Myanmar 2021: Documenting the Military’s Internet Shutdown Toolkit with Alternative Data
Free internet access was the first casualty of the coup. Here we collate our remote measurements on how it was lost.
Over the past three weeks, political pressure has been progressively building as Myanmar’s military attempts to stamp out uprisings against the coup. Internet suppression tactics, including nightly communications blackouts, have become a key angle of coercion against a nation fighting to retain their democratic freedoms.
At the Monash IP Observatory, we have been publishing updates on the loss of internet access as the crisis unfolds. Here, we collate our measurements, and place them in the context of Myanmar’s troubled history with both political and internet freedoms, and show how the military has been refining its approach to suppression in real time.
1st and 6th February 2021: the first lesson
In the first days of the coup, telecom services were ordered to block platforms including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, shortly after Aung San Suu Kyi was detained on the 1st of February. The ban was soon extended to VPN services, which had experienced an enormous spike in demand in wake of the coup.
However, it seems that the military was not content with these tools, and has preferred to completely disconnect large parts of the population, via direct orders to the Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Such a measure overcomes VPN technology and reflects, to some extent, the inability, with current technology at hand, of the military to precisely control what is accessed or used on the internet by the citizens of Myanmar. As such, turning off access is a blunt, economically costly, but effective tool of internet access suppression.
On the 1st February 2021, we measured a substantial, though not complete drop in internet connectivity starting at around 1am, coinciding with the arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi in the early hours of the morning (Figure 1).
Whilst the internet resumed to most areas by around 10am the same day, the state of Magway took until 3pm to be back online. This indicates again that full, coordinated control over the internet was not accomplished on day one of the coup.
Then, over the 6th-7th February 2021, a further shutdown came into effect, this time starting at approximately 7am on the 6th and resolving at around 2pm on the 7th.
Importantly, in our sub-national measurements, it was clear that this second shutdown was more widespread and deeper than the first: whereas Tanintharyi State had no impact of the shutdown on the 1st, Mandalay was down to only 18 percent on the 1st, and Yangon lost around 50 percent of connectivity on the 1st, the 6–7th February shutdown saw these three states go to effectively 0.
In effect, the world was witnessing, in real time, Myanmar’s military leadership growing in their technical ability and political force to bring about internet suppression.
The second lesson: Speed throttling
After the events of 1 February 2021, we saw a new phenomenon arise in our measurements of internet quality in Myanmar.
Starting 4 February 2021, our measures of latency across sub-national regions of Myanmar increased substantially (Figure 2).
Latency, measured in milliseconds, gives the amount of time taken, on average, for a small packet of information to travel to and from internet-connected end-point devices to website and web service servers around the world. Whilst not a direct measure of speed, latency indicates the immediacy of the connection, and is a proxy for the easy of movement of internet traffic.
If latency is high, information packets being sent or received can be significantly slowed, and even dropped completely. In particular, a connection with high latency will challenge the upload of larger files such as voice, or video footage.
Aside from the second shut-down period over the weekend of the 6th-7th February 2021, as Figure 2 shows, latency across Myanmar has been substantially higher during the day-time peak period since 4 February 2021.
Practically, for citizens of Myanmar, this means that when the internet is online, their ability to organise, share experiences, and document happenings in Myanmar is likely frustrated.
The ‘new normal’: nightly shutdowns with military precision
Finally, and in addition to the continuous throttling since 4 February 2021, since Monday, 15 February 2021 the internet has been shut off every night between 1am and 9am local time (Figure 3).
While there is much speculation on the exact motives behind the shutdowns, what we do know is that the internet in Myanmar is the primary medium for news sharing, communication and access to critical information. Shutting it down represents a quelling of basic human freedoms in the interest of political gain.
The military has also introduced a new cybersecurity bill that bolsters their own power over internet services, granting them wider access to personal data and the ability to block websites at will. This legislation would give them greater control over the flow of information in Myanmar, and when combined with the suspension of civil protections, presents a growing reason for concern over the safety and security of citizens at the hands of the military.
In defense of the blackouts, military representatives have cited “fake news” and maintaining “stability” as reasons for the blackout, pointing to the coordination of civil disobedience on social media.
However, it is questionable whether the junta are merely acting in concern for public wellbeing, or if they are simply exercising their control over internet services in an attempt to divide and disempower.
Internet Freedom In Myanmar
In 2010, less than 1% of Myanmar’s population was connected to the internet.
When telecommunications services arrived around 2011, Facebook was allowing people to access their app free of data charges. Naturally, the promise of free connection was very appealing to those who had previously lived entirely offline. Then, in 2016, Facebook rolled out its controversial program “Free Basics”, which enabled previously disconnected users to access a limited suite of free internet services through using Facebook’s platform. But people began voicing concerns about the program, wondering whether it would become a sort of “walled garden” — or in other words, where the control over information access would become too centralised and easy to dictate. Now, around 22 million people (~50% of the population) rely on Facebook as one of their primary news and communication sources.
