It was about as simple and uncomplicated as shooting demonstrators in the streets. Embarrassed by smuggled video and photographs that showed their people rising up against them, the generals who run Myanmar simply switched off the Internet.
Until last Friday, television screens and newspapers abroad were flooded with scenes of tens of thousands of red-robed monks in the streets and of chaos and violence as the junta stamped out the biggest popular uprising there in two decades.
But then the images, text messages and posts stopped, shut down by generals who belatedly grasped the power of the Internet to jeopardize their crackdown.
“Finally they realized that this was their biggest enemy, and they took it down,” said Aung Zaw, editor of an exile magazine called The Irrawaddy, whose Web site has been a leading source of news over the past weeks.
His Web site has been attacked by a virus whose timing raises the possibility that the military government has a few skilled hackers in its ranks.
On Wednesday the intimidation continued as the government sent troops to take people from their homes in the middle of the night and let others know they were marked for retribution, The Associated Press reported.
Threats and arrests
More Top Picks Sensory Seeking Vs Sensory Avoiding Behaviors
“We have photographs! We are going to make arrests!” soldiers yelled from loudspeakers on military vehicles that patrolled the streets in Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city
People living near the Shwedagon Pagoda, Myanmar’s most revered shrine and a flash point of unrest during the protests, reported that security forces swept through several dozen homes about 3 a.m., taking away many men and some women for questioning.
The difficulty in getting such information, however, has only grown due to the efficiency of the junta’s Internet crackdown, raising the question of whether the much-vaunted role of the Net in undermining repression can stand up to a determined government.
“The crackdown on the media and on information flow is parallel to the physical crackdown,” said David Mathieson, an expert on Myanmar with Human Rights Watch, “and it seems they’ve done it quite effectively. Since Friday, we’ve seen no new images come out.”
There are just two Internet service providers in Myanmar, and it was not complicated to shut them down, he said. Along with the Internet, the junta cut off most telephone access to the outside world. Soldiers on the streets confiscated cameras and video-recording cell phones.
In keeping with the country’s self-imposed isolation over the past half-century, Myanmar’s junta seemed prepared to cut itself off from the virtual world just as it had from the world at large.
At the same time, the junta turned to the oldest tactic of all to silence an opposition — fear. Local journalists and people caught transmitting information or using cameras are being threatened and arrested, according to Burmese exile groups.
“People are terrified,” Shari Villarosa, the acting U.S. ambassador in Myanmar, told AP on Wednesday. “People have been unhappy for a long time. Since the events of last week, there’s now the unhappiness combined with anger, and fear.”
In New York, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said he would meet with the Security Council on Friday to discuss possible actions for addressing human-rights abuses in Myanmar, calling the situation there a top international concern.
Ban said his special envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, delivered “the strongest possible message” to Myanmar’s military leaders during a four-day visit but added that he could not call the trip a success. The junta has not commented on Gambari’s visit.
Before last Friday’s blackout, Myanmar’s hit-and-run journalists were staging a virtuoso demonstration of the power of the Internet to outmaneuver a repressive government. A guerrilla army of citizen reporters was smuggling out pictures even as events were unfolding, and the world was watching.
Sneaking out the truth
People sent images and words through SMS text messages and e-mails and on daily blogs, according to some of the exile groups that received their messages. They posted notices on Facebook, the social networking Web site. They sent tiny messages on e-cards. They updated the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
They also used Internet versions of “pigeons” — the couriers reporters used in the past to carry out film and news — handing their material to embassies or non-government organizations that had access to satellite connections.
Within hours, the images and reports were broadcast back into Myanmar by foreign radio and television stations, informing and connecting a public that hears only propaganda from its government.
But now, without Internet access, Mathieson said, Myanmar’s dissidents are reverting to tactics of the past, smuggling images out through cell phones by breaking the files down and reassembling them.
It is not clear, though, how much longer the generals can hold back the future. Technology is making it harder for dictatorships to draw a curtain of secrecy around themselves.
“There are always ways people find of getting information out, and authorities always have to struggle with them,” said Mitchell Stephens, a professor of journalism at New York University and the author of “A History of News.”
“There are fewer and fewer events that we don’t have film images of: The world is filled with Zapruders,” he said, referring to Abraham Zapruder, an onlooker who was the only person who recorded the assassination of President John Kennedy in 1963.