Myanmar’s Military Deploys Digital Arsenal of Repression in Crackdown - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/world/asia/myanmar-coup-military-surveillance.html
During a half century of military rule, Myanmar’s totalitarian tools were crude but effective. Men in sarongs shadowed democracy activists, neighbors informed on each other and thugs brandished lead pipes.
The generals, who staged a coup a month ago, are now back in charge with a far more sophisticated arsenal at their disposal: Israeli-made surveillance drones, European iPhone cracking devices and American software that can hack into computers and vacuum up their contents.
Some of this technology, including satellite and telecommunications upgrades, helped people in Myanmar go online and integrate with the world after decades of isolation. Other systems, such as spyware, were sold as integral to modernizing law enforcement agencies.
But critics say a ruthless armed forces, which maintained a dominance over the economy and powerful ministries even as it briefly shared power with a civilian government, used the facade of democracy to enable sensitive cybersecurity and defense purchases.
Some of these “dual-use” technologies, tools of both legitimate law enforcement and repression, are being deployed by the Tatmadaw, as the Myanmar military is known, to target opponents of the Feb. 1 coup — a practice that echoes actions taken against critics by China, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and other governments.
The documents, provided by Justice For Myanmar, catalog tens of millions of dollars earmarked for technology that can mine phones and computers, as well as track people’s live locations and listen in to their conversations. Two parliamentary budget committee members, who requested anonymity given the sensitive political climate, said these proposed budgets for the Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of Transport and Communications reflected actual purchases.
The budgets detail companies and the functionality of their tools. In some instances, they specify the proposed uses, like combating “money laundering” or investigating “cybercrime.”
“What you see the Myanmar military putting together is a comprehensive suite of cybersecurity and forensics,” said Ian Foxley, a researcher at the Center for Applied Human Rights at the University of York. “A lot of this is electronic warfare capability stuff.”
Documentation for post-coup arrest warrants, which were reviewed by The Times, shows that Myanmar’s security forces have triangulated between their critics’ social media posts and the individual addresses of their internet hookups to find where they live. Such detective work could only have been carried out by using specialized foreign technology, according to experts with knowledge of Myanmar’s surveillance infrastructure.
“Even under a civilian government, there was little oversight of the military’s expenditure for surveillance technology,” said Ko Nay Yan Oo, a former fellow at the Pacific Forum of the Center for Strategic and International Studies who has studied the Myanmar military. “Now we are under military rule, and they can do everything they want.”
One particularly large section of the budget allocations covers the latest ware for phone-cracking and computer-hacking. Those systems are usually designed for use by militaries and police forces, and many international export bans include such technology.
The 2020-2021 Ministry of Home Affairs budget allocations include units from MSAB, a Swedish company that supplies forensic data tools for militaries around the world. These MSAB field units can download the contents of mobile devices and recover deleted items, according to notations in the budget.
Henrik Tjernberg, the chairman of MSAB, said that some of the company’s “legacy technology” had ended up in Myanmar a few years ago, but it no longer sold equipment there because of a European Union export ban on dual-use products that can be used for domestic repression. Mr. Tjernberg did not answer questions about how his products ended up in the latest budget.
In Myanmar, the latest budget also included MacQuisition forensic software designed to extract and collect data from Apple computers. The software is made by BlackBag Technologies, an American company that was bought last year by Cellebrite of Israel. Both companies also make other sophisticated tools to infiltrate locked or encrypted devices and suck out their data, including location-tracking information.
In many instances, governments do not buy military-grade technology directly from the companies that make them but instead go through middlemen. The intermediaries often cloak their intentions behind business registrations for education, construction or technology companies, even as they post photographs on social media of foreign weaponry or signing ceremonies with generals.
Middlemen can give Western companies distance from dealing face-to-face with dictators. But international embargoes and dual-use bans still hold tech firms liable for the end users of their products, even if resellers make the deals.
By 2018, Israel had essentially blocked military exports to Myanmar, after it emerged that Israeli weaponry was being sold to an army accused of genocidal actions against the Rohingya ethnic minority. The embargo extends to spare parts.
Two years later, Myanmar Future Science, a company that calls itself an educational and teaching aid supplier, signed paperwork reviewed by The Times agreeing to service military-grade surveillance drones made by Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms manufacturer. Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the Tatmadaw chief who led the coup last month, visited Elbit’s offices during a 2015 trip to Israel.
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