Myanmar orders wireless internet shutdown until further notice: telecoms sources | Hacker News Reader

Myanmar orders wireless internet shutdown until further notice: telecoms sources

reuters.com

191 pointslawrenceyan102 comments

Something that makes this extra interesting is that two of the major telcos of Myanmar are subsidiaries of companies from other countries: Telenor from Norway and Ooredoo from Qatar. Both of which are majority owned by their respective governments. According to [1] they account for 28 of 54 million subscriptions.

It will be interesting to watch how these two companies continue to comply with such orders. These events are making the news in Norway with a Telenor angle. If things keep escalating and Telenor is shown to be in any way complicit in any human rights abuses, it will be a scandal in Norway, and the Telenor leadership will have to answer to the government. Norway has cultivated an image as a human rights champion of sorts on the international stage, and is expected to take this sort of development very seriously. There is precedent in the VimpelCom case [2] where the financial crime police, parliament and the ministry of commerce got involved. Senior leadership had to testify before parliament committees, the police made corruption charges, and the chairman of the board resigned after the minister of commerce indicated she did not have confidence in him. So Telenor Myanmar and it's Norwegian leadership is now under pressure from the government of Myanmar to comply, while also being answerable to the government of Norway for the possible consequences of doing so.

Meanwhile, Qatar is under international pressure because of human rights issues on their own turf, and the international eye turned on them because of the upcoming FIFA World Cup. In fact, Norway's national team has been calling them out recently [3]. They might also want to tread very carefully around this issue.

[1] https://www.charltonsmyanmar.com/myanmar-economy/telecommuni...

[2] https://www.thelocal.no/20151105/former-vimpelcom-ceo-seized...

[3] https://twitter.com/FRfotballBen/status/1374809071497383953

I don't see how any consequences inflicted upon the foreign owned telcos by their respective governments is much more than theatre as viewed from the perspective of Myanmar citizen.

How will any of that help to reduce the burden of human rights abuses?

I'll admit though, it is entertaining to watch a political scandal unravel. Predictable though.

> and is expected to take this sort of development very seriously

Yeah, but what does "taking it seriously" really mean? They can either comply or not. If they comply, the world will call Norway hypocrites. If they don't, you think Myanmar's military would give two fucks about forcefully destroying their facilities, killing their employees along the way?

It's no only a matter of optics and it's cynical to reduce it to a mere PR (ergo, money) problem. It's catch 22.

I do in fact think Myanmar's military will give multiple fucks about killing Norwegian citizens. Destroying their facilities, less so.

Most of their employees in Myanmar aren't going to be Norwegian.

Telenor is no stranger to being ordered to do these things when operating in autocratic regimes, and they have a history of complying.

Previous incidents have not evoked any such responses in Norway either, sadly.

As others have alluded, I have major doubts Telenor is able to accomplish anything here. Myanmar's military already faces practically unanimous derision. They will just nationalize Telenor's telco assets and try to figure out how to fill in the gaps. If they don't care about shutting off the telco's for weeks, they won't care again.

How is it an option not to comply when a government disallows use of the airwaves in its country?

That’s not a question of ‘human rights championing’, it’s a question of sovereignty. It’s not realistic to expect a country to challenge that, it’s basically a declaration of war.

What's going on here in Myanmar should be a lesson to all people.

Here is the US, I'd like to see a lobby to have Communications Act amended to remove any power of the government or business to shut down communications networks, systems or inter-connections.

This idea that governments can protect us from ourselves is foolish.

Governments at a certain point aren't trying to protect us from ourselves. They're trying to protect themselves from us.

'People shouldn't be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.'

Myanmar has a government that's afraid of its people. It's not working out so great.

What seems to work best is when the government and the people like each other, and nobody's afraid. That doesn't mean that they have to agree, but it does mean that they disagree politely, and seek to resolve disagreements with compromises that everybody can live with.

That requires a certain amount of trust and good faith. Once there's widespread fear, it's not going to end well for anybody.

I think the people of Myanmar are more afraid of the government than the government is of them. That's kind of the important part of that idiom there.

It's not like a law is going to stop a malicious government from literally cutting a connection.

Do you really mean to propose that network operators not be able to disconnect from people that don't pay or are disruptive to their operations? I feel like you need to be a little more clear about what responsibilities you think private entities have.

No.

The Myanmar military’s coup, and the killing of hundreds of protesters, were already illegal.

