On the first of February, the Myanmar military seized the government power and declared a year-long state of emergency.
Since then peaceful and nonviolent forms of protest started which include acts of civil disobedience, labour strikes, a military boycott campaign, a pot-banging movement, a red ribbon campaign, public protests, and formal recognition of the election results by elected representatives. However this weekend the movement started to take new momentum and on Monday morning, tens of thousands of teachers, lawyers, bank officers and government workers had gathered in Nay Pyi Taw for the strike, with other cities such as Mandalay and Yangon also reporting significant numbers, according to BBC Burmese.
Today we have seen the police using water cannon and managing the protest with fewer casualties and incident and the answer to how lies in their advance usages of technological tools such as CCTV, facial recognition systems and artificial intelligence.
Accroding to MyanmarNow reporting,” A system of 335 surveillance cameras with facial recognition technology made by the Chinese tech giant Huawei went live across Naypyitaw on Monday (December 2020), at a cost of more than 4bn kyats ($2.9m).”
This system covers eight townships in the capital with artificial intelligence and facial recognition. Such large numbe of installation exists in Yangoon and many other large cities.
The military now using the modern technologies to identify the lead protestors and at the dark of night arrest them silently.
Therefore, it is time now to tally the missing protesters and create an online open database.
