8/21/22, 8:40 PM Myanmar’s Military Deploys Digital Arsenal of Repression in Crackdown - The New York Times Myanmar’s security forces have triangulated between their critics’ social media posts and internet hookup addresses to find where some of them live. The New York Times A spokeswoman for the company said that Cellebrite stopped selling to Myanmar in 2018 and that BlackBag had not sold to the country since it was acquired last year. The company, she said, does not sell to countries sanctioned by the United States, European Union, Britain or Israel. “In the extremely rare case when our technology is used in a manner that does not meet international law or does not comply with Cellebrite’s values, we immediately flag these licenses for nonrenewal and do not provide software updates,” the spokeswoman said. Cellebrite hardware and software have been used by the police to secure evidence in court cases, according to U Khin Maung Zaw, one of Myanmar’s top human-rights lawyers who is representing Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, the ousted civilian leader. The technology was presented as central to the 2018 trial of two Reuters reporters who uncovered evidence of a Rohingya massacre the year before. Mr. Khin Maung Zaw represented the two journalists. In court documents, the police said they had gathered data from the detained reporters’ phones using Cellebrite forensic technology. The data helped convict the reporters, in what human rights groups have said were politically motivated cases. Cellebrite said that after the Reuters case was publicized, “these licenses were unequivocally not renewed.” The company now has the ability to remotely suspend the licenses, essentially erasing the software from its machinery and rendering the devices useless. Mr. Khin Maung Zaw, the human rights lawyer, said that the police again presented Cellebrite evidence in trials he worked on in 2019 and 2020. The cases related to a section in the telecommunications law on online defamation, which human rights groups say is used to criminalize dissent. “The cybersecurity department is still using that technology,” Mr. Khin Maung Zaw said. “To my knowledge, they use Cellebrite to scan and recover data from cellphones.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/world/asia/myanmar-coup-military-surveillance.html 4/7