Burmese censorship -UPDATED!

30/09/2007 Written by minor

Really hard are these days in Burma — Myan­mar. Every news chan­nel reported about reac­tion of mil­i­tary junta, that supressed with force demon­stra­tions lead by monks.

Offi­cial infor­ma­tions from Burmese junta says, that there has been few dead and injured. Army took over many cities to avoid any fur­ther demon­stra­tions. What is sur­pris­ing in this issue? Many peo­ple informed, that pro­vided infor­ma­tions are wrong and num­bers of deads and injured are much higher. Censorship?

Junta dis­cov­ered that many peo­ple used Inter­net as infor­ma­tion chan­nel to spread infor­ma­tions around the globe. Not only Burmese, but for­eign cit­i­zens have shoot pho­tos, videos and posted with com­ments on Youtube and other pages.

Cen­sor­ship in this case looks strange: local police hunts every­body and tries to avoid pub­lish­ing of these infor­ma­tions. Offi­cial insti­tu­tions were dis­con­nected from Inter­net con­nec­tion, but because many pri­vate com­pa­nies and hotels are con­nected, infor­ma­tions were pub­lished. Police also entered into hotels and tried to avoid send­ing data from for­eign tourists…

Cen­sored inter­net in this part of the world is noth­ing new: China is cen­sor­ing Inter­net. More­over Burma is among few coun­tries, where cen­sor­ship and vio­lat­ing human rights are daily per­formed by mil­i­tary sys­tem.

Thanks to cyber­space there is enough infor­ma­tion about what is going on there.

UPDATE: As Inter­na­tional Her­ald Tri­bune informed today, two Inter­net ser­vice providers in Myan­mar were shut down because of attempts of junta to avoid spread­ing infor­ma­tions. As Aung Zaw, edi­tor of an Myan­mar exile mag­a­zine called Irrawaddy, told: “Finally they real­ized that this was their biggest enemy, and they took it down”. Also most of tele­phone access out­side of the coun­try was cut off. Also sol­diers are con­fis­cat­ing cam­eras and mobile phones.

More­over, Aung Zaw’s web­site was attacked, and because it hap­pened in time of shut­down of ISP’s, it rises the pos­si­bil­ity, that the gov­ern­ment has few skilled hack­ers.