Opinion: Burma Shave: Myanmar barely edges out PRC in internet oppression pageant

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Reporters Without Borders honors the tyrants, thugs, and dictators who are finding new ways to censor the internet and suppress information online. This is not an easy contest to win: Today’s well appointed totalitarian can’t settle for simple censorship but must actively use the internet as a tool of oppression—by, for example, luring dissidents into the open or keeping tabs on the insufficiently team-spirited. (You can find various examples of how this works in Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith’s book Who Controls the Internet.) By taking screenshots every few minutes of all activity at internet cafes, the military junta in Burma/Myanmar bests a strong field that also includes China, Belarus, Iran, Tunisia, Cuba, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, North Korea, Syria, and Uzbekistan. Full story.

Reporters Without Borders maintains a special rogues gallery for internet oppressors. It’s notable that in some of these cases, the internet is still a not-very-mixed blessing for ordinary people, and government policies can be fairly schizophrenic: Syria is an example of a country that veers between high profile campaigns to get every citizen online and crackdowns against bloggers who don’t praise the president effusively enough. The country’s web-enabled population has grown from about 30,000 in 2000 to more than a million today (out of a total population of about 18 million). One important perspective to keep when engaging the Goldsmith/Wu argument is that even under the most repressive regimes, access to information is light years beyond what it was even five years ago.