Arrested in early June for criticising the government’s relief efforts after Cyclone Nargis and, in Zarganar’s case, for talking to the BBC, they are facing up to two years in prison under article 505 (b) of the criminal code. . .The trial of Zarganar and three other activists accused of participating in unofficial cyclone relief operations in the delta area began on 30 June before a special court inside Insein prison. A defense lawyer, Aung Thein, was quoted by Reuters as saying the trial was due to continue on 7 August.

Authorities at Rangoon’s notorious Insein prison for the first time allowed family members a meeting with detained Burmese blogger Nay Phone Latt.

Daw Khin Than, mother of Nay Phone Latt (Nay Myo Kyaw), and his brother went to the prison on Monday after Thingan Kyun Township police informed them that the Burmese blogger was being held in Insein, sources close to the family said.

Update: RSF now reports that Nya has been sent to Insein prison.

***

Update: RSF has confirmed that Nya has in fact been arrested and is now being charged.

Nay Phone Latt, the blogger and Internet café owner who has been held at the interior ministry since 29 January, has been charged under section 5 (J) of the Emergency Provision Act of 1950.

It provides for up to seven years’ imprisonment for anyone who “causes or intends to disrupt the morality or the behaviour of a group of people or the general public, or to disrupt the security or the reconstruction of stability of the union.” Adopted two years after independence, the law is often applied to journalists and writers.

***

Update: From Niknayman.

Even though some medias published that Nya Phone Latt has been taken by the authority, we can’t confirm yet that he is arrested. The comment of BarNyar is correct. The bloggers inside Burma are dare to fight the military regime and not run away anywhere. We will let you know if something is happened in Burma regarding to bloggers inside Burma.

***

According to Mizzima (via Burmanet), blogger Nay Phone Latt was arrested earlier today at an Internet cafe in Thingan Kyun TownshipRangoon.

A blogger, who requested anonymity in fear of reprisals, said, “At the moment we [bloggers] are fleeing in the wake of the arrest of Ko Nay Phone Latt.” . . . Another blogger said he believes the authorities have targeted bloggers and confirmed that fellow bloggers are on the run in fear of arrests.

Internet users in Rangoon said, over a few weeks ago, authorities have stepped up surveillance of internet users and asked internet café owners to maintain strict records of users.

Blogging, which is popular among Burmese youth, has become a dangerous pastime in the country. The authority’s stranglehold over information flow remains as tight as ever and there is zero tolerance over any critical writing.

During the September protests, a Burmese blogger Thar Phyu, who has a blogsite www.mogokemedia.blogspot.com, was arrested and briefly detained for posting pictures of monks and people demonstrating on the streets.

Via email on January 20th, another Burmese blogger, Niknayman, wrote us about the steps the tinhorns had taken during the crackdown and how they continued those measures. Direct action is now being taken.

It seems obvious the tinhorns were hoping that once Burma had dropped from the news headlines, they’d be able to go about their business in secret. Not so. Let’s make sure they are aware we know about Nay Phone Latt.

Attack on Burmese Blogs by SPDC (Military regime in Burma)[Original Source – niknayman – http://niknayman.blogspot.com]

Translated by Burmese Bloggers w/o Borders (http://bbwob.blogspot.com)

Before the recent “Saffron Revolution”, there were approximately around 2000 blogs and most of them concentrated on writing about the topics of their own personal interest and their personal experiences in life.

In September, Burmese people could no longer endure the years of poverty and as a result of increase in diesel prices, many of them took to the streets for peaceful demonstrations. Such demonstrations were shown to the world through the Burmese blogs in the form of instant news, pictures and videos. After that, everyone, including SPDC, became aware of the significant role that Burmese bloggers played in this “Saffron Revolution”.

After seeing the impact that Burmese blogs can have as transmission medium for news, SPDC declared that they will retaliate in a similar manner, that is, to “fight media (blogs) with media (blogs)”. They began to see the urgent need to implement actions according to their declaration. Therefore, they chose a group of their trusted people and gave them training on blogging. They then asked those people to write blogs according to their tune, thus resulting in the rise of various pro-SPDC blogs in Burmese bloggers’ community. Not only do those blogs were asked to write pro-SPDC posts, but also asked to attack the posts written by pro-democracy bloggers and to incite discord among the Burmese bloggers’ community.

Their techniques also included writing vulgar words, writing spam, impersonating identities of certain bloggers and writing nonsense under their nicknames in commonly-used message boards (aka c-boxes).

Knowing their techniques, many Burmese bloggers have simply ignored their provocations in c-boxes by just deleting their messages.

Hence, they decided to attack from another direction, that is, to block certain Burmese blogs so that the people in Burma would not be able to view them. Many well-known pro-democracy blogs were their first targets.

However, with the advanced technology, the people in Burma found a way to overcome such restrictions. Subsequently, SPDC resorted to slowing down the internet speed for their networks and even to the extent of limiting the internet usage by shutting down their networks for public usage.

