In a 21 January 2000 letter to the head of the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), General Tam Shwe, RSF protested against a recent decision prohibiting diffusion of political information on the Internet. This decision came a month after the closure of two local privately owned Internet Service Providers. RSF asked the president to […]
In a 21 January 2000 letter to the head of the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), General Tam Shwe, RSF protested against a recent decision prohibiting diffusion of political information on the Internet. This decision came a month after the closure of two local privately owned Internet Service Providers. RSF asked the president to guarantee an end to censorship on the Internet and called for the repeal of the 1996 Computer Law which obliges Internet users to obtain official authorisation.
According to information collected by RSF, Myanmar Post and Telecommunications (MPT) has recently applied a new restriction to Internet use, prohibiting the diffusion by electronic mail of political commentaries and information “detrimental to the government”. This requirement has been added to the 1996 Computer Law, which already obliges Internet users to request administrative authorisation. Prison terms can be given to anyone breaking that law. The new regulation was adopted a few weeks after the arrest of at least three people, one of them an army officer, who were accused of consulting opposition web sites based in foreign countries. In a report published in August 1999, RSF described Burma as one of the “twenty worst enemies of the Internet”. Burma now has only one, state-owned, Internet Service Provider.
