Internet censorship in Thailand

Internet censorship is effected in Thailand by two methods. The Royal Thai Police blocks approximately 32 500 websites and the Communications Authority of Thailand a further unspecified number directly at Thailand's Internet gateway.

However, the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MICT) [1], blocks indirectly by informally “requesting” the blocking of websites by Thailand's 54 commercial and non-profit Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Although ISPs are not legally required to accede to these “requests”, MICT Permanent Secretary Kraisorn Pornsuthee has written in 2006 that ISPs who fail to comply will be punitively sanctioned by government in the form of bandwidth restriction or even loss of operating license. This is a powerful compulsion to comply.

On September 19, 2006, the Thai military staged a bloodless coup d'etat against the government of elected Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. The fifth official order signed by coup leader General Sonthi Boonyaratglin on September 20, the first day following the coup, was to enforce Web censorship and appointing Dr. Sitthichai Pokaiudom “The Official Censor of the Military Coup” as Minister of ICT.

Prior to the military coup d'etat, in September 2006, 34,411 Internet web sites were blocked. The top cited reasons are: Pornography 56%, sale of sex equipment 13%, and threats to national security 11%, which includes criticisms of the king, government or military.^[1] This figure represents blocking done by all three government agencies.

In October 2006, MICT blocked 2475 websites by "request"; by January 11, 2007, this number had risen to 13,435 websites, a jump of more than 500%. This brings the current total of websites blocked to more than 45,000. All websites are blocked in secret and the criteria for censorship has never been made public by government. However, the MICT blocklist must be made available to ISPs to block.

Although the great majority of censored sites are pornographic, the list is liberally salted with an attempt to block all anonymous proxy servers which serve to circumvent Web-blocking and Internet gambling sites. Pornography and gambling are specifically illegal in Thailand.

Websites are blocked by Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and/or IP address. However, only about 20% of blocked sites are identified by IP; the remaining 80% are unable to be identified at a physical location. If these sites could be identified as being located in Thailand, legal action could be taken against their operators. Thus, lack of IP is a major oversight.

Most sites concerning the violent political situation in Thailand's Muslim South are blocked, specifically those in support of the Patani United Liberation Organisation (PULO), a banned group which works for a separate Muslim state, including PULO's appeals to the United Nations for redress.

In addition, some web pages from BBC One, BBC Two, CNN, Yahoo! News, Seattle (USA) Post-Intelligencer newspaper, and The Age (Melbourne, Australia) newspaper dealing with Thai political content are blocked. More recently, all international coverage of Thaksin-in-exile has been blocked, including interviews with the deposed PM.

Thailand blocked Google's video sharing site YouTube beginning on April 4, 2007, but Reuters reported on 6 April 2007 that the search company promised to help the Thai government block certain material on the site, making the rest legal to display in Thailand.^[2] The block remained in place until August 4, 2007.

Although the “interpretive biography” of Thailand's King Bhumibhol Adulyadej, The King Never Smiles by Paul Handley (Yale University Press) was published in July 2006, websites concerning the book had been blocked as far back as November 2005. As no advance reading copies or excerpts were made available, these sites were censored based on the book's title alone. All sites with links to sales of the book are still blocked, including Yale University Press, Amazon. com, Amazon UK and many others.

Several technologies are employed to censor the Internet such as caching, blacklisting domain name or IP address, or simply redirection to a government homepage. Blacklisting the website is beneficial for this kind of web censorship as the webmasters would be unaware that their websites are being blocked. This measure is said to be used to make unpleasant websites appear unavailable.^[3]

Many censored web sites previously redirected the user to a site hosted by the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MICT) which states that the requested destination could not be displayed due to improper content. It should also be noted that censorship of the Internet in Thailand is currently for website access only. Unlike China's “Great Firewall”, which censors all Internet traffic including chat conversation via Instant Messaging, Thai Internet users are still able to interact with other users without being censored. However, current policy is to use a system of transparent proxies so that the user receives system, server, TCP and browser error messages when trying to access blocked sites leading the user to believe that the failure is caused in the Internet itself.

