Translated by Burmese Bloggers w/o Borders
(http://bbwob.blogspot.com)
Before the recent “Saffron Revolution”, there were approximately around 2000 blogs and most of them concentrated on writing about the topics of their own personal interest and their personal experiences in life.
In September, Burmese people could no longer endure the years of poverty and as a result of increase in diesel prices, many of them took to the streets for peaceful demonstrations. Such demonstrations were shown to the world through the Burmese blogs in the form of instant news, pictures and videos. After that, everyone, including SPDC, became aware of the significant role that Burmese bloggers played in this “Saffron Revolution”.
After seeing the impact that Burmese blogs can have as transmission medium for news, SPDC declared that they will retaliate in a similar manner, that is, to “fight media (blogs) with media (blogs)”. They began to see the urgent need to implement actions according to their declaration. Therefore, they chose a group of their trusted people and gave them training on blogging. They then asked those people to write blogs according to their tune, thus resulting in the rise of various pro-SPDC blogs in Burmese bloggers’ community. Not only do those blogs were asked to write pro-SPDC posts, but also asked to attack the posts written by pro-democracy bloggers and to incite discord among the Burmese bloggers’ community.
Their techniques also included writing vulgar words, writing spam, impersonating identities of certain bloggers and writing nonsense under their nicknames in commonly-used message boards (aka c-boxes).
Knowing their techniques, many Burmese bloggers have simply ignored their provocations in c-boxes by just deleting their messages.
Hence, they decided to attack from another direction, that is, to block certain Burmese blogs so that the people in Burma would not be able to view them. Many well-known pro-democracy blogs were their first targets.
However, with the advanced technology, the people in Burma found a way to overcome such restrictions. Subsequently, SPDC resorted to slowing down the internet speed for their networks and even to the extent of limiting the internet usage by shutting down their networks for public usage.
They also restricted the usage of internet cafes by asking the users at those places to register using their identity cards, filling in their personal details, keeping a log of visited sites and taking screenshots of various pages.
Their latest attacks include blocking the access to the whole of www.blogger.com from Burma and the possibility of increasing the price for usage of internet in Burma.
Pro-SPDC group has also tried to hack into the Gmail accounts of well-known pro-democracy Burmese blogs. After being successful, they would change or redirect the URLs of those blogs to porn website addresses and advertised addresses for businesses.
In addition, they have also tried to create bogus blogs with similar addresses of pro-democracy blogs by adding some words to the URL. The well-known pro-democracy blogger, niknayman’s blog, fell victim to such attack recently. As shown in the picture below, they created a bogus blog with the URL (http://niknayman.blogspot.com.corp.st) and put the name of the blog as “This is myanmar NLD stupid sucking blog”. If you open the bogus blog, you will be directed into a porn site.
[Disclaimer: Women are advised not to open the bogus blog’s link as it contains a lot of offensive porn materials. The screenshot of the bogus blog is shown in this post just to prove as evidence of SPDC’s doing.]They have also advertised this bogus blog’s address in various c-boxes of Burmese people, especially women, under the nickname of “admin” as shown below in picture. By doing that, they tried to trick people into misunderstanding that Niknayman has changed his blog’s address and he, himself, was the one going around informing the people of this new address.
When the check was done on the identity of the person who went around advertising the bogus blog’s link, the person turned out to be a pro-SPDC blogger, by the name of Opposite Eyes. Though he used a fake IP address, his lie was exposed as shown below.
Niknayman has also discovered how the pro-SPDC group created the bogus’s blog address. They registered as a member of a French business company and made use of the domain name given by typing “niknayman.blogspot.com” in the blank in front as shown in picture below.
Niknayman has declared that such lies and attacks by pro-SPDC groups in Burmese websites, forums, blogs and emails definitely will be exposed after gathering enough evidence. With such evidence, their cases will be presented to international internet usage authority and human rights authority, etc.Finally, Niknayman urged his fellow Burmese bloggers to be careful of such attacks from SPDC side and to unite against SPDC and their lackeys.
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