Internet Access Complicates the Coup in Myanmar

By Doug Bock Clark

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Not long after midnight on February 1st, a squad of Myanmar Army soldiers surrounded a housing complex in the nation’s capital, where elected leaders had gathered before parliament was to convene that morning. Another team was descending on the data centers of one of the largest telecommunications companies in the country. Inside, engineers were up late, upgrading the networks while there was minimal traffic. According to one senior engineer, the soldiers forced the team to turn off some equipment, and cut the wires to other systems. At another major telecommunications company, this one co-owned by the military, there was no need to slash cables; employees obeyed the shutdown orders, an engineer said. But, at both locations, the soldiers stood guard over the data centers with guns.

Myanmar’s military staged its first coup in 1962, when the country was still called Burma, deposing an unsteady parliamentary democracy that had been established in the aftermath of British colonialism and the Second World War. For decades, the junta kept a stranglehold on the country, tamping down democracy movements with ruthless violence and dominating the nation’s communications systems. As late as 2010, only one per cent of Myanmar’s population had cell-phone subscriptions, the lowest percentage on earth (along with the Marshall Islands), and roughly zero per cent was using the Internet. But, in 2011, the junta disbanded and reconstituted itself as a political party. Four years later, the opposition, the National League for Democracy, won a landslide victory over the generals in a genuinely democratic election. This past November, the N.L.D. expanded its control even further, winning three hundred and ninety-six seats in parliament; the military’s proxy party won only thirty-three. Since then, the military has complained, without evidence, that the election was marred by extensive electoral fraud. Now, just hours before the new parliament was to convene, the military moved to retake power, and once again it sought to control the flow of information.

But then, on the afternoon of the coup, the engineers were ordered to get the Internet and cell phones working again. (Sources I spoke to for this article were granted anonymity for their safety.) No explanation was given for this sudden reversal, and it seemed to the engineers that the soldiers hadn’t anticipated it; wires and cables had been physically cut just a few hours before. The military reversed course because, as an individual involved in Myanmar’s telecommunications industry explained, “They couldn’t run the businesses.” A former telecommunications employee pointed out that the Web had become especially crucial during the covid-19 pandemic, when a sizable amount of work in the country’s urban centers shifted online. Indeed, the telecom engineers and others reported widespread problems caused by the blackout—A.T.M.s and crucial banking software were freezing, and some text messages became illegible.

Myanmar’s dependence on the Internet is a recent phenomenon. The first foreign telecom carriers arrived in early 2014, not long after the country was opened to foreign investment. By that August, the price of a sim card had dropped to $1.50 from a high of about two thousand dollars during the dictatorship. Affordable smartphones flooded in across the Chinese border. Cell-phone coverage rapidly expanded from cities to rural areas, where many people still survive as farmers. Mobile-banking apps became integral to corporations and mom-and-pop shops alike. YouTube and other social-media platforms were suddenly available to a previously suppressed and voiceless citizenry. Recently, the number of active sim cards in Myanmar surpassed the number of people. The Internet had become an inextricable part of daily life, and this presented the generals with an unforeseen challenge. The nation could not function with the Internet turned off, but, as long as it remained on, the populace could not easily be controlled.

On the Monday of the coup, Myanmar’s military-owned television network announced that the armed forces were taking over for a yearlong state of emergency, after which, the military later promised, there would be another election. In the following days, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets, many of them waving the N.L.D.’s flag—a red banner decorated with a golden fighting peacock. Nightly, at eight, citizens banged pots and pans, repurposing a traditional practice believed to scare away evil spirits. In past uprisings, protesters had secretly passed around slips of paper and cassette tapes of speeches. Now activists with tens of thousands of followers were brainstorming and sharing resistance ideas on multiple social-media platforms. A young activist, whom I’ll call Z, led several dozen demonstrators carrying signs in English, intended for an international audience that would see the photos on the Internet. After the parliamentarians were released, N.L.D. members began coördinating a resistance government online. Protests were live-streamed for domestic and international viewers, and encrypted-messaging apps were used to communicate with foreign governments and journalists.

The military was working furiously to shut all this connectivity down. Within a few days of the coup, telecom engineers had been ordered to use software to block the I.P. addresses for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. “We didn’t want to,” one of the engineers said, “but we had no choice.” There were more rolling blackouts, none of which lasted longer than a day. Telenor, a Norwegian company that runs a large portion of Myanmar’s cellular network, has been posting directives issued by the military, each of which brought a new round of tightening digital control. Activists, however, were finding ways around these obstacles. Many of them downloaded apps that acted as virtual private networks, or V.P.N.s, which make traffic appear as if it were coming from Singapore or another country. Others were buying Thai sim cards for similar reasons.

Social media has also fuelled the Civil Disobedience Movement, a nationwide strike, which involves closing schools, government agencies, hospitals, banks, and transportation services. A street activist named Dane has been soliciting donations online and distributing them to strikers who are not receiving their salaries during the shutdown. An engineer who had worked for the telecom company co-owned by the military had resigned to join the C.D.M., along with dozens of colleagues. This, perhaps even more than the street protests, was paralyzing the new dictatorship.

The military began arresting dissidents at night, perhaps to avoid daytime spectacles that would attract international attention. Residents countered by live-streaming the raids. In one widely shared video, a prominent doctor, who had apparently sided with the resistance, seemed resigned to leave with the armed men who had showed up at his house. But soon the banging of pots and pans could be heard in the distance. A live stream of the incident had apparently attracted a crowd, which gathered in front of the compound. Eventually, the armed group’s leader promised to leave the doctor alone and pleaded to be allowed to safely exit the compound. The live streamer told her viewers not to hurt them as they fled.

On Sunday, February 14th, armored personnel carriers and tanks rumbled into urban centers. Warnings spread on social media that the military was going to cut the Internet nationwide from 1 a.m. to 9 a.m. Around midnight, I received a series of texts from contacts in Myanmar. “The military soldiers are kidnapping our innocent civilians including me at the night time,” Z wrote to me, minutes before the Internet went dark. The next morning, when the Internet came back, Z told me that he had managed to escape after a crowd of his neighbors intervened. Since mid-February, the military has kept the Internet on during the day, to enable the economy to function, and turned it off at night, while hunting down activists.

During the second week of the takeover, the military put forward a draft of a draconian cybersecurity law. The measure, which was circulated among the telecom companies, would give authorities sweeping powers to access private data, ban Web sites, order Internet blackouts, lock away dissidents, and punish companies and their employees for disobeying orders; even if the military could not yet take away the Internet, it could at least make getting online more dangerous for its opponents. The military had also recently released twenty-three thousand prisoners—while continuing to arrest pro-democracy activists—and some speculated that the actions were designed to make space for those imprisoned under the new law. The law also called for companies to store data locally, rather than abroad, a necessary first step to sealing Myanmar’s Internet off from the rest of the world. (The cybersecurity law seems to have stalled, after significant outcry, but the military is reportedly seeking other avenues for enacting its most significant provisions.)

There were also widespread reports that the military was taking steps to build its version of China’s Great Firewall, a nationwide system of Internet control through software, hardware, and human surveillance. But Herbert Lin, a senior research scholar at Stanford, told me, “It’s going to be a complex, multistage process for Myanmar to build out a system of Internet control as effective as China’s. It will not be like flipping a switch.” There were, however, indications that the military’s oppression was becoming more technologically sophisticated. Internal messages from one of the major telecommunications companies, which were shared with me, suggested that the military was choking off roaming networks and blacklisting individual sim cards that were believed to be in use by activists. The military was also reportedly classifying Web sites by type—such as business, government, and civilian—in order to, for example, shut down civilian Web sites while keeping others up. These were relatively crude methods, but they were successfully disrupting many of the activists’ efforts.

Meanwhile, a United Nations expert on Myanmar’s human-rights situation warned, on February 17th, that the military was moving experienced combat troops toward cities. “At the end of the day, the future of Myanmar will be determined by what happens in the streets,” Richard Horsey, a Myanmar-based senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, said. During some previous pro-democracy movements, he said, the military had started shooting only after other options had been exhausted. At the end of February, the military ratcheted up its use of force against demonstrators. On Thursday, police stood by while civilian supporters of the military broke up protests with slingshots and knives. This past weekend, soldiers and police made hundreds of arrests. On Sunday, the authorities began opening fire, and the United Nations has since reported that at least eighteen individuals have been killed. On Monday morning, demonstrators were back in the streets, pleading on social media for the international community to intervene. “We need actions from the world,” one activist tweeted. “Words are not enough anymore.”