From Globe and Mail :

A vivid cyber window into a violent crackdown

IAIN MARLOW

From Friday's Globe and Mail

September 28, 2007 at 1:10 AM EDT

LONDON — Ko Htike sits in his small northwest London apartment next to an overflowing ashtray. In one hand he holds a cellphone and speaks in sombre tones to the person on the other end. With the other, he types a reply into one of the 23 chat windows open on the laptop he uses to maintain his blog.

These days, the 28-year-old Myanmarese exile sleeps only two hours a night. The rest of the time he's online, overseeing a network of amateur journalists in the capital of Myanmar, also known as Burma, providing news giants such as CNN, the British Broadcasting Corp., al-Jazeera and more than 20 other media outlets with some of the most vivid dispatches depicting firsthand the now 10-day-old anti-government protests.

Mr. Htike, who arrived in Britain seven years ago to study computer science, said his informants sneak around the capital with their cellphones, capture images of the violence, and then cautiously slip into Internet cafés, where they upload their files and send them beyond Myanmar's closed borders.

The blog was never designed to be political, Mr. Htike said from his apartment. The aspiring writer launched it to post some of his short stories, but “one day, I was chatting with my friends and they told me there were a lot of protests outside,” he said.

The first post occurred, Mr. Htike recalled, when a friend said, “ ‘Okay, there are some people marching right in front of my house, so I'm going to take a picture and send it to you.' I said, ‘Yes, go and do it.' … And I put it in my blog.”
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