They also restricted the usage of internet cafes by asking the users at those places to register using their identity card, filling in their personal details, keeping a log of visited sites and taking screenshots of various pages.

Their latest attacks include blocking the access to the whole of www.blogger.com from Burma and the possibility of increasing the price for usage of internet in Burma.

Pro-SPDC group has also tried to hack into the Gmail accounts of well-known pro-democracy Burmese blogs. After being successful, they would change or redirect the URLs of those blogs to porn website addresses and advertised addresses for businesses.

In addition, they have also tried to create bogus blogs with similar addresses of pro-democracy blogs by adding some words to the URL. The well-known prodemocracy blogger, niknayman’s blog, fell victim to such attack recently. As shown in the picture below, they created a bogus blog with the URL
(http://niknayman.blogspot.com.corp.st) and put the name of the blog as “This is myanmar NLD stupid sucking blog”. If you open the bogus blog, you will be directed into a porn site.

[Disclaimer: Women are advised not to open the bogus blog’s link as it contains a lot of porn materials. The screenshot of the bogus blog is shown in this post just to prove as evidence of SPDC’s doing.]

They have also advertised this bogus blog’s address in various c-boxes of Burmese people, especially women, under the nickname of “admin” as shown
below in picture. By doing that, they tried to trick people into misunderstanding that Niknayman has changed his blog’s address and he, himself, was the one going around informing the people of this new address.

When the check was done on the identity of the person who went around advertising the bogus blog’s link, the person turned out to be a pro-SPDC
blogger, by the name of Opposite Eyes. Though he used a fake IP address, his lie was exposed as shown below.

Niknayman has also discovered how the pro-SPDC group created the bogus’s blog address. They registered as a member of a French business company and made use of the domain name given by typing “niknayman.blogspot.com” in the blank in front as shown in picture below.

Niknayman has declared that such lies and attacks by pro-SPDC groups in Burmese websites, forums, blogs and emails definitely will be exposed after
gathering enough evidence. With such evidence, their cases will be presented to international internet usage authority and human rights authority, etc.

Finally, Niknayman urged his fellow Burmese bloggers to be careful of such attacks from SPDC side and to unite against SPDC and their lackeys.

In a bid to stop the flow of information outside Burma one of the most popular blog sites www.blogger.com has been banned by the Myanmar Post and Telecomm Ministry as of Thursday morning, according to bloggers in the former capital.

In the wake of ‘Saffron Revolution’, another Internet Service Provider ‘Bagan Teleport’ has blocked this blog website. And now the remaining ISP under the MPT has blocked this website which bars computers in Burma from accessing the blogs.

Both the ISPs are under the control of the military regime but under two different administrations.

Can anyone confirm?

From Eightfold via Burma Underground via Dave Lucas.

As to the technical details of what happened when the tinhorns pulled the plug, Steve Gibbard at CircleID has a pretty detailed run-down. He’s says, “The connection between Myanmar and the rest of the world appears to be turned back on, at least temporarily.”

Update: ONI has published a bulletin entitled “Pulling the Plug: A Technical Review of the Internet Shutdown in Burma.”

The 45 megabit per second circuit connecting Myanmar to Kuala Lumpur that is Myanmar’s primary connection to the Internet came back up at 14:27 UTC today. It had mostly been “hard down,” indicating either that it had been unplugged or that the router it was connected to was turned off, with the exception of a few brief periods since September 28.

Myanmar’s country code top level domain, .MM, disappeared. It’s served by three name servers, ns0.mpt.net.mm, ns.net.mm, and ns-mm.ripe.net . . .

Looking at the rest of Myanmar’s connectivity to the outside world, MPT has the IP address block 203.81.64.0/19 (8192 addresses). Another Internet Service Provider, Bagan Cybernet, has the address block 203.81.160.0/20 (4096 addresses), but uses MPT for its international connectivity. Daily snapshots from the University of Oregon Route Views Project show both of those blocks in the global Internet routing table on September 27, but show them to have been missing since September 28.

I then spoke with Preetam Rai , a blogger in SE Asia and contributor to Global Voices. Here’s his two cents.

From what I have heard, Myanmar has become like a intranet, people are still able to access to internally hosted sites but are not able to go outside. I am sure there is some outside access available but maybe limited to government officials and international companies. I have noticed that bloggers inside Myanmar who used to post non-political (There were some fashion, tech and korean tv drama themed blogs) content have also gone silent.

I thought that nik guy was outside Myanmar and he was collating information from all over.

What is happening though is that Burmese outside are able to call people inside and get some info. Some Myanmar bloggers are posting this information. However it is also getting harder to verify stuff. I think even if there were bloggers inside Myanmar they would not go near any cybercafe to report stuff about the protests.

My thought was that perhaps if not posting directly, people inside the country were texting to others who could post for them.

Well, at this point, I just don’t know what to think, but thought I should let you all know what I’ve discovered, even if it is, at this point, only suspicions. If anyone has any clarifying information, do please let us know. And thanks to all of you who took part in Free Burma day yesterday.