An anonymous cybersecurity expert who now lives in hiding leaves his mobile phone behind for security reasons whenever he has to go out. "I advise not to use the same SIM card for a long time if there is a lot of communication about the revolution stored on it. One should use a VPN every time one uses the Internet to access and ensure security on social media. One should be careful of which VPN to use and research who owns the application, which country it is based in and what policies of data sharing they are offering. People should think about endto-end encryption such as provided by Telegram Secret Chat, Signal and ProtonMail for each communication." Because of its Secret Chat high-level encryption settings, the Telegram application has been largely appropriated by anti-coup forces to organize themselves and inform each other but every digital communication is now considered as potentially compromising. A few days after the coup in February 2021, the regime drafted a Cyber Security Law, requesting Internet service providers to keep data onshore to provide it to the government on request and punishing users deemed to have spread “misinformation” or “disinformation.” Myanmar's business community pushed back against its implementation. For now, conservative mindsets in the army, lobbying by powerful companies and the complexity of the Burmese language fonts, which makes it difficult for automated machines to read and sort out content in a similar fashion to the Khmer language, have limited the scale of surveillance. But SAC has made clear their desire to control a new tech-savvy rebel generation that is connected to a change-hungry world and to cut off the political resistance's sources of funding. On January 22nd, 2022, it proposed a new version of the cyber-bill which criminalizes the use of VPN, cryptocurrency and online gambling with one to three years prison. Rumors of China's involvement in building the equivalent of its firewall and intranet in Myanmar were widely circulated on social media. This prompted protesters to demonstrate outside the Chinese Embassy in Yangon and fueled anti-China conspiracy sentiment. The SAC is protected from any effective condemnation and action by the UN Security Council due to the veto of China and Russia, who have been the two major sources of military equipment and training for the Myanmar army since the 1980s. China denied the news as baseless rumors. But Myanmar officers do regularly attend training in those two countries, both of which have a stronghold on online dissent. The New York Times recently conducted an investigation on the Chinese police's strategies to buy fake accounts, generate content and hunt down users to manipulate social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. This technology is being increasingly purchased by authoritarian Southeast Asian governments such as Cambodia. In October 2021, Cambodia signed a new security deal with China’s Public Security Ministry including the sale of surveillance tools and DNA screening equipment. A young PDF recruit, who has left Yangon for guerilla training in an undisclosed location, said in an interview via encrypted messages, “People who are communicating with PDFs from their phone need to be even more careful than before. But now everybody is losing their privacy and is being watched.” 19 Photo: Pictures of arrested young people from Yangon beaten in jail were aired on MWD TV on April 18th as a terror and intimidation tactic against the anti-coup movement.