Search engine giants, Google and Yahoo!, were approached to investigate the potential capability for blocking access to their cached web pages in Thailand, a common technique used to circumvent blocking.^{[citation needed]} The search engines were also asked about blocking by keyword search which is used effectively in China to censor the Internet. Google, at least, has made public a statement that it has no intention of blocking any sites to users in Thailand.

Wayback Engine, a project of Archive.org, currently caches 85 billion inactive web pages. Some of these are now being blocked by the MICT. With 100 million active web pages, 10% of which are thought to be pornographic, the effect of MICT's censorship will only be negligible.

Another, more disturbing, trend is the censorship of anti-coup websites such as 19 September Network against Coup d'Etat, which has been blocked six times, as of Febreuary 2007, with government refusing to acknowledge responsibility for the blocking.

Internet webboards and discussion forums such as Midnight University,^[4] Prachatai.com^[5] and Pantip.com have all been blocked so reasonable political discussion has been rendered impossible. Prachatai and Pantip have chosen to self-censor, closely monitoring each discussion, in order to remain unblocked. In addition, video sharing sites such as Camfrog have recently been blocked with the grounds given that people were "behaving indecently" on webcams; the block was later reversed when it was discovered that Camfrog provided a principal means of communication for the handicapped, elderly and shut-ins. The entire video upload website, YouTube, has suffered several blockings, including a complete ban between April 4, 2007 and August 31, 2007 due to a video which was considered to be offensive to the monarchy; YouTube's parent company, Google, was reported in the press to have agreed to assist the MICT in blocking individual videos rather than the entire website. The entire YouTube site block persisted for nearly five months, despite the fact that the video challenged by the MICT was voluntary deleted by the user who posted it.

Midnight University has filed a petition to the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand^[6] simultaneously with filing in the Administrative Court.^[7] As the Court and the Council of State can find no laws which permit Internet censorship, Midnight University has been granted a restraining order against further blocking, pending resolution of its legal case. This makes Midnight University the only legally-protected website in Thailand.

Interference in communication, including the Internet, was specifically prohibited by Section 37 of the 1997 “People's” Constitution and free speech protected by Section 39.^[8] However, following the pattern of past coups, the military's first action was to scrap the Constitution and establish drafting a new one. Nevertheless, the MICT has commissioned the Law Faculty of Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University to find laws or loopholes which permit such censorship.

Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT)^[9] filed a petition against all censorship before the National Human Rights Commission on November 15, 2006. FACT's petition is still open for signatures and actively seeks all international support.^[10]

NHRC has no enforcement capability so, typically, any government body can simply refuse or fail to give evidence. This was the case with FACT's petition. However, on January 26, 2007, the MICT agreed to cooperate with this process.

The Official Information Act^[11] established in law by the 1997 Constitution was promulgated to enforce transparency in government. On February 9, 2007 FACT filed an official information request with the MICT.^[12] Its 20 questions, signed by 257 individuals supported by 57 international civil liberties and human rights groups,^[13] must be answered with two exceptions.

MICT has refused to reply citing grounds of “national security” and “interference with law enforcement” rather than make its secret blocklist, the criteria used for censorship and the specific procedures it uses, public. FACT has filed a complaint requiring an investigation within 60 days (from March 23, 2007) by the Official Information Commission^[14] under the Prime Minister's Office. If this, too, fails, a legal case seeking a restraining order against further censorship will be initiated.

Software applications for circumventing web-blocking are readily available. Tor, Torpark, Privoxy, Vidalia, Proxify, Six-Four, Ultrasurf, Freenet, phproxy circumvention software for all operating systems, as well as Mozilla Firefox browser plugins such as Ghostfox and EZtor are available for free download from the Internet and are made available on disk by the Freedom Against Censorship Thailand. The Minister of Information Communications and Technology has said in an interview in the Bangkok Post that he has not blocked these methods because "using proxies to access illegal sites are illegal, whereas using proxies to access legal sites is legal."

• Wikileaks: Internet Censorship in Thailand; includes full block lists and a detailed analysis