How Burmese Dissidents Crack Censorship 154
s-orbital writes "According to a BBC News article, "Images of saffron-robed monks leading throngs of people along the streets of Rangoon have been seeping out of a country famed for its totalitarian regime and repressive control of information. The pictures, sometimes grainy and the video footage shaky, are captured at great personal risk on mobile phones — but each represents a powerful statement of political dissent."
The article goes on to tell the stories of how Burma's bloggers use proxy servers, free hosting services, and other technologies to overcome Burma's "pervasive" filtering of internet access and news."
In tomorrow's news (Score:4, Insightful)
What about inside Burma? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, and I'm sure that the Burmese authorities would sooner the word not get out. But the principal role of censorship -- and one for which it is effective notwithstanding a few workarounds -- is to control widespread dissemination of the information within the population.
Consider China, for example. Sophisticated computer users can find foreign news and commentary. But the masses have successfully been kept in the dark about, say, Tiananmen Square. This ignorance helps shape public opinion and marginalize those few who have access to the information.
Who? (Score:5, Insightful)
Misleading title (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who? (Score:2, Insightful)
I am all for freedom and a well armed public but a sudden change like that might get more people killed than deserve it.
Re:Who? (Score:3, Insightful)
See...that's the problem. That would take years, and a lot of individual, personal, risk. This would have had to be done 50 years ago to be effective today.
Oddly enough... (Score:4, Insightful)
Radical Religionist... (Score:5, Insightful)
The radical Christian blows up others and buildings.
The radical Muslim blows himself up with others.
The radical Budhist sets himself on fire, after he makes sure that no living things are around him to get hurt.
Re:What about inside Burma? (Score:3, Insightful)
Fixed.
Re:Radical Religionist... (Score:4, Insightful)
There's this this utterly blue-eyed view of Buddhists around that just doesn't tally with the facts.
Sure Buddhism preaches non-violence and enlightenment, and that's a good thing, but it's followers are as violent and judgmental as anyone else. Christianity preaches love and forgiveness while practicing violence, repression and judgment. I don't know the details of what Islam preaches but I assume it's the same story.
I have no problem with personal religion, but I don't have much time for churches of any ilk; giving any person the power to speak for God (or indeed the Buddha) is just foolish.
Re:What about inside Burma? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Power Does Not Corrupt (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What about inside Burma? (Score:5, Insightful)
In some ways media self-censorship is worse than state censorship, since with state censorship the populations often know they are being routinely lied to and are not getting all the facts. In countries with a free media like the US or UK, people have the illusion that they are getting all the facts and are more likely to trust what they are told. It's not always total censorship either. Sometimes the media will give a tiny mention to something that deserves an enormous amount of attention. That way they can always say they covered it when challenged. An example of this is COINTELPRO [wikipedia.org]. You're likely to have to look that up, yet if I said Watergate, which is a story which broke around the same time, you are likely to know all about it.
Language is important too. For example, if these protesters in Burma were to take up arms, they would be correctly described as insurgents, since the definition of insurgency (in all the major dictionaries) is about trying to overthrow your own government. Insurgency is completely the wrong term (again in all the major dictionaries) for armed groups attacking an occupying force, as in Iraq. With Iraq the media desperately tries to avoid using the term Resistance (despite it being the correct term) because it reminds people of the French resistance, who were clearly the good guys. Another example is the term "Private Security Contractor". Under the Geneva conventions there is no such thing as a Private Security Contractor. There are soldiers, civilians and mercenaries. The technically correct term for these "hired soldiers" is mercenaries, yet the media almost unanimously avoids the term. Talking about Private Security Contractors sounds ok, whereas if the media kept talking about mercenaries, people might not accept their deployment so readily.
Re:What about inside Burma? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:no idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Radical Religionist... (Score:1, Insightful)
One favorite tactic of Buddhist evangelists was to convert famous but insecure, guilt-ridden cultural creatives like artistes, musicians, courtesan women, theater actors etc, then egg them on to use their powers of public adulation and oratory, to convert sheeple into Buddhism.
Another was to exploit the fuzzy and thin boundary between the core principles of Buddhism and Hinduism. Buddhists would embrace and extend Hindu iconography, mythology etc, then subvert, corrupt or bastardize them (like re-spin Hindu mythical good guys into bad guys etc), and then present them as original Buddhist tenets to illiterate sheeple.
Of course the Buddhist philosophy of nihilist inaction simply hasnt stood the test of time. If Buddhism had not been thrown out by the Indian equivalents of Charlemagne, 100% of India would have been Buddhist, and like the rest of Central Asia (which did become antirely Buddhist), been overrun by Islam.
A lot of early history of Buddhist missionary zeal and violence has been totally whitewashed by royalty as well as the slavishly secular/PC post-indepence governments of India.
In general, IMHO, any so called "religion" founded or evangelized by a human figurehead is just a cult with a strongman followed by mindless sheeple. Such an outfit can never be a true religion that can guide its believers into true spiritual solace and freedom. As history has borne out countless times, such human-founded cults soon end up being no different than the crassest of banana republic, fascist dictatorships.
