No one used the Internet to tell the story of 1988 Burmese uprising while it was happening. Ordinary Burmese didn't have camera-equipped cellphones or handheld video cameras with which to record the violent crackdown that put a generation of student protesters in jail. The story is vastly different this time around. Despite the fact that junta that runs Myanmar tightly controls Internet access, computer savvy exiles and activists are exploiting inherent weaknesses in those controls to get the word--and the pictures--out to the world, as Asia Times reports.

The OpenNet Initiative blog points out that "Bloggers are also utilizing underground networks inside Myanmar to instruct users on how to use proxies, as well as post updates on events and, most recently, casualties."

In addition to posting videos on YouTube such as this one...

people are also using CNN's iReport facility to post video, mostly from the Myanmar (Burma) capital of Yangon (formerly Rangoon):

As Spectrum noted a few years ago in a special report called Sensor Nation, savage dictators can no longer hide from the glare of cameras wielded by citizen journalists. They must now do their dirty work while the world watches. As Saswato Das pointed out yesterday in Tech Talk, it's not just video cameras that are gathering evidence of the junta's brutality--satellite images analyzed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) seems to indicate evidence of villages being razed by the military in Myanmar (formerly known as Burma).