If the US joint chiefs of staff arrested the president and congress, the CEO of T-mobile would not refuse to switch off mobile networks if half a dozen marines with loaded ARs showed up at his house with an order to do so.

> the CEO of T-mobile would not refuse to switch off mobile networks if half a dozen marines with loaded ARs showed up at his house with an order to do so.

If people with guns threatened me and the way out was to turn off a network, I think I’d do as they ‘asked’.

If I was worried about it I would build a process that didn't have a single point of failure like that.

Absolutely. However it still would be nice if it US Government didn't have the legal authority to do so. There is a difference between an internet kill switch controlled and required by the government ala russia and marines storming T-Mobile's HQ. Not to mention the optics matter, even to dictators.

There are several sibling posts saying we don’t have to worry about the US government cutting communications. That’s just not true. A major US transit agency halted cell service to disrupt protests: https://www.aclunc.org/blog/five-years-later-barts-cell-serv....

but again, if it gets as bad as in Myanmar, a)laws wont help b) we will have bigger problems.

Is shutting down internet a small step towards a coup, as opposed to being the fruit of one? In the case of the US, i don't think it's likely short or medium term.

What about police abusing this power? That's a local government problem, not a national one, so it's different to what's going on in myanmar.

> if it gets as bad as in Myanmar, a)laws wont help b) we will have bigger problems

It gets as bad as it has in Myanmar when one doesn't have those laws. If you ban cutting communications, it normalizes the expectation. Cutting communications now becomes personally and politically risky in a way it isn't if it's in the grey area.

For an example, see India's slow slide into authoritarianism in this respect. Cutting communications in Kashmir was legal, but iffy. That normalized, legally and culturally, the mechanism. Now, communications are routinely cut across the country.

All that said, Myanmar fell to a military coup. That's a different failure mechanism from elected leaders getting too comfortable on their thrones.

We have a member called 2GKasmiri, would be appropriate to hear him here.

They cut communications regularly across the country well before 2019

> What's going on here in Myanmar should be a lesson to all people.

Yes. The lesson is that when your country is taken over by a military coup, and guys with assault rifles come to shut down the internet, pre-existing laws and rhetoric about free speech and open access and all that other good stuff become completely irrelevant.

You are looking at a wet street, and are claiming that it caused rain.

If you actually want to prevent this from happening here, the step that you should worry about is the coup and the killings, not the internet getting shut down in the following week.

They're never going to shut it down in the US. Too many people posted incriminating stuff during Jan. 6th. It's way too useful to turn it off.

How is that a lesson? Its coup, and the military has ignored the rule of law and seized control.

What good a is law when there are people with guns ready to shoot you down?

It bolsters other people with guns to shoot the first bunch down because they've clearly lost their bloody minds.

Goes both ways.

Perhaps this is an idealistic and naive world view but internet connectivity _should_ transcend governments and be something that no one has control over and no one can shut down.

Agreed. I'd love to work on solving this problem.

I like this point. The first question we should ask when someone develops a single switch to shut off an entire, critical piece of infrastructure is why? Who would need to do that? Whose interest is it for? Surely not the company, why would they stop serving their customers and go through the expense of making it easy to do that. There is no other reason to have and use that capability than to stop an entire population from communicating. No one has a good justified reason for wanting to do that. Corrupt reasons? Yes. But not any that are in the interest of a truly open, democratic society.

Well in this case, the order is from a military government, which locked up the elected politicians earlier this year and is shooting its people in the streets, so the boat on “a truly open, democratic society” has kind of sailed. It also suggests, to the people running the networks on the ground, that the military is very open to coming round and shooting you if you don’t shut it down.

> why? Who would need to do that? Whose interest is it for?

"National security" is the blanket answer to all those questions.

> The first question we should ask when someone develops a single switch to shut off an entire, critical piece of infrastructure is why?

They don't though. From a technical view point, they have the same "off switch" that every country has: boots on the ground, guns and trust that they'll use them. They didn't switch the internet off, they ordered the service providers to switch it off. Every country on earth can do that with the service providers that are running physical infrastructure in the country, it's harder for satellite internet.

There's absolutely no reason why the US, Germany or Switzerland couldn't do the same. They probably won't any time soon, but they can: all it takes is a few phone calls and the service providers' belief that they mean it.

If it's satellite based internet, there's no way to shut it off, especially if gateway is not in the same country. Of course, the government could always patrol around looking for antennas...

