[opelayday]

I came across this report on internet censorship in Thailand, and wondered if anyone had any thoughts ?

Quote[/b] ]The government filters Internet traffic to fight child-porn but has extended censorship far beyond this kind of material.

Clear government policy and a national constitution (1997) that firmly protects freedom of expression encourage growth of the Internet. More than 10 per cent of Thais have Internet access and news sites are flourishing.

The Internet is regulated by the National Information Technology Committee (NITC), the National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC), the Telephone Organisation of Thailand (TOT) and the Communications Authority of Thailand (CAT). The rise of such bodies has hindered Internet growth more than helped it.

The CAT by law has a minimum 32 per cent share in the country's 18 privately-owned ISPs, which gives the government great influence over them and enables it to impose filtering more easily. No laws specifically regulate the Internet.

Covert censorship

The NITC said in July 2001 it would hunt down "unsuitable content" on the Internet and has since censored material, mostly pornography. But it has also blocked access to online gambling, material criticising the king and even personal webpages that mention official corruption.

The NITC regularly sends a list of banned websites (currently about 1,000) to ISPs, which are required to block them. Some block IP addresses, others domain names, which explains why censorship is not the exactly same in different parts of the country.

The government's filtering method is covert. Users connecting to a censored publication do not get a "access refused" message but one saying "site unknown" or "server error." An easy way round this censorship is to use anonymizers, which are proxies accessible on the Web.

Links

- The Communications Authority of Thailand
www.cat.or.th/eng

- The Nation media group
www.nationmultimedia.com

- Statistics about the Internet in Thailand
http://ntl.nectec.or.th/internet/index.html

- Government site about growth of new technology (in Thai)
www.ictlaw.thaigov.net

Now I've never actually come across a banned page during normal surfing so far (although I sometimes get mysterious 'Bad Gateway' errors on some sites e.g. www.siam-bangna.co.th/ which I never seemed to get in the UK), but I thought I'd try out the articles claim about proxy servers. It says "an easy way round it is to use anonymizers, which are proxies accessible on the Web." if I try any access any of the major sites listing proxy servers - such as www.stayinvisible.com/, www.publicproxyservers.com , http://www.proxy4free.com - then I'm informed access to them is banned and I'm redirected to http://203.107.138.4/ . Gambling sites like http://www.sportingbet.com/ and http://www.ladbrokes.com/ give the same result. More controversially, the PULO website (PULO being the group fighting for a seperate state in southern Thailand, often accused of being a terrorist group) is banned too http://www.pulo.org/ , as are similar sites such as http://www.manusaya.com/ . http://www.laosearch.net/ , which seems to be just a general Laos portal site, is also banned. From looking at one of the police websites, it seems it's nearer 20000 sites banned rather than 1000, the vast majority of them pornographic ones (if only the government could tackle the problem of prostitution with the same vigour as it tackles the websites! ).

Can anyone else in Thailand at the moment access these sites ? (They can be accessed via the google cache) What happens if you try ? Who knows what else my ISP (KSC) is doing too, logging my phone number and red-flagging me for accessing a banned site perhaps ? Is this kind of censorship justified, especially as there doesn't seem to be a fixed definition for "unsuitable content" ? And, as there's a general perception that under Thaksin the media has become less free and that many state organisations have become less independent, is there a chance this will be used to block sites that are 'libellous' to the PM ? Perhaps this is already happening, there doesn't seem to be any way of knowing for sure.

I can see why they'd block child porn, but if they also block sites about the royal family and about corrupt officials is that really that different from what happens in China ? The difference of course is that "the great firewall of China" is widely known and criticised, while this in Thailand seems to have gone unnoticed by just about everyone. What does anyone think, is this justifiable ??

(Edit: URLs deliberatly unlinked to reduce the trace back to here)