Thailand: WordPress.com blocked–Global Voices Online

[FACT comments: The Telephone Organization of Thailand (TOT) is one of Thailand’s 57 public ISPs and one of Thailand’s four Internet gateways to the rest of the world. These government agencies and private companies have become emboldened by passage of the draconian Computer-Related Crimes Act. Despite the fact that the cybercrime law contains no provision for censorship–Internet censorship is still illegal in Thailand–these government agencies and private companies have begun to censor arbitrarily and independently according to their own agendae.]

Thailand: WordPress.com blocked

+ Published by gvadvocacy August 27th, 2007 Share This

Thailand blockpage (TOT – Telephone Organization of Thailand): This screen shot was taken by Prachatai.com when access to the popular blogging platform WordPress.com has been blocked (August, 22th, 2007): “Sorry. TOT Plc., as an organization of Thai people, has restrained the access to this website as it contains content, text, and/or picture that is unappropriated which affects the mind of Thai people all over the country and cannot be accepted.”
(Source: National Blockpages Gallery via Prachatai.com| Global Voices Advocacy Blog)

On August 22th, 2007, access to wordpress.com blogging platform has been blocked by TOT (Telecommunication Authority) preventing Thai Internet users from accessing Thai WordPress and all blogs hosted on wordpress.com. “A notice has been shown when trying to access any WordPress page: “Sorry. TOT Plc., as an organization of Thai people, has restrained the access to this website as it contains content, text, and/or picture that is unappropriated which affects the mind of Thai people all over the country and cannot be accepted.”

In a recent update, Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT) confirmed that “ until the evening of Friday 24 August, it is still impossible to access WordPress.com from TOT service. The symptom is unpredictable, actually, as sometimes it can be accessed, but sometimes it cannot.”Last week, on August 17, 2007, the Turkish Fatih Second Civil Court of First Instance blocked access to the entire wordpress.com domain after alleged libel of Turkish Islamic-creationist, Adnan Oktar, aka Harun Yahya.

Update: In this podcast interview, from Thailand, my friend and colleague David Sasaki, Global Voices’ outreach director, talks with four of Thailand’s most popular bloggers about recently passed computer crime act, web censorship and the block of wordpress.com by TOT ISP. Please, listen below to the resulting podcast.

You can also download a PDF version of the Computer Crime Act and read our previous interview with CJ Hinke, FACT founder and coordinator, about the FACT campaign, the filtering situation in Thailand and its implications and consequences as a result of the new cybercrime law.