Norway's provisional charges against Telenor over customer data handed to Myanmar's junta

Norwegian police placed Norwegian telecom group Telenor ASA under two provisional charges on 15 September. Under a provisional charge (siktelse), police formally accuse a suspect during an investigation, before any case goes to court. Both charges concern only Telenor's former Myanmar subsidiary in 2021 and 2022, including handing customers' traffic data to the military regime, so those affected were that unit's customers at the time.

Kripos, the National Criminal Investigation Service, charged Telenor with complicity in crimes against humanity. Its statement says the subsidiary repeatedly handed over historical traffic data (who contacted whom and when, without the content) between the February 2021 coup and the unit's sale in March 2022. The Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) charged Telenor with breaching sanctions law, because the sale included sanctioned surveillance equipment without permission from Norway's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Telenor's statement of 15 September said its employees risked imprisonment, torture or the death penalty if military orders were not followed, and that it had no real choice. It also said no individuals had been charged and that it would cooperate fully with the police.

In civil proceedings, Asker and Bærum District Court agreed on 17 September to hear a class action covering at least 1,253 people. Norway's public broadcaster NRK reported that Telenor disclosed the call logs, names, addresses and last known locations of more than 1,300 customers.

Perspective

Operators hold records of who contacted whom, when, and from where. Those records can map a person's contacts and movements without any wiretap, and NRK reported that the junta used Telenor's data to map and pursue the resistance movement.

The digital rights group Access Now wrote that leaving a market does not mean leaving human rights responsibilities behind. The two Norwegian cases cover both the data handed over while Telenor operated there and the equipment transferred on the way out. In a May 2022 press release, the advocacy group Justice For Myanmar wrote that the sale included a German-made lawful interception gateway, designed to monitor calls and SMS in real time, and that the military-linked Shwe Byain Phyu raised its stake in the unit to 80% that month.

How easily such records lead to a person depends on how numbers and handsets are registered, and several places in Asia make that link mandatory. Mainland China has required operators to check ID and record real identities for phone users since September 2013. Hong Kong made real-name registration compulsory for all SIM cards, and unregistered prepaid cards stopped working after 23 February 2023.

The Myanmar news outlet The Irrawaddy reported that in March 2026 the junta launched a central equipment identity register (CEIR), which requires each handset's IMEI, a fixed hardware identifier, to be registered like the SIM before it can connect to a mobile network. An IT specialist interviewed by the outlet said that once the authorities hold a device's IMEI, switching SIM cards no longer breaks the trail.

An end-to-end encrypted messenger keeps conversation content and the other party out of the operator's call and SMS records, but the operator can still see when and from where the phone connects to the messenger's servers. Signal, for example, registers accounts with a phone number, and as of its 23 September announcement, sign-up without one was still in beta. Where SIM cards are registered to real names, such an account can still lead back to its owner.

People who need to protect their contacts can start by moving sensitive conversations to Signal and treating ordinary calls and SMS as records the operator may hand over. Signal runs on Android, iPhone and iPad (desktop apps need the phone app first), and its mobile apps come in Traditional and Simplified Chinese. Since 2024 users can set a username and be contacted without sharing their number. GreatFire, which monitors censorship in mainland China, found Signal's download page blocked there in a test on 18 September.