5/23/22, 12:53 PM Junta steps up phone, internet surveillance – with help from MPT and Mytel | Frontier Myanmar Call monitoring These concerns are not misplaced. Late last year, shortly before the coup, the Ministry of Transport and Communications directed the Myanmar Police Force to set up a cybersecurity team to monitor calls and social media use, a police officer on the team told Frontier, speaking on condition of anonymity. The team is based inside the police’s Special Branch, whose plain-clothed officers are well known for their intrusive surveillance of the population, and the team’s activities complement the specific case work of the Criminal Investigation Department’s Cybercrime Division. Although initiated under the National League for Democracy government, the monitoring has become key to the new military regime’s efforts to establish what some have described as a “surveillance state”, in which authorities closely track phone and internet use and seize devices from ordinary civilians before analysing them for incriminating material. The new team began its work around a month after the coup, when the ministry introduced what the police officer described as an “AI system” that enabled the team to monitor the calls, text messages and location of selected users in real time. If specific words, such as “protest” or “revolution”, are mentioned during the call, then the system automatically records it. It also triggers a notification for police so the call can be reviewed and, if necessary, the user can be placed under heavier surveillance or the call retained as evidence. Known as “lawful interception”, this real-time monitoring marks a major increase in surveillance of phone users that experts say is concerning in a context like Myanmar, where there are few legal safeguards. Previously, security forces could only access historical data from users – for example, who they had called and their location based on which cell tower they had connected to – by making a request to the relevant operator. The officer did not know how many users were being monitored, but said it was a significant number. “We can’t monitor all conversations so they need a system that just flags sensitive calls. It’s not a particularly advanced system but it works well for now,” he said. A little help from our friends The police officer said that the programme had not yet been rolled out to all operators and ISPs, including foreign-owned mobile operators Telenor and Ooredoo. Among mobile firms, only Mytel – whose investors include the Tatmadaw, a consortium of Myanmar companies and Viettel, a company owned by the Vietnamese military – and state-owned MPT, which is run under a partnership with Japan’s Sumitomo and KDDI, have installed the system at their data centres, he said. He was speaking prior to a Reuters report that the junta had banned foreign and Myanmar executives of “major telecommunications firms” from leaving the country without permission. A week after the ban was announced in mid-June, the operators received another order instructing them to install intercept technology by July 5 that would let the regime spy on their customers. It is unclear whether they have complied. A senior executive at one of the foreign operators told Frontier: “The technical term is lawful interception, and the [authorities have] been pushing for this for some time – it started under the NLD. We have not implemented this, but I am pretty sure other operators are running it.” Recent changes to the Electronic Transactions Law grant the authorities almost unlimited access to user data without even basic safeguards. Free Expression Myanmar, an advocacy group, said that under the February 15 amendment there are no limitations on the type or scale of the data that can be intercepted, and no clarity on how intercepted data should be handled, or for how long. The amendment “represents a significant risk to civic space” it said, adding that the regime now has “broad powers of interception without even the most basic safeguards for misuse”. A senior official from MPT told Frontier that the company was not only providing user data to the cybersecurity team but had also dramatically stepped up surveillance of its users since the coup. “Two months ago, we [MPT] formed a team to monitor calls. If the system notices a suspicious conversation or detects certain words, the team will be notified. I’m not sure if the recorded https://www.frontiermyanmar.net/en/junta-steps-up-phone-internet-surveillance-with-help-from-mpt-and-mytel/ 2/7