The On-Line Activist

Multimedia producer Glen Norris, who works for the Virtual Vegas entertainment company, does not seem the type to be an international human rights activist.

He neither organizes rallies nor marches in picket lines. He does not feel comfortable joining organizations or going to planning meetings.

“I’m not really a member of any physical communities,” said the soft-spoken Norris, speaking from the Santa Monica office of Virtual Vegas, where he helps create CD-ROM games and on-line services.

But Norris, who lived in Burma for several months in 1993, was greatly disturbed about the political situation in that country.

The military regime in power there is one of the most oppressive and hated in the world--the United Nations, Amnesty International, the Carter Center and the International Center for Human Rights have all strongly denounced its mass killings of dissidents, forced-labor policies, strict controls over information, and refusal to allow elected officials a role in the government.

Burma (renamed Myanmar by the military regime) became prominent in the news earlier this week when it was announced that dissident Aung San Suu Kyi, who was awarded the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, had been released after six years of house arrest.

Norris might not fit in well with “physical communities,” but he certainly knows his way around the virtual world, and it was there that he decided to make his contribution. Last year, about Thanksgiving, he created the Internet “Free Burma” World Wide Web site, which quickly became a center for people around the world seeking to learn about the situation in that country.

As an introduction to the site (which can be reached at https://sunsite.unc.edu/freeburma/freeburma.html), Norris wrote: “ Free Burma is a slogan, a hope, a certain number of web pages, and, until the people there are free and self-governing . . . the only one there is.”

Most of the rest of “Free Burma” is taken up with links that lead to numerous information and political sites throughout the Internet, and thus throughout the world.

Click on BurmaNet and you are taken to a continually updated news source that originates in Thailand. Go to Burma Web and you are in an information site in Norway. From Australia comes Burma fact pages organized by Lonely Planet, a travel-book publisher. And closer to home is an extensive site created by a computer science student at the University of Maryland that includes picture tours and a chronology of Suu Kyi’s activities.

Most of these sites were buzzing with news this week about Suu Kyi’s release and what it might mean to the future of Burma. On “Free Burma,” Norris provided direct links to the BurmaNet announcement that Suu Kyi had been freed and to a copy of her first public statement.

For the first several months that “Free Burma” was on the Internet, Norris ran the site from a computer on his desk at work. He enjoyed watching people from all over the world check it out. “It was nice seeing someone with a ‘sg’ at the end of their address logging on,” he said. “That means they were from Singapore, which is such a censored society they don’t normally get this kind of information.”

But traffic on “Free Burma” became so heavy, it was taxing the capacity of his computer. He contacted the Sun Micro Systems company, which offers nonprofit groups free space on powerful Sun work stations. “Free Burma” now operates out of a SunSITE location at the University of North Carolina, although Norris retains control of the content and updates it by modem connection.

Norris’ name does not appear on the “Free Burma” page, and there is no hint that it originated in Santa Monica. He was worried that agents of the military government might try to take action against him, even though he is not Burmese. “I was not sure how cautious I need to be,” he said. “It wasn’t necessary to tell anyone who I was, so I played it safe.”

But Norris no longer feels the need to be anonymous.

“There are people doing a lot more radical things than me who are willing to use their names,” he said. “I guess it is not much of a problem for me, now, to let people know who is doing this.”