“Information! Information! Information! Key to security my friend!”

This was Harry, a North American ex-special forces operative who had been in Afghanistan, and later decided to sell his talents to the more lucrative private security market. He was from a well-known and international firm, consisting of retired Western (predominantly Commonwealth connections in this expo including Singapore Defence, British and Canadian Armed Forces). These firms who enter the market with ‘international expertise’ from ‘containing’ experiences in ‘conflict zones.’ They usually have pre-existing connections with the Burmese military, ultimately providing comfortable military-to-military transactions disguised as new business terms and deals.

Harry, now working for one such well known and influential company, whispered, pointing to Xiao Wang’s popular stall next store.

‘You don’t need that stuff in this third world country, you need some good old school spying.”

I was intrigued and unsettled. We were still in a country where the military Junta frequently deployed old-school surveillance, and wide-spread arbitrary politically-motivated arrests, and in many cases, continues to do so. But he went on, unfazed,

“We just employ local guys, you know they need jobs here… there is surplus labour, so they just sit in tea stalls, wander here and there, and you know, they listen to the public mood. These guys are far more effective than these sub trained security guards. Many of our guys come back with very interesting information; I personally analyse that info, compress it, make it palatable and that’s the package”

“What public mood?”

Political stuff you know! You have to do it, elections, business, everyone needs information here, old-style, this country is not ready for more advanced stuff. You’re not going to have a lot of people talking about cybersecurity here, I assure you. You have to do what they (the military regime) have always been doing, and do it better! ”

“How are you going to do it better?

This led him to say something that we in academia are all too familiar with – ‘critical discourse analysis’ except his was one with a twist, a ‘SCOPE’ he learned in his ‘counterinsurgency’ class in grad school.

“SCOPE means Structures, Communities, Organisations, People, Events. When you have information on these five things, you have control over everything. And we know how to SCOPE it!!”

He went on,

“See there are two different discourses that reappear across the world. Say if I ask you a very personal question in a very public space. You’ll equivocate or avoid the question, not giving a straight answer. But if I know someone well and ask in private, I’ll get a completely different answer. A great example is tea shops, coffee shops, they are the world over. They are great places to share private information that you won’t get in formal interviews. This (information) means something different to the community, to the government, to the other groups in that and understanding the perspectives of all these different groups is key to being able to make your own decisions. That’s semiotics. That’s the secret we want to know. Every problem you encounter locally probably has another source so you can be trapped in treating the symptoms. And this is the best product for the clients in a country like this!”

“Who do you mean by clients? Who buys ‘private information’ like this when there is already Facebook?” Wrong question, obviously.

“We deliver this to multi-level clients. I can’t tell you who exactly, guess you already know,” he smirked.

Well, I didn’t exactly, but what I did learn was that he strove to provide SCOPE packages as private security and political risk assessment products containing ‘discourse analysis’ of the public political mood, which they billed as their recipe for ‘regime security’. The actual practice, as he detailed, is ludicrously simple. First, hire people to eavesdrop at key public spaces – parks, tea stalls, outside ministries, police stations, media offices, etc. Second, get them to report. Third, write it up, package it, then sell it to whoever is willing to pay for that information, be that government, military, or corporates. Indeed, ‘Simple, and dangerous, but not surprising.’, I thought.

After all, employing ‘local spies’ have been the quintessential best practices recommended for states and princes throughout history from Sun Zi, to Kautilya and Machiavelli. CCTV and tea house “intel” are mere tenets of the private sector’s products marketed towards conflict, of whom the most obvious and historic forms are arms sales, and mercenaries. The latter, which Machiavelli himself counselled against using, has its most infamous contemporary manifestation in Blackwater, rebranded later as XE and now Academi. Blackwater founder Erik Prince’s HK based (and fittingly named) Frontier Services Company now works in Myanmar, allegedly helping to secure and provide private intelligence for China’s Belt and Road investments. These security expos have thus served as another addendum to what’s always been happening alongside weapons and mercenaries and the financing that underlies it all.

But for now, Harry seemed quite confident of his success and prospects in selling the SCOPE packages to a ‘wide clientele’ within the country, and he hinted it was always easy doing business with ex-Tatmadaw connections who now monopolized Myanmar’s domestic private security market. But as far as selling was concerned, Xiao Wang, our Chinese sales amateur, attracted more attention with his bewildering array of shiny Chinese surveillance products, while Harry’s discourse analysis seemed to fall on deaf and possibly clueless ears among the Burmese security shoppers.

Of course, since that first expo, much has changed in Myanmar. The ‘frontier’ fever has waned, and Aung San Suu Kyi has fallen from grace over the anti-Rohingya violence, among other things. The international media has pivoted from celebrating the country’s investment opportunities to indicting it over allegations of genocide. As Facebook was implicated through Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 US elections, the Rohingya violence was also influenced by the social media giant, through the amount of fabricated and propagandist material cultivated and circulating in its ecosystem. (In)Security today has moved from tea houses to social media and into one’s urban work desks worldwide, as Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism details. In Myanmar, politics and security is debated online, far away from the insurgencies and ethnic violence of its peripheries and borders. Outside, Yangon continues to be secured as a site of ‘frontier investments’ and new CCTVs and security guards are being installed to safeguard an ever-developing urban core and the flavours of new globalization that comes with it.

In a recent paper, James Sidaway and I explore such connections and imbrications of security and (in)security in Yangon’s urban fabric. We think of Yangon, both as a ‘frontier city, but also a bit like Harry, as the old school security field in a city still soaked in the bitter violence of colonialism, nationalism, militarization, student protest, ethnic revolt and suppression, dictatorship and ongoing unrest. We travel between contemporary Yangon and colonial Rangoon, unpacking how a private security geo-urban culture has emerged with special attention to Yangon’s busy downtown core – the historical port region, and old colonial front, now the administrative capital of the city and the site of many new developments, real estate and otherwise. We explore how a majority of these new urban (re)developments are direct material refurbishments from decades of ill-gotten and crony resource extractions and laundering from the country’s violent borders, now to be ‘secured ‘on the urban front by a new private security industry largely linked to the same military and allied cronies. From 2015 to 2019, we visited Yangon several times, attending security expos, and spoke to private security agencies, businessmen, and residents to ask – what and who was this emerging security market trying to secure, and at whose expense?

More of that in Part 2, but for now, I remember something that happened on one of the evenings of the security expo in 2015 rather vividly. Because that was when I accidentally and embarrassingly stumbled into one of the many potholes on the footpath next to the majestic colonial Strand Hotel (where my own ancestors and local Burmese were not allowed to enter until 1945). That was a rude end to my brand new longyi, but the fault was entirely mine. As an Indian woman ever vigilant of bad roads, drains, a million cars honking, dozens of ‘eve-teasing’ street men and ‘holy cows’ back home, I was perhaps too spoilt after living in ‘safe’ and a fully CCTV’d Singapore. I let my guard down, walking absentmindedly along the lively downtown streets, pondering perhaps the absurdity of plain-clothed private security contractors ‘discourse analysing’ my order of palatha and laphetye posain in one of the many nondescript tea stalls here.

Somehow, my present predicament in that pothole, and state of the art ‘Singapore-style’ surveillance infrastructure in a city like Yangon above my head, didn’t quite add up for me that night. I wondered whether CCTVs would come before the street was repaired. As of writing this, the repairs never came, but the CCTVs, and a lot of private security guards did. In Part 2, I speak to some of these guards, about their jobs in security and their lives of wider insecurities as residents of a ‘frontier’ Yangon.