IMHO the only true religions would be those that dont have a single human founder, have no central axiomatic truths except certain basic epistemological principles which are themselves open to questioning and change. True religion would be one that spontaneously originates and takes hold in the collective subconsiousness of a group of autonous human beings, inspired by and mediated by the forces of nature. In this sence, the only true religions are some forms of Hinduism, Shintoism, Native animistic religions, mystical forms of Islam like Sufism, those of Christianity like Gnosticism, and to an extent, Western Science.
Re:What about inside Burma? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I believe so, too. It's just that the news outlets are run by people who often have their own agendas. It is not hard to imagine that, in a political system where everything is either Republican or Democrat, and the Republican policies tend to coincide with the interests of the wealthy and the corporations, the news outlets the masses get their news from (large corprorations run by wealthy people) would be biased in the Republicans' favor. Just one line of thought.
Remember (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember this next time someone proposes to take this or some other security/anonimity technology (e.g. cryptography) away from you. These are important instruments of freedom!
Re:Who? (Score:3, Insightful)
For contrast, compare that number to how many Reagan was selling to Iran to fund the Nicaraguan Contra rebels. Just a single figure from page 50 of the "Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran/Contra Affair" by Lee H. Hamilton and Daniel K. Inouye (the count is from Oliver North's personal notebook) shows that on May 8, 1985, North confirmed delivery of 40,000 working M-79 grenade launchers. (Many other weapons were delivered on many other days including notes about 10,000 AK-47 rifles, plus other unspecified quantities of RPG-7 rocket launchers, light machine guns, and SA-7 surface to air missiles; I wasn't able to identify exact numbers directly from that report without the references.)
I'll say it again: delivering weapons to other countries may be a good short-to-medium term tactic, but in the last 50 years it has proven time and again to be counterproductive to our strategic interests. If we want U.S. weapons delivered and used anywhere else, it should be American soldiers wielding them, keeping them out of the hands of the locals. That way when we want to pick up our ball and go home, all that's left is for the locals to throw rocks and insults at each other. I can live with that.
Re:Who? (Score:3, Insightful)
Your ignorance is staggering. Those people are Buddhist, they won't touch your weapons. I really hope the US stay out of this.
Re:Radical Religionist... (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, the Dalai Lama was the nominal head of a medieval regime in Tibet. Though regents ruled in his place for most of his life prior to exile.
Critics are right to point out that Tibet was no land of milk and honey before the Chinese invasion. It also wasn't nearly as brutal and repressive as the Chinese would have you believe- for one thing, there wasn't enough centralization or technology in pre-invasion Tibet to have anything approaching a fascist state. There's also no compelling reason to believe that the "backwards-ness" of Tibet had much at all to do with its religious leadership; it's a resource-poor region (in terms of providing farming subsistence and a food surplus, necessary for a more complex society), land-locked, and communications with potential trade partners are disrupted by the ruggedness of the terrain and climate. For that matter, many more repressive religiously-backed regimes in the West made it out of the middle ages just fine- they just didn't do so at the point of a Chinese bayonet, and at the cost of 15% of their population.
Buddhism has its warts, as does any world-wide religion. Racist/chauvinists in Sri Lanka, war crime apologists in Japan, crooked monastic landlords in Tibet... What it also has is a strong history of non-violent resistance. The same technique employed by the monks in Burma- refusing to accept alms from government officials- is recorded in Buddhist scriptures that date back to the 3rd century AD. While acts of violence are certainly identifiable within Buddhist history and are sometimes condoned by local Buddhist leaders (there's never been any period of violence given universal sanction by international Buddhist leadership, Buddhism at the supra-national level being an entirely ad-hoc, voluntary arrangement), there is also an undeniable trend in the 20th Century of Buddhists- lay and monastic- acting as leaders in non-violent struggles for independence. Thich Nhat Hanh and Thich Quang Duc in Vietnam, the Dalai Lama and others in the Tibetan movement, the Burmese monks, the early Sri Lankan monks who opposed Western evangelism through writing and debate, the peace and reconciliation marches lead by Maha Goshananda in Cambodia...
If Buddhism is lately more associated with peace than other religions in the West, there is certainly a certain amount of starry-eyed idealism in that assessment. But, on balance, there's a grain of truth to it as well.
Usenet (Score:2, Insightful)
I suppose this is why the ISPs in the US and Europe have been pressured into shutting off their Usenet access. Of course systems that ship without Usenet are an active part of the problem.
With all that is happening in the world, I see a greater need for a distributed, decentralized, asynchronous message service, not less. Of course centralized systems like myspace and facebook are the antithesis and a boon to surveilance and restriction, as are DRM'd communication and broadcasting.
Control the flow of information and you control the population.
America DOES have a free press (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not an illusion. America does have a free press. There are a few corner cases where weird laws like DMCA do chill a bit, but there's really no speech about politics that you can't get into or that you'll be punished for. (Ok, here come the replies with counter-examples.. ;-)
Our biggest problem is just that most of the press just doesn't bother to exercise its freedom, because entertainment is more profitable than news or political discussion. And when some of the press does take advantage of its freedom, most of the people just don't give a shit about the news. (Or they pretend to be outraged, without actually acting on it.)