What were they thinking? But then again, probably they just thought that it was just a harmless joke.

It is perhaps not an overstatement to say that today most Bruneians spend their every waking hour on their mobile phones. We can always count on our mobile phones whenever there is the need to kill time, to pass boredom, to pretend not to realise someone’s presence when bumping into them, and many more uses. But this is now. How about back then, before there were iPhones and androids. Circa 2005. What did people do in place of constantly “playing” with their cellphones during that time. Well, the PC played a big part. I remember there were the mIRC (remember mIRC?), MSN messenger (remember MSN?), Bruclass (remember Bruclass?), Skype, not a whole lot, but good enough. 

In 2005, 3 friends – 32, 41 and 49 year old men, were playing around with some media editing app and had this idea of making the mouth move on a still picture of a face – a talking picture. They overlayed the mouth on the still picture with a video of their mouth and voice talking about some funny things. The result was a less than a minute video clip which the men later shared with their close friends and family members, whom they innocently thought would appreciate the humor, through MMS (remember MMS?) and email. Expectedly, those close friends and family members then shared the clip with their respective circle of friends and family members and on and on. I won’t say that the clip went viral, but it reached quite a number of the country’s population. These included the authorities.  

It didn’t take long before the authorities were able to track the men down who conveniently worked at the same company. One day in June 2006, the three men went to work as per their normal work days, none of them having the slightest inkling of what was about to go down that day. They didn’t get to go home from work as the authorities came to their workplace, scooped them up and took them away. Their officemates who saw the whole thing were left puzzled having no idea what it was about. Nothing had crossed their minds because they saw the three men as quite decent gentlemen and held good positions in the company. It was only after the police released a press statement on the arrest that their trouble with the law was revealed. Yep, it was the video clip. The less than a minute long clip they produced during their moment of goofiness would cost them a year in jail. 

So, what was wrong with the video clip? It might not be a big of a deal had they NOT used a still picture of the country’s leader. They were charged with carrying out activities considered seditious and derogatory to the royal family. It was the first such case in Brunei. It caught the population by surprise, but nonetheless necessary to bring awareness on the needless to say big no no.