Big Tech is not much help when fighting a junta, and FOSS doesn't ride to the rescue

Research presented by Laura Gianna Guntrum examines how Myanmar activists navigate communications under the military junta, finding that dependencies on services like Facebook’s Free Basics hinder privacy and access to secure tools, while FOSS options such as Briar and Tor are limited by complexity and performance. The study recommends user-centric features—such as rapid account disablement, app obfuscation, and mesh/peer-to-peer capabilities in widely used apps like Signal and WhatsApp—to maintain secure, resilient communications amid shutdowns, surveillance, and poor connectivity.