9/24/21, 8:39 PM The State of Internet Censorship in Myanmar | OONI Leaked email communications from 2015 revealed a discussion between Hacking Team, an Italian spyware company, and the Myanmar government on establishing domestic surveillance mechanisms, with the earliest communication dating back to 2012. Although Hacking Team’s offer ‘active IT intrusion services’ appears to have failed, the fact that such options were being considered by the Myanmar government is disturbing. Blocking of Facebook Following days of unrest and inter-communal violence between Buddhist and Muslim residents of the Mandalay region which left two dead and 14 injured, Facebook went down in Myanmar coinciding with the government-imposed curfew hours in Mandalay, with speculation that the blocked access may have been to prevent online users from posting hate speech and fueling unrest in Mandalay. Examining internet censorship in Myanmar The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), in collaboration with Sinar Project and Myanmar ICT for Development Organization (MIDO), performed a study of internet censorship in Myanmar. The aim of this study was to understand whether and to what extent censorship events occurred in Myanmar during the testing period. The sections below document the methodology and key findings of this study. Methodology The methodology of this study, in an attempt to identify potential internet censorship events in Thailand, included the following: Review of the Citizen Lab’s test list for Myanmar OONI network measurements Data analysis A list of URLs that are relevant and commonly accessed in Myanmar was created by the Citizen Lab in 2014 for the purpose of enabling network measurement researchers to examine their accessibility in Myanmar. As part of this study, this list of URLs was reviewed to include additional URLs which - along with other URLs that are commonly accessed around the world - were tested for blocking based on OONI’s free software tests. Such tests were run from local vantage points in Myanmar, and they also examined whether systems that are responsible for censorship, surveillance and traffic manipulation were present in the tested network. Once network measurement data was collected from these tests, the data was subsequently processed and analyzed based on a set of heuristics for detecting internet censorship and traffic manipulation. The testing period for this study started on 25th October 2016 and concluded on 28th February 2017. Review of the Citizen Lab’s test list for Myanmar An important part of identifying censorship is determining which websites to examine for blocking. OONI’s software (called OONI Probe) is designed to examine URLs contained in specific lists (“test lists”) for censorship. By default, OONI Probe examines the “global test list”, which includes a wide range of internationally relevant websites, most of which are in English. These websites fall under 31 categories, https://ooni.org/post/myanmar-report/ 9/19