It's quite easy to jam satellite comes, as well as locate them. The Tatmadaw has some US company built direction finding equipment.

"It's quite easy to jam satellite comes"

That would literally require a man in the middle attack; the jammer should be kept between the antenna and the satellite, or very close to that position. I mean, it should be in the air.

"as well as locate them"

Possible, but not easy. A satellite dish can be buried, hidden under a camouflaging roof etc It's not like earth antennas that need the space around them free for pointing them; all they need is to see their satellite which is in the sky. One can dig a hole in the ground, put the dish down there pointed to the satellite, then when not in use park their truck above it, and good luck to the government helicopter passing above to track it. And btw, there are ways to build antennas that don't appear as such; they may offer worse performance but they do work, and satellite reflectors can be built that way too.

The location finding would be by RF emissions, not visually.

That's my point. A dish antenna is highly directional, so an tx/rx antenna pointed towards the sky can be detected/jammed effectively only by standing in between the antenna and the target it's pointed to, ie the satellite. It's not a thin line, but it's still a limited area, and the minor lobes of its radiation pattern produce a very faint signal which can become negligible by burying or covering most of the dish in all directions except the one it's aimed to.

It is also easy to detect the jamming stations and fire missiles from black-ops.

You can easily jam or overpower a faint satellite signal with a local ground-based antenna.

Or you can shoot down your enemy's satellites and screw up the orbit so he can't launch any more.

> Or you can shoot down your enemy's satellites and screw up the orbit so he can't launch any more.

Pretty sure Myanmar can't do that.

Maybe not yet. Rockets keep getting cheaper and more accessible. Eventually you'll be able to buy a used SpaceX booster second hand for a few million.

Targeting a satellite in orbit might be a bit harder than just reaching orbit, though...

Eventually you'll be able to buy a used rocket scientist for a few million.

Seriously, though, if the tech needs to be actively camouflaged and there's death penalty only for its possession, there's no way many people will use it. So it will be useless to inform and organize people, it will be useless to broadcast what's really happening inside.

"You can easily jam or overpower a faint satellite signal with a local ground-based antenna."

Not doable unless either you are in between the dish and the satellite, or have an extremely powerful transmitter with its directional antenna pointed to the dish, where all that power is needed to cope with the fact that the maximum sensitivity of the dish is towards the satellite, not your jammer. Which also means that they need one jammer and its antenna for every dish they want to silence. That would not scale well.

I believe in practice the Tatmada keeps a tight grip on satellite Internet, and don't allow services that they don't control.

Remember, this is the country where one of the charges they brought against Aung San Su Kyi during the Feb coup was importing analog two-way radios. And more broadly, people are regularly arrested and imprisoned or sometimes executed for mere possession of radio equipment.

Because encryption exists, the internet can hopefully always stand as a transcendental entity.

VPNs, TOR, steganography and obfuscation are some of the best tools against tyranny.

These tools are useless if your tyrannical government cuts off access to the internet.

“The protesters are communicating using encryption. Take this $5 wrench and hit the network equipment with it until they stop.”

In this case, it sounds like they're physically shutting off the broadband wireless servers. Encryption seems unlikely to help if the actual connection is severed.

They don’t protect against rubber hose cryptography, and that’s the biggest concern with oppressive governments.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis

If the government is lawless enough that it will trample on the rights of the citizens, then the laws that prevent citizens from setting up wireless networks securely to recreate the internet backbone are null and void.

(With all the risks that comes with operating + defending a detectable RF emitter from the ground in a hostile environment)

If you want to work to prevent this, keep enough technology and know-how on hand that you could do this on short notice, even if's as simple flinging 5mb/s on a cantana a mile away.

I will never understand the HN crowd's deification of the internet. Out of all the methods of communication out there it doesn't seem particularly special, and definitely not special enough to supercede the sovereignity of nations.

In this case the problem is that the sovereignity of the nation has been undermined by a military coup. Which is to say: Unless you believe in the rightfullness of the right of the stronger which in political terms would amount to believe into some elan vitale, a will of the biological organism of the people, some superstition of thinking blood and soil (which is to say a mob of antisocial males) to be the (metaphysical) being of what is considered the nationstate. (Some might also argue that the nationstate has had terrible consequences for the average worker in the dawn of modernity (that bit of history is probably specific to western history))

adding on this: I'd agree with the notion that it is weird that people fetishize the internet as some anarchic free entity when on a material level it is owned in big parts by private interest.

