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Just back home after a couple of weeks in Burma, I find myself shaking shredded notes out of my bags as I unpack. In the country’s unbearably tense climate, I did not feel comfortable throwing away anything that I had written down while I was there – phone numbers, addresses, surreptitiously scribbled interview notes, or even innocuous shopping lists. Instead, I tore-up the notes and shoved the resulting confetti deep inside my luggage.

After the military regime cracked down on peaceful protests led by thousands of monks in Burma at the end of last month, an even more treacherous crackdown began and is now taking place behind the scenes. Part of this crackdown involves stopping the flow of information from leaving the country (brave Burmese bloggers had been sending out up-to-the-minute news reports and rare photographic evidence of the regime’s brutality – pictures of bleeding demonstrators who had been severely beaten by government soldiers, the corpse of a monk floating face down in a river). The regime’s response was simple: turn off the Internet.

As I visited old friends and met people who had witnessed the protests in Burma, I was constantly given messages to carry out of the country; without the Internet, the safest way to get messages out is to send them by hand. Among the variety of messages I have unpacked from my bags are: