Bloggers who risked all to reveal the junta’s brutal crackdown in Burma

[babylonsister]

Bloggers who risked all to reveal the junta’s brutal crackdown in Burma
Young men from Myanmar who helped to inform the rest of the World through their blogs

(The Times)


Internet geeks share a common style, and Ko Latt and his four friends would not be out of place in cyber cafés 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. While the veteran democracy activists, and then the Buddhist monks, marched in their tens of thousands against the military regime, it is the country’s amateur bloggers and internet enthusiasts who have brought the images to the outside world.

Armed with small digital cameras, they have documented the spectacular growth of the demonstrations from crowds of a few hundred to as many as 100,000. On weblogs they have recorded in words and pictures the regime’s bloody crackdown, in a city where only a handful of foreign journalists work undercover. With downloaded software, they have dodged and weaved around the regime’s increasingly desperate attempts to thwart their work. Now the bloggers, too, have been crushed. Having failed to stop the cyber-dissidents broadcasting to the world, the authorities have simply switched off the internet.

Now Ko Latt and his blogging comrades have abandoned their keyboards and gone underground, sleeping in a different place every night, watching and waiting to see if the democracy movement has been truly crushed or is simply on hold. “When things were hot on the streets, we were not the main worry,” Ko Latt says. “But as the situation cools down, they will follow us. They know who we are, they know we are bloggers, and I am afraid.”

Even in normal times it was hard to be a blogger in Burma. With characteristic paranoia, the Government monitored and controlled every aspect of the process, from licensing computers to issuing accounts through government-monitored internet service providers (ISPs). This is what makes political blogging so dangerous here — it is easy for military intelligence to identify a dissident’s name and address through his registered account.

more...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article2563937.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=2015164

[MadMaddie]

1. And where is Condi while this is going on?

The US diplomacy mission is lost....the US has been made week and ineffective by this administration and the US cannot impact events around the world in a positive way anymore.

[Uncle Joe]

2. Thanks for the thread babylonsister.

My thoughts are with the bloggers.


Kicked and recommended.