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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."

7 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Free Burma by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Get Involved in the Struggle to Free Burma!
    http://www.freeburma.org/

  2. Misleading title by SnoopJeDi · · Score: 5, Insightful
    From TFA:

    The regime stopped focusing on policing its virtual borders after a power struggle which resulted in the ousting of former Prime Minister Khin Nyunt in October 2004, explains Mr Brussels.
    This sounds more like a case of the system breaking down and allowing people to slip through, not really people cracking some sophisticated censorship system.
  3. How do you fight budhist monks? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I mean, they reincarnate over time, kinda like Doom on nightmare-difficulty.

  4. Radical Religionist... by WED+Fan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The radical Christian blows up others and buildings.

    The radical Muslim blows himself up with others.

    The radical Budhist sets himself on fire, after he makes sure that no living things are around him to get hurt.

    --
    Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
  5. Call it Burma by spoonboy42 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Noticing a tag about the name "Myanmar", I thought I'd explain the controversy over the country's name. The official name of Burma was changed to Myanmar by the ruling military junta. Since the pro-democracy movement doesn't recognize the legitimacy of military rule, they and their supporters around the world continue to use the name Burma.

    --
    Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
    Andy Grove: "Not Much."
  6. Re:What about inside Burma? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Consider China, for example. Sophisticated computer users can find foreign news and commentary. But the masses have successfully been kept in the dark about, say, Tiananmen Square. This ignorance helps shape public opinion and marginalize those few who have access to the information.
    While your general point is valid I do not believe your specific example is correct. As far as I am aware, the events in Tiananmen Square are common knowledge in China; certainly the Chinese people I've talked to know about it. What censorship has done in this case is prevented any great discussion about it, which helps prevent it from shaping opinions to the degree that it otherwise might. Suppressing knowledge of events is really hard, but suppressing their importance is considerably easier.
  7. Re:What about inside Burma? by Foobar+of+Borg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The difference is that most Americans are under the illusion that we still have a free press.

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    Similar to the upcoming US election results