This makes SpaceX even more interesting.

Not to take away from your point but I think you mean to say Starlink - it's a separate company.

Governments could block sales of the customer equipment, but once they're in it would be almost impossible to locate and confiscate them all.

They could order termination of service (based on coordinates or serial numbers), but there's no way for them to physically control that if the company refuses to do so.

The service would be highly susceptible to DF of the outgoing traffic, but could probably be managed on the basis of set up, transmit, run away quickly before they find and arrest/kill you.

I look forward to global adoption of systems like Starlink.

Presumably, neither the US Government nor SpaceX will comply with the mandates of totalitarian governments and waste time geo-fencing specific chunks of the globe. This isn't really practical from a technological perspective either.

No, but I assume Starlink will implement geofencing for subscribers to please content-providers.

Geo-fencing is kind of inherent to Starlink since it's based on spot beams.

I also wonder if people really want to see "Starlink customers in Myanmar executed for treason" headlines.

I can imagine a boots on the ground approach searching door to door to find and execute people using it.

When no one will stop you doing something, you can go as far as you want.

WEIRD people see this type of situation as very catastrophic, strange, and alien, but when you crack open the history books present day Myanmar is a regular day at the office on planet earth and it's all the WEIRD people who are actually the anomaly.

This thinking goes both ways. There is no reason someone would have to use starlink at their home. That is the entire point. You could hide a setup in the middle of nowhere.

Take a 3 hour drive every weekend to go watch cat videos, see what shenanigans Trump's up to these days, and jerk off to midget porn.

Good times.

Plenty of countries already ban certain things from coming into their countries like sat phones, CB radios and weapons.

The Starlink dish will just be on that same list of "prohibited from import" items for totalitarian governments.

So, we need one that can be 3d printed. Network communications equipment that can be 3d printed or better yet a starlink dish that can be assembled from items found in your kitchen.

I jest but... life finds a way.

Uh-huh, but when you're in a country ruled by a totalitarian government you really, REALLY don't want to be caught with equipment on the banned list.

I drove through 35 African countries a couple of years ago, and I was warned repeatedly not to have a sat phone or drone, lest the governments get VERY upset with me.

I think we're slowly witnessing the next phase of societal evolution right now. No watershed moment yet though.

With the likes of Bitcoin and Starlink a picture is starting to emerge that, while this tech is all still it's infancy, there does seem to exist the remote possibility that one day the tables will turn such that the dynamics that enable totalitarian regimes will be removed or seriously undermined.

The industrial revolution changed the previous set of dynamics in that there became a class of independently wealthy, and hence powerful/influential, business owners with a vested interest in how the state operated. It wasn't that they had power and influence over other people, but rather that they recognised that their peers had the same interests they did and they could band together to form a coalition against the rulers of the day and eventually out of that government emerged.

Wish I could read the history books from the year 2500!

I'm not thrilled about the further expansion of US influence on worldwide telecommunications.

StarLink is a "solution", involving ruining raw data collection from any amateur or professional space telescopes fir decades only because the corrupt US government and private internet ecosystem doesn't allow for accessible internet connections, that the whole world has to suffer for. A shitty solution to an artificial problem in a country that tries to police the world.

Totalitarian governments will jam Starlink frequencies or arrest and shoot people who use its receivers. They won't be beaten by some crazy billionaire with an internet space ISP. You'd be a fool if you thought China would ever allow something like StarLink to exist in their airspace without exerting major control over the company.

No, most likely, StarLink will just be unavailable to totalitarian countries until their dictators stop doing what the US government wants them to do. If there's no way to block it, it'll become just another tool in the deep toolbox for insurrection. After all, dropping StarLink receivers is a lot easier than handling "rebels" guns when the time calls for it, like in most major conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa for at least the last decade.

Oh, it's going to be very simple. Tracking satellite receivers is a common military problem, they will purchase electronic warfare aircraft (often with the help of the US government), then locate the emitters and shoot those people.

Alternatively, they can threaten SpaceX's satellites to either comply or be shot down or jammed with highly powerful directional jammer pointed at the satellite.

Starlink already is geofenced to where you live (you can't even move the dish within your own country).

I'm pretty sure they will only provide the service legally.

Interesting. Last time something like this happened, that I remember, was about a decade ago in Egypt. The government demanded the internet be turned off during a civil war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Egypt#2011_Interne...

