9/24/21, 8:39 PM The State of Internet Censorship in Myanmar | OONI original draft, include the removal of the bylaw making powers from the Home Ministry, and the insertion of vague wording in Article 8 for “permission from the Union President or a Union-level Government body”. Censorship and surveillance Telecommunications Law 2013 Articles 75 and 77 of the 2013 Telecommunications Law allows the government to intercept, suspend, or obtain any information that threatens the national security and prevalence of law in the country. The broad provision fails to specify which government agents are authorised to do this, and what sort of information specifically constitutes the general terms such as ‘national security’. Reported cases of internet censorship and surveillance The internet freedom landscape in Myanmar appears to have taken a relatively positive turn following the 2011 reforms. Nonetheless, some cases of internet censorship and surveillance that have been reported since are included below. Internet café surveillance A 2011 report by Reporters Without Borders(RSF) revealed the issuing of a set of expansive directives by the Ministry of Communications Post and Telegraphs (MCPT) requiring owners of internet cafés to collect and share with the authorities the personal data of their patrons including their “names, National Registration Card number, passport number (if the user is a foreigner), contact address”, in addition to a log of their internet records. Internet censorship devices In 2011, Citizen Lab research uncovered the use of commercial filtering devices manufactured by U.S.based Blue Coat Systems in Myanmar. Tests of internet filtering conducted within Burma running on Open Net Initiative (ONI) developed software provided evidence that Blue Coat’s devices were being used to actively filter internet content in Myanmar. Of the 37 Blue Coat content categories, all URLs from 10 categories on ONI’s test list appeared to be blocked entirely, including categories for pornography, LGBT, Hacking, and Proxy Avoidance. Similarly, a report by Reporters without Borders revealed the acquisition of censorship equipment and hardware from the Chinese subsidiary of Alacatel-Lucent. The offering of a website filtering and surveillance system by Alcatel-Lucent’s Chinese subsidiary was confirmed by a spokesman for Hanthawaddy, a state-controlled ISP. Blue Coat software (some types of which can potentially be used for internet filtering, censorship, and surveillance) was detected in Myanmar through OONI’s HTTP Invalid Request Line test in late 2012. It remains unclear, however, if this was a country-wide deployment or if it was only used in the specific network that was tested. Two years later OONI’s HTTP Invalid Request Line test was run in the same network, but the presence of Blue Coat systems was not detected (indicating that it was possibly removed from that specific network). Hacking Team Surveillance Software https://ooni.org/post/myanmar-report/ 8/19