Myanmar, a southeastern Asian state, is the new censorship’s home after other countries like China, Iran or Singapore.

Repressive governments are the most eager buyers of technologies developed to filter, monitor and censure the internet activity.

Myanmar “employs one of the most restrictive regimes of Internet filtering worldwide that we have studied,” said Ronald J. Deibert, a principal investigator for the OpenNet Initiative and the director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto.

OpenNet Initiative, a group of researchers from the University of Toronto, Harvard Law School and Cambridge University in Britain, are raising though questions about these type of technologies and fire at Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Yahoo which are a few of the companies that provide technology or cooperate with the governments that want to censure their citizens.

The Myanmar government forbids “any writings directly or indirectly detrimental to the current policies” and “any writings detrimental to the interests of the Union of Myanmar.” These are the latest addition to those introduced in January 2000.

Many sites have been blocked. For example, Hotmail was blocked, forcing Myanmar citizens to use one of the two officially “approved” ISPs for their e-mail services. Other 25 sites dealing with Burmese political information and content–from Freeburmacoalition.com to Burmalibrary.org–a full 84 percent were blocked.

“There’s a cat-and-mouse game going on between states that seek to control the information environment and citizens who seek to speak freely online,” said John Palfrey, the director of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a researcher with the OpenNet Initiative. “Filtering technologies, and the way that they are implemented, are becoming more sophisticated.”

What are the limits?