5/23/22, 2:07 AM Stay or go? Telenor’s Myanmar dilemma | Frontier Myanmar “If a protester’s name is on a watchlist, the police will check the mobile phone including the chat applications, Facebook and photo gallery to find more suspects or friends connected to this protester,” said the source. Another prominent lawyer, Daw Zarli Aye, who since the coup has been assisting imprisoned activists from the democracy movement, said that because of the regime’s increased phone-cracking and remote surveillance capabilities, it was simply no longer safe to use phones. “When I was discussing a case with a railway worker from the Civil Disobedience Movement, I talked too much about the case on the phone and the police searched this worker’s home the next day,” Zarli Aye said. “After that, I do not trust mobile operators and have decided to only hold face to face discussions with my clients about the cases.” Listening in The demands Telenor is facing from the regime – for access to the calls, SMS messages and internet usage data of Telenor users in real time – is known as “lawful interception” and is common in many countries. In Myanmar, though, there are no checks – such as judicial review – on what data can be monitored and under what circumstances. Access to this data is generally considered more intrusive and concerning from a digital rights perspective than the historical records that Telenor presently provides on a case-by-case basis. Frontier and Danwatch have confirmed that police do not yet have access to real-time data from Telenor or Ooredoo customers – but that could soon change. The police officer from the cybersecurity team said the police are monitoring calls from governmentowned operator MPT and military-linked operator Mytel with artificial intelligence software to identify and track regime opponents. “Words such as “revolution” (in Burmese taw hlan yay) and “protest” (san da pya) are put into the system, and the police or the Criminal Investigation Department are notified if people use these words. If the system notices that someone is using these words very often, the person will be added to the suspect list, and then police can listen to their conversations,” the police officer said. However, Reuters has since reported that the regime has ordered all operators to install the intercept technology. It set a July 5 deadline, but it is still unclear whether Telenor and Ooredoo have complied. A week before the order, the junta banned foreign and Myanmar executives of “major telecommunications firms” from leaving the country without permission, Reuters reported, in what seems a crude attempt to force them to comply. But this is not a new initiative. Leaked meeting notices and government budgets included in a November 2020 report from Open Technology Fund shows that the authorities had made plans to impose the interception system on all mobile operators, including Telenor. On January 31, 2019 – almost exactly two years before the coup – the Ministry of Transport and Communications called Telenor and Myanmar’s three other mobile carriers to discuss the technical aspects of monitoring voice, SMS and data, the meeting invitation shows. The ministry – then under the National League for Democracy government but stacked with former military officers – subsequently allocated K6.19 billion in the 2019-20 budget to implement a system that would be capable of intercepting up to 120 calls on the Telenor network simultaneously, while also monitoring 1 gigabyte per second of the company’s customer data. The budget request also included funds for digital forensics software from several companies, including OpenText and Magnet Forensics from Canada. In December 2020, Telenor itself sounded the alarm at their annual public sustainability briefing held in Yangon, announcing that the authorities would have direct access to user data in real time “We are concerned that existing laws and regulations do not contain clear definitions on when such powers can and cannot be used, as well as other legal and regulatory safeguards to make sure that these powers are used in a proportionate and necessary way,” the Telenor official said at the briefing, which was shared by Telenor on YouTube. The author of the Open Technology Fund report, Ma Phyu Phyu Kyaw (a pseudonym), said that for now the military still relies heavily on community-based informants to track its opponents as they go about their daily lives, but this could change. “I think that when protests end, they will increase the use of surveillance technology to track down the remainder of the protesters,” she said in an interview with Frontier and Danwatch. https://www.frontiermyanmar.net/en/stay-or-go-telenors-myanmar-dilemma/ 5/9