Dean: Myanmar supporting such activists or ethnic minority organizations. While the ethnic armed organizations have been engaged with militarily, the rest has been subject to surveillance, harassment and repression, involving also high intensity coercive measures such as firing on crowds, violence against high profile targets or direct assaults on democratic institutions (see Levitsky and Way 2010: 47-50). 6 Avoiding any potential threat perceived as emerging from wider cross-sections of the society, the military created a state that aligned somewhere between the Orwellian totalitarian state and Bentham’s penitentiary ‘Panopticon’ (Lyon 2001: 7) during its rule.7 The new Constitution attends to some of the basic challenges to military power that the persistent social or political opposition has posed—by securing military control over the three ministries and its veto power at parliament, and by legalizing a takeover of the government. This eliminates a need for high intensity coercion which international visibility may pose some risks for the regime (see Levitsky and Way 2010: 4750). There is ‟no longer a blanket clampdown against all challenges to the state,” Huang (2016: 7-8) quotes an activist, and describes ‟a different pattern” emerging where particular individuals of certain ethnicities or religions are most vulnerable to being subjected to a politically motivated detentions and arrests. Huang (ibid) has observed the following three types of political offences as the least tolerable during 2011-2015: public protests on an agenda that is contrary to the policy of the state; activities that are deemed a threat to the image, security, and reputation of the military; and offences that are contrary to the populist Buddhistnationalist narrative. Journalists are particularly vulnerable by reason of their job, followed by netizens operating in cyberspace conducive to speech norms, where ‟people appear to be more vocal, hyper-critical and less diffident in expressing their views … as compared to how they would act off-line” (Tang 2009: 22). A person with professional experience in Myanmar’s military intelligence describes the situation since 2011 as follows: “…surveillance has significantly increased for ethnic people, opposition, different business organizations, different networks like non-profit … for foreigners. One thing different is that they don’t really take action yet. It’s not like before. Taking action is not like before. Now they just let you go because of the NLD administration… But there is more surveillance than before” (Interview, 25.04.2017). The “transition” period has not led to a decrease in the size of the armed forces, while it has opened up space for involving its leadership and troops in training “on the ‘role of the military in a democracy’” (e.g. see Stevens 2017). The military engagement with the ethnic armed organizations at the country’s border areas has significantly intensified since 2011. The intelligence agencies within the new civilian dominated administrative structure continue to respond to the military or its autonomous ministries, and monitor ‟any matter that affects the state's security and stability, including non-disintegration of the military, and take necessary measures” (Irrawaddy 2011). Focus on surveillance Phone tapping, bugs and other devices, agents and informant networks have all reportedly been a part of the extensive surveillance during the military era that, together with adeptness and knowhow, entrenched routines, habitude and predilection establish a lingering legacy. The pervasiveness of surveillance in the 6 The most violent repressive events in Myanmar have been the 1988 massacres of demonstrators in Rangoon, the attack on Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD convoy in 2003 known as the Depayin massacre, and the suppression of the 2007 monk-led demonstrations. Aung San Suu Kyi’s house arrest of 17 years in total is violence against a high profile target. The direct assault on democratic institutions was the cancellation of the 1990 election results where the NLD won 392 of the 492 seats, and the arrest of its leaders. Violence at Myanmar’s ethnic borders is related to the protracted civil wars since the inception of the country, and has a different pattern and strategies (see Smith 1999; Grundy-Warr and Dean 2011). 7 Coincidentally or not, it was George Orwell’s early experience with authority and imperialism in the colonial Burma of the 1920s that influenced his work, from Shooting an Elephant (1936) set in Burma up to the novel 1984. The names of Myanmar’s last military governments, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC 1988-97) reconstituted into the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC 1997-2011) are meaningful in the Orwellian sense. Surveillance & Society 15(3/4) 500