Li i a i
There are three potential limitations to this study
The first and foremost limitation was the difficulty in determining the true use of the equipment and
strategies employed by the government and military At times it was challenging to determine
through a review of the tenders which themselves are put out by the authorities whether these
technologies are used for surveillance or censorship purposes
The second limitation was the ongoing pandemic Due to COVID 19 travel was limited The ability to
perform network measurement tests on many different networks in Myanmar was therefore limited
as well In addition the interviews scheduled to be carried out with journalists working to uncover the
third party companies purchasing the surveillance and censorship equipment were not able to be
implemented due to travel restrictions and identity security reasons
Third and final limitation was the test list The list of blocked websites does not reflect all the blocked
websites in Myanmar since the test list does not include all of the websites that have been created in
Myanmar Since Facebook is the tool that the majority of the people in Myanmar use to access
communicate and coordinate it was harder to curate a list of the websites for different categories
Furthermore any potential content censorship implemented by Facebook on its platform was not
included within the scope of this study s research