C.J.Hinke, Global Voices Advocacy
Thailand’s
military junta’s fifth order following its coup d’etat September 19, 2006 was
to appoint an Official Censor of the Military Coup. The overthrown elected
government had publicly stated that it intended to block 800,000 websites.
Thailand’s
Official Censor never got that far but he did manage to block 17,793 sites
before a general election. In addition the Royal Thai Police claim to block a
further 32,500. The junta obviously considered the Internet a dangerous place
as its ICT Ministry introduced a Computer-Related Crimes Act to the
military-appointed parliament as its first law.
The first draft of this cybercrime law included the death penalty, though,
on final passage, the strictures were reduced to “only” 20 years for some
computer crimes.
Censorship in Thailand
has always been accomplished by government in secret. The number of websites
blocked, its blocklists and the methods it uses to block have never been
disclosed to the Thai public which pays for it.
However, the new cybercrime law required that the government seek a court
order before blocking. However, since passage of the law, Web censorship has
become far murkier, with Thailand’s
100 ISPs blocking blocking independently in order to avoid being criminalised
under the law for illegal content transiting their servers and no court orders
have been requested.
Now ISPs are required to keep all Internet traffic logs for 90 days. Two
cyberdissidents have already been arrested under the new law tracked by their
IP addresses for comments they made on Thailand’s monarchy to public Web
discussion boards.
Most famously, Thailand’s
official censor blocked YouTube for seven months in 2007 for sophomoric
anti-monarchy videos posted to the site. The ICT Ministry blocked not only
YouTube’s domain but 75 separate YouTube URLs before securing Google’s
cooperation, in secret, to implement geolocational blocking at Thai
government’s recommendation.
The difference between Internet censorship in Thailand
and that in the Middle East, Myanmar
and China is that Thailand is
famously a Constitutional monarchy. We claim to be a democracy but operate
government-in-secret, above the law.
Make no mistake: Internet censorship is illegal in Thailand under
at least 11 articles of the 1997 Constitution, by decree of the lawmakers’
Council of State and by order of the Administrative
Court. Has this stopped the censors? Didn’t even
slow them now.
The 2007 YouTube block, hundreds of links to an unauthorised biography of King
Bhumipol (The King Never Smiles, published by Yale University Press), anticoup
Websites, sites in support of our deposed prime minister and voices from Thailand’s
restive Southern provinces under the military junta were merely a harbinger of
censorship to follow.
Now Thailand’s
newly-elected government and its new ICT Minister are using lèse majesté as its
ongoing excuse to block freedom of opinion and expression by Thais on issues
vital to our society.
The past few weeks have seen YouTube blocked again as well as Prachatai, Thailand’s foremost independent news portal and Same Sky, a journal of social criticism. Both
sites have popular public Web discussion boards. In the past, both sites have
been warned by MICT to self-censor “sensitive” public comments.