When even two weeks of torture could not force Aung Thu to betray his fellow anti-coup activists, his military interrogators in Myanmar tried something different: they asked a Norwegian telecoms company, Telenor, then the largest one operating in the country, for its data on him.
The company – whose majority shareholder is the Norwegian government – had first entered Myanmar in 2013 as it was transitioning to democracy, promising to connect users who had been isolated from the world.
