Surachanee Sriyai

Opinion | Myanmar junta’s VPN ban, internet controls expose citizens to more cyber threats

Ban is likely to push people, desperately seeking information or social connection, towards alternatives even from obscured sources

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Myanmar youths browsing Facebook at an internet shop in Yangon. File photo: AFP

Surachanee Sriyai

Published: 11:00am, 11 Aug 2024Updated: 11:05am, 11 Aug 2024

For Myanmar, access to online information has always been limited even during the relatively open political period of around 2016 to 2021, in part due to the slow digital infrastructure development compared to the rest of Southeast Asia.

In 2023, Myanmar registered a 44 per cent internet penetration rate and 15 million social media users, whereas its immediate neighbour Thailand had reached 85 per cent internet penetration and over 52 million social media users. However, since the coup d’etat of 2021, cyberspace has been further constricted by regulation.

Shortly after usurping power, Myanmar’s State Administration Council (SAC) blocked access to Facebook – which is so ubiquitous and popular that it is often called “the internet” – and other websites and messaging applications, aiming to cut off communication channels of the resistance forces and control information flow.

Consequently, Myanmar people turned to virtual private networks (VPNs) as a way to circumvent the censorship. VPNs provide an encrypted route such that a user in Myanmar would be recognised as accessing the internet from another country.

A meme equating Burmese identity with 20 VPN applications illustrated the popularity of VPNs among Myanmar people. While that number is said in jest, the real-world figure is still likely to be high. Digital rights activists estimate that Myanmar citizens have an average of five VPN applications installed on their phones.

Min Aung Hlaing (centre), chairman of the State Administration Council, during a meeting in Naypyidaw last month. Photo: EPA-EFE/Handout

Between late May and early June this year, experts and cyber analysts started to observe that the SAC has been actively blocking access to VPNs. At the end of May, the Ministry of Transport and Communications ordered a nationwide ban on access to Facebook, Instagram, X, WhatsApp and VPN services, according to news reports from Voice of America. This crackdown is one of the extrajudicial executions of the Cybersecurity Law drafted in 2022 by the junta, which was never fully enacted. On the ground, security forces have been randomly checking, searching and even arresting people for having VPNs on their phones.