28 Brooten, McElhone and Venkiteswaran fees and monthly service charges kept these off-limits to all but the country’s elite. Several studies in the mid-2000s found that the regime was actively using filtering and surveillance tools to monitor and censor the internet through its two internet service providers — MPT and the first private provider, Bagan CyberTech (OpenNet Initiative 2005; Villeneuve 2007). The early development of the internet and the rise of Myanmar blogging culture is further detailed in this volume by Kamran Emad and Erin McAuliffe, in the context of privacy risks, as well as by Htaike Htaike Aung and Wai Myo Htut for the telecommunications sector. 2007 Saffron Revolution and 2008 Cyclone Nargis In September 2007 an estimated hundred thousand monks, students and activists marched in the streets of more than twenty-five Burmese cities and towns calling for democracy, and the protests gained worldwide attention. The military regime declared martial law, banned foreign journalists and suppressed news of the protests. Yet citizen reporters and bloggers used their cell phones and digital cameras to upload information and images to the internet, where they were picked up by exiled media and transnational news networks. The amateur video of the fatal shooting of Japanese journalist Kenji Nagai at close range by a Burmese soldier attracted worldwide attention when it was aired on Japanese and other international television networks. Additional footage of violence against unarmed protestors was smuggled out and aired internationally. In response the military junta shut down official internet access and soldiers began targeting those with cameras (Brooten 2008a). The exiled broadcaster Democratic Voice of Burma used a BGAN (broadband global area network) satellite terminal to access the internet inside the country, thus circumventing the junta’s attempts to control information flows (Khin Maung Win, personal communication, 11 September 2017). More than 6,000 people were arrested, including approximately 1,400 monks, between August and October 2007 (ALTSEAN Burma 2007). The figures for the death toll differ; the government claimed only 13 people were killed, the UN human rights envoy on Burma said 31 people had died, while the Democratic Voice of Burma reported that 138 people had been killed (Zarni Mann 2013). 01 ch1-MyanmarMediaIT-5P.indd 28 8/4/19 10:29 am