Nothing can prevent proxies being used. It is just a matter of time before they are used so successfully that all sites are visible inside Myanmar / Burma.

Creating a culture of dialogue using the internet is another matter. Most people inside are loathe to send email as they assume, usually incorrectly, that the government can read their emails.

Learning simple encryption is the next step.

[him] moderator

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Burning down Myanmar's Internet firewall
Shawn W Crispin
Asia Times
21 September 2007

Yangon - Myanmar maintains some of the world's most restrictive Internet
controls, including government-administered blocks on foreign news sites
and the use of popular e-mail services. But when politically sensitive
fuel-price protests broke out last month in the old capital city Yangon,
government censors proved powerless to stop the outflow of information and
images over the Internet to the outside world.

State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) authorities have increased
their efforts to curb local and foreign media coverage of the protests and
their heavy-handed response against demonstrators. Pro-government thugs
have been deployed to harass and intimidate local journalists and
camera-carriers, some of whom have had their mobile-phone services cut.

Authorities initially ordered a blackout on all local media coverage of
the protests and have since crafted and placed articles in mouthpiece
media criticizing the protest leaders they have detained. But the
government is losing decidedly its most crucial censorship battle: over
the Internet. Despite government bans, journalists and dissidents continue
to send information and video clips of the protests over the Internet to
foreign-based news organizations.

Exile-run media have published detailed blow-by-blow accounts and explicit
video clips of government crackdowns. Popular video-sharing website
YouTube is flush with footage of the protests posted by citizen
journalists under Burmese names, including one posting by a user who
apparently uses the same name as SPDC leader General Than Shwe. The
Thailand-based, exile-run Irrawaddy - a la CNN - has called on the Myanmar
population to play the role of citizen journalists and send information to
their newsdesk.

So why have the Myanmar authorities, who had apparently deployed some of
the most restrictive cyber-controls anywhere in the world, so utterly
failed to stem the outflow of sensitive information? Myanmar's military
government deploys various software-based filtering techniques aimed at
severely limiting the content the country's citizens can access online.

Most Internet accounts in Myanmar are designed to provide access only to
the limited Myanmar intranet, and the authorities block access to popular
e-mail services such as Gmail and Hotmail. According to the OpenNet
Initiative (ONI), a joint research project on Internet censorship issues
headed by Harvard University, Myanmar's Internet-censorship regime as of
2005 was among the "most extensive" in the world.

The research noted that the Myanmar government "maintains the capability
to conduct surveillance of communication methods such as e-mail, and to
block users from viewing websites of political opposition groups and
organizations working for democratic change in Burma". An ONI-conducted
survey of websites containing material known to be sensitive to the regime
found in 2005 that 84% of the pages they tested were blocked. The regime
also maintained an 85% filtration rate of well-known e-mail service
providers, in line with, as ONI put it, the government's "well-documented
efforts to monitor communication by its citizens and to control political
dissent and opposition movements".

Myanmar's technical censorship capabilities were also reputedly bolstered
by the regime's procurement and implementation of filtering software
produced and sold by UStechnology company Fortinet. According to ONI's
research, the regime was as of 2005 continuing to seek to refine its
censorship regime, which showed no signs of lessening and could worsen as
it moves to more sophisticated software products.

Eschewing the censors
Two years later, thanks to the growing global proliferation of proxy
servers, proxy sites, encrypted e-mail accounts, http tunnels and other
creative workarounds, the cyber-reality in Myanmar is actually much less
restricted than ONI's research indicated.
To be sure, official Internet penetration rates are abysmally low in
Myanmar, because of the prohibitive cost and bureaucratic hassle,
including the provision of a signed letter from the relevant porter warden
that the applicant is not "politically dangerous", to secure a domestic
connection.

However, those low figures mask the explosion of usage at public Internet
cafes, particularly in Yangon, where a growing number are situated in
nondescript, hard-to-find locales. All of the cafes visited in recent
months by this correspondent were equipped with foreign-hosted proxy sites
or servers, which with the help of the cafe attendant allowed customers to
bypass government firewalls and connect freely to the World Wide Web -
including access to otherwise blocked critical news sources.

One particularly popular proxy site in Myanmar's cyber-cafes is
Glite.sayni.net, popularly known as Glite. According to the site's
India-based administrator, the Glite program has been downloaded by tens
of thousands of Internet surfers and resides on hundreds of private and
public servers in Myanmar, allowing its users to access Gmail accounts
that the government has tried to block.

The authorities have so far moved to block three particular Glite
versions, but the program's administrator says he has in response designed
and set up more sites, of which he estimates there are currently 11
unblocked versions, some of which are housed in support site forums in a
format that is difficult to search and block.

He says Glite is also designed not to be indexed by search sites, which
gives Myanmar's Internet cafes their own private and secure access and
makes censor search-engine results for its site seem deceptively sparse.
Although the site's administrator says he is "apolitical", he believes
Myanmar's junta is "fighting a losing battle" in trying to censor the
Internet.

Other popular proxy servers in Yangon's cafes are Your-freedom.net and
Yeehart.com, both of which similarly maintain new, updated versions to
bypass government firewalls. The same is true for various encrypted e-mail
services, including the hyper-secure Hushmail.com, which many local and
exile-based journalists have been trained to use and technology experts
say the junta lacks the expertise to crack.

The proliferation of evasive small-scale technologies, some like Glite
maintained by private individuals with a penchant for programming, have in
these restive times left Myanmar's junta with few viable censorship
options but to unplug the Internet altogether. Indeed, there have been
recent reports of rolling Internet blackouts acrossYangon's cyber-cafes,
particularly during the late afternoons, when journalists would normally
file their stories.

So far the authorities seem reluctant to make yet another policy decision,
on top of last month's hyper-inflationary fuel-price hikes, that would
impinge on national livelihoods, particularly the

urban-based business
class, who judging by their numbers in Yangon's cyber-cafes have grown
increasingly reliant on the Internet for cheap communications. That, of
course, could change in the weeks ahead if the street protests mount and
the government cracks down more forcefully.

Yet the comprehensive news coverage that has leaked out of Myanmar
represents an important victory for the global forces fighting to keep the
Internet free from government censorship. And when the dust finally clears
on Myanmar's popular protests, depending on the eventual outcome, the
information-driven movement could one day be known as Myanmar's Glite
revolution.

Shawn W Crispin is Asia Times Online's Southeast Asia Editor. He may be
reached at swcrispin@atimes.com.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/II21Ae01.html