ostensibly designed for “public safety”—are repurposed to target ethnic minorities,
exacerbating historical patterns of discrimination.
Commercial spyware and targeted mobile surveillance
The military and military-controlled security services have used commercial spyware to
compromise devices belonging to temporarily and permanently detained individuals, including
journalists, human rights defenders, and minority rights activists. They have also used spyware
to remotely infect devices, exfiltrating a person’s contacts, location history, and private chat
logs, and sending them to a military‐controlled server.
This data is later used by the military and military allies to identify a person’s home, detain
them, and subject them to torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. There are
concerns that the data is purposefully used to encourage discrimination, too. For example, the
military uses intercepted data of an intimate nature to shame women in front of their
community.
Predicting hidden practices
Given the military’s complete opacity and history of weaponising ordinary administrative
processes, it is highly probable that more invasive, AI-driven profiling and data-sharing schemes
are operating or are being developed in secret. For example, the military’s longstanding practice
of conducting door-to-door “voter” registration in ethnic villages—collecting fingerprints, iris
scans, and family lineage data—may soon feed into centralised computer systems, like the
PSMS, that assign “risk scores” based on ethnicity, inferred political affiliations, and biometric
characteristics. The military will likely develop opaque algorithms to inform periodic sweeps of
potential opposition supporters, leading to extra-legal “interviews” or arbitrary detentions.
Furthermore, data gathered by public service portals—such as welfare disbursement systems
or electronic health records—may be discreetly shared with military intelligence to blacklist
dissenting families from access to State support. Without transparency, freedom of information
mechanisms, or independent auditors, these practices will remain unseen.
Conclusion
Since the 2021 coup, Myanmar’s military has weaponised digital tools—enacting the 2025
Cyber Security Law to force data retention, deploying Deep Packet Inspection to block
encryption, and installing AI‐enabled surveillance—to dismantle any remaining privacy
protections. The PSMS alone led to 1,657 arrests over three months in 2025, underscoring how
quickly the military’s digital apparatus can identify and detain “fugitives” without due process.
These measures target everyone but have a particular discriminatory effect on ethnic and
religious minorities, women, LBTIQ+ persons, people with disabilities, and older individuals,
transforming everyday technologies into instruments of repression. The absence of
independent oversight means that every digital interaction is subject to arbitrary interception,