Indian govt shutdown internet in Kashmir for a year (maybe a bit longer maybe less) much more recently so they could de facto annex the region: https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/kashmir-internet-shutdown-co...

Its pretty common and predictable over the last decade

You have friends in Myanmar and now know they’ve lost wireless internet.

Is there a fast way to help them recover some functionality?

It's not fast, but, move to Myanmar, join the military, rise up the ranks, start an off-hand discussion to the tune of "you know, when you really think about, running a country is a lot of work..." and make them think it was their idea to call the whole thing off.

I wish I could remember the name of the software package. It was posted here some time ago, but it was a DIY way to create a "summary of the internet" on a 1TB disk, similar to the “Paquete Semanal”[1] used in Cuba.

Shipping those in regularly would likely be appreciated.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal

There's probably an app for building mesh networks.

Bribery. The military has separate networks which it doesn’t shutdown and if you know the right people and have the cash, then it’s possible to get added to it.

> Is there a fast way to help them recover some functionality?

A NATO tank division in Yangon, and a missile destroyer flotilla in the bay of Bengal.

There is 1 US friendly nation anywhere in the vicinity. And given the timeline of Iraqi Freedom as a reference, 1.5 month.

That is, unless they're part of the unlucky 5% to be slaughtered in the invasion.

> A NATO tank division in Yangon, and a missile destroyer flotilla in the bay of Bengal

Tanks aren't great in cities.

Are there material differences between wireless and wired Internet w.r.t. infrastructure? Is wired Internet easier to trace or something? I'm not too familiar with computer networks, but I thought that they would be the same.

It affects different user segments differently. Disconnecting wireless internet means that you're mostly disconnecting consumers/social media users/general public, while the businesses that are non-digital but rely on the internet for their daily operations keep functioning - if you disconnect all the internet then you're likely to disrupt e.g. ATMs and retail store logistics and all kinds of technical service monitoring which cause you trouble; but if you "just" disconnect all the mobile internet (except for a whitelist of phone numbers used by gov't employees) and the residental networks, then the general public is without communications but the economy can still be mostly functional.

Also, a key goal is to disrupt the communications between protesters in the streets - so that they can't coordinate any reaction between themselves or those who are at home until they themselves leave the streets; we saw similar actions a few times last year in Belarus.

Makes sense; thanks so much for the explanation!

Now is starlinks time to shine. Freedom of information from the skys.

I'm all for this but unfortunately these transmissions can be triangulated.

No need for triangulation when you can load up directional antennae and equipment looking for specific RF freqencies being beamed skyward using a light aircraft with GPS. All you have to do and fly in a grid, marking all ground stations on a map and send the coordinates to your goons later (or in real-time, if you want to make sure the stations are being turned off).

Starlink is geofenced, they don't provide service to regular customers outside their contract location.

I wonder what difference satellite internet like Starlink will make in future situations like this.

This could be an interesting case study of what happens when people are suddenly taken away of the internet (at least wireless). I don't think any technology in history has been adopted so quickly and changed so profoundly the way individuals and societies behave. I think it could be a hundred years until we can fully see the consequences of what widely-available, fast-speed internet has.

Internet shutdowns are regular in India.

This happens quite a lot. Turkey did it back in 2016, some of the Arab states did it back during the Arab Spring. Usually some sort of bootleg networks pop up around the countries borders/ edge nodes.

Does anyone still has a 56k modem gathering dust somewhere?

Oh I’ve got much worse than that. I have 56k modems, T1/E1, ISDN equipment, and even some weird 4800/9600bps mainframe modems all sitting around until I finally put together my internal little networks. Then I may decide to screw around with old LANs like Token Ring and WAN backbone stuff like ATM.

cue "Running in the 90s" track

Why we need starlink.

Wouldn't make a difference in this instance. Not only would they need base stations somewhere in country but the users would require a dish. Both could and probably would be in this case found and destroyed by the military.

Then again protesters can definitely make do with 9600 bps and that is achievable with other sat networks that have much smaller (and hideable) terminals such as iridium or its newer competitors whose name i forget.

Many wireless and ethernet connections could ultimately network with just a few Starlink user dishes in population centers. I think the base station could be located in neighboring countries. It might be plausible if you have a bunch of young people who are disconnected for too long.

Relevant XKCD? https://xkcd.com/538/

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