Bloggers Who Risked All In Burma

An anonymous reader sends us to the UK's TimesOnline for a story about dissident Burmese bloggers, who, with the Internet shut down in the country, are no longer posting live stories. Some of them are on the run and fearing for their lives. "Internet geeks share a common style, and Ko Latt and his four friends would not be out of place in cyber cafes across the world. They have the skinny arms and the long hair, the dark T-shirts and the jokey nicknames. But few such figures have ever taken the risks that they have in the past few weeks, or achieved so much in a noble and dangerous cause. Since last month Ko Latt, 28, his friends Arca, Eye, Sun and Superman, and scores of others like them have been the third pillar of Burma's Saffron Revolution."

Comments

Re:Exactly

[Lumpy]

step 1 create a universal danger to scare your populace.
step 2 get laws passed to speed up defending against the universal danger.
step 3 convince the populace that their freedoms are helping the danger and must be removed.
step 4 convince the populace that weapons also help the danger and must be removed for your safety.
step 5 show the steps are not going far enough, get populace believing that the danger is near!
step 6 remove ALL judicial protections in the name of security.
step 7 legalize total government secrecy in the name of security.
step 8 convince that term limits are bad and help terrorists and exacerbate the danger.
step 9 have populace elect a new easily controlled patsy as president.
step 10 invoke martial law.

you have successfully converted a democratic free nation into a fascist dictatorship.
The united states is currently on step 4 and step 5.

what is happening in Burma to the vocal dissidents will start to happen here. It already happens in the military as ground troops over there that are vocally against what is happening suddenly turn into government loving " we are doing the right thing, GW bush is awesome" drones in their blogs. That has been even covered here.