RAND_MR1382

Open Society Institute to purchase modems and electronic mail accounts, testing
whether it was feasible to train the large Burmese exile community in Thailand to be
active online. 14
Far more important than the news that was transmitted was the new network itself,
which provided information, and in so doing empowered members of the Burmese
diaspora. This educated elite, scattered around the world in the 30 years since the events
of 1962 and cut off from their homeland, for the first time had access to the same up-todate
information and a means to communicate. “Once it was so obvious that people
were using it, that it was useful to them, more and more came on. Pretty soon you had,
if not the entire Burmese exile community in the world, but all the ones who have $20 a
month and a modem,” Steele recalled. “There’s a lot of Burmese in exile, but they
weren’t together and the Net allows them, in one way, to be together.” The Internet’s
power to connect and organize geographically disparate individuals and groups would
be dramatically displayed in the activist campaigns behind the Massachusetts selective
purchasing legislation and the Pepsi boycott.
BurmaNet—maintained on a computer server run by the Institute for Global
Communications (IGC), a computer network serving peace and human rights activists 15
—grew rapidly. The number of electronic subscribers went from a handful, to 30, to 100,
to 400 in its second year, until it was impossible to keep track of the real “readership,”
because BurmaNet’s reports were posted on the Usenet system and reprinted in paper
newsletters. 16 As of January 1997, BurmaNet had 750 known subscribers worldwide. 17
A difficult decision faced the activists in 1994: whether to allow the Burmese regime’s
embassy in Washington and other known SLORC representatives to subscribe to
BurmaNet and “post” messages giving Rangoon’s viewpoint. The decision was made to
allow SLORC to join, in the interests of free speech and full debate—which is, after all, a
strong part of the Internet’s culture. According to Steele, “it’s actually sort of beneficial
to have this on the Net,” because the regime, by its very nature, is able to communicate
little beyond its standard propaganda. Activist Michael Beer of Nonviolence
International agrees. “Very often they come across as looking ridiculous,” said Beer, a
veteran among those using the Internet and working for political change in Burma. But
by seeing SLORC’s viewpoint, like a Kremlinologist of old, “you can then get in their
heads…. we can sit in their shoes.” 18
At about the same time BurmaNet was ending the international drought on news about
Burma and helping both form and inform an international network whose members
were dedicated to ending SLORC’s rule, related efforts got under way to challenge the
regime’s choke-hold on information within Burma. This effort was and continues to be
hampered by the regime’s intelligence apparatus and the lack of any significant private
Internet connections inside Burma itself. In September 1996, SLORC passed the
“Computer Science Development Law,” which metes out a prison sentence of 7 to 15