ers without bor­ders web­site has loaded, as has the united nations refugee site. the polit­ical cartoonist’s site has been blocked.

please leave any com­ments or add sites which you can con­firm are blocked.

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