Around the same time that Facebook’s user base was expanding, hate-speech and misinformation were also spreading rampantly amongst religious nationalist groups on the social media site, mostly targeting Rohingya Muslims, an ethnic minority from Myanmar’s Rakhine region. Eventually, with Facebook as a prime breeding ground for brewing hostility, tensions erupted into a devastating military-led ethnic cleansing event that was classed by the UN as a genocide. Local militia reportedly burned down entire villages, terrorised, raped, and murdered thousands of people, driving 740,000 Rohingya to seek refuge in Bangladesh. Aung San Suu Kyi faced heated criticism for her silence around this crisis, with many international human rights groups denouncing the NLD’s failure to condemn the military’s role in the human rights abuses.
This event highlighted the failures of social media platforms such as Facebook to maintain the integrity of their content and prevent the toxic spread of violence-inciting misinformation.
More recently, the government has imposed widespread internet shutdowns in Rakhine and other states, and made various attempts at censoring websites and information. These events almost perfectly mirror the current shutdowns in Myanmar, and suggest that this form of oppression won’t be going away anytime soon.
Dictatorship and Democracy in Myanmar
Myanmar’s tug-of-war for democracy has been ongoing since gaining independence in 1948. On the one hand, authoritarian junta have long attempted to shut down attempts at civilian government. On the other side, democratic leaders have been fighting to empower the people through freely elected political representation.
Aung San Suu Kyi emerged as head of the National League for Democracy (NLD) in 1988; since then she has faced almost 15 years of detainment, house arrest and otherwise forced silencing as she fought to bring a representative government to Myanmar (previously Burma). In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Peace prize for her efforts in this domain, however, this was later redacted for her silence over the Rohingya genocide.
In the past two decades, things have started to look more hopeful for democracy in Myanmar. In 2003, the governing military released a Roadmap to Democracy, which initiated a gradual shift towards fairer political practices. In 2015, Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD was democratically elected, sharing parliament with a fixed 25% share of military members. While promising, this demonstrated that the military were unwilling to part with their share of the pie, a move which also set the stage for their most recent power-grab.
Evidently, the military are not yet ready to part with their authoritarian ways. But despite losing traction on the democratic gains they had made, it is clear from the enormous pressure building in the community that Myanmar isn’t giving up yet.
Our Methodology
To generate the data behind these observations, we combine a commercially available geo-located IP database with our powerful scanning technology which measures the online or offline status of millions of Internet addresses globally every hour.
Our observational methodology uses the most basic Internet messaging protocol that is widely used billions of times a day to establish routes for your email, tweet, or share. After developing a carefully selected set of Internet addresses (IPs) to measure, we periodically send them one of these tiny messages, essentially asking, ‘Are on you online?’. These online/offline answers form the basis for our ‘connectivity’ indicators.
Connectivity
By connectivity, we mean the count of unique, online devices in our measurement sample every hour.
The large majority of our measurements are to fixed, broad-band, end-point devices (home and business routers, servers, etc.) in a given region. Mobile or cell towers are also measured, but typically not individual mobile phones. And, to be clear, being “online” in our measurement does not necessarily mean that an end-point user has a free internet experience. Access could be blocked to a specific website or service at any time, even with an active (not blocked) internet connection. Or, access could be practically blocked by a slowing of internet traffic (see latency).
Latency
By latency, we mean the average return trip time (rtt) across all unique, connected end-points in a given region, as measured by multiple signals sent from our global platform to the end-point each hour.
Latency can be thought of as the immediacy of the connection. Low latency is crucial for any synchronous internet mediated activity such voice or video chat, but is also a good proxy for the bandwidth pressure on the network at the time. If the network is overloaded latency will tend to rise dramatically as packets of information are slowed down, waiting in queues, if you will. In our team’s earlier work, we know that some governments apply slow-downs (rather than ‘shutdowns’) to make the sharing of voice or video materials practically impossible and influence political outcomes.
Privacy
The Monash IP Observatory has no access to any content being shared, viewed, visited, or generated by a user at a given IP, and all IP Observatory activity works in aggregates of thousands of randomly sampled measurements across geo-spatial sub-regions.
The IP-Observatory is fully compliant with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (EU-GDPR). The IP-Observatory does not collect, hold or process personal data.
Acknowledgement: Hayley Lock assisted with writing, background research and analysis in the preparation of this article.
The mission of the Monash University IP Observatory — ‘internet insights for social good’ — is to monitor the availability and quality of the Internet during critical events such as elections, natural disasters or conflicts. The IP Observatory was founded by Klaus Ackermann, lecturer in Econometrics and Business Statistics, and Simon Angus, and Paul Raschky, Associate Professors in Economics. The observatory is a project of SoDa Laboratories at the Monash Business School, and tweets @IP_Observatory.
