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How Burmese Dissidents Crack Censorship

Posted by samzenpus on from the monks-and-the-net dept.

s-orbital writes "According to a BBC News article, "Images of saffron-robed monks leading throngs of people along the streets of Rangoon have been seeping out of a country famed for its totalitarian regime and repressive control of information. The pictures, sometimes grainy and the video footage shaky, are captured at great personal risk on mobile phones — but each represents a powerful statement of political dissent." The article goes on to tell the stories of how Burma's bloggers use proxy servers, free hosting services, and other technologies to overcome Burma's "pervasive" filtering of internet access and news."

3 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Power Does Not Corrupt by WED+Fan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Aung San Suu Kyi has said, "Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts. The fear of losing power corrupts."

    --
    Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
  2. Re:Who? by plover · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I say put a rifle in the hands of every able-bodied man and woman in Myanmar and see how things change.

    That's the approach we successfully employed in Afghanistan. We taught the mujaheddin how to resist the Soviet invaders and taught them the principles of insurgency, which they haven't seem to have forgotten yet. And in Iraq, we sold peace-lovin' Saddam Hussein the weapons to defend himself against Persian aggression, which he peacefully used to help the Kurds avoid an uprising, and peacefully used to liberate Kuwait... and now we're rearming the Iraqi police to defend against those same weapons.

    So if at any point you continue to think it is a good idea for us to keep providing arms to other people, just start flipping through your history books or your newspaper. Seriously, I think a U.S. invasion would be better than a weapons deal, simply because we wouldn't leave the weapons behind after the fighting is done.

    --
    John
  3. Re:Call it Burma by jellie · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Since we're on the topic of names, I might as well add that some countries, like the US and UK, use "Burma", whereas the UN (perhaps for diplomatic reasons) uses "Myanmar". Most refer to the people of the country and the official language as "Burmese". And, for what it's worth, the name of the country actually sounds more like "Myanmar" than "Burma" - apparently the latter was a poor transliteration.