New report highlights ‘net prosecutions-ONI

OpenNet Initiative Country Report – Thailand

June 17, 2009

 

http://opennet.net/research/regions/asia

In Thailand, ongoing political turmoil between “red-shirt” and “yellow-shirt” factions, organized around their support of or opposition to former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and the constituencies he championed, led Thai prime minister Samak Sundaravej to declare a state of emergency on September 2, 2008. Upon his declaration, the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology ordered ISPs to immediately shut down around 400 Web sites and block 1,200 more, all alleged to disturb social order or endanger national security.35 Although these Web sites were reportedly detected between March and August 2008, the blocking order and simultaneous requests for court orders required by law were instituted as the Thai government faced challenges by protesters occupying government buildings and accusations that it committed electoral fraud by buying votes in the December 2007 election.36

Providing an indication of the types of activities that will be targeted under the Computer Crimes Act, in March 2009 police arrested the director and moderator of the political news site Prachathai.com for reportedly allowing a comment referencing the royal family to remain on the site for twenty days.37 Chiranuch Premchaiporn was arrested under Section 15 of the Computer Crimes Act, which extends the liability for illegal activities to service providers that intentionally support or consent to them.38 Illegal activities defined in the framework for regulating Internet content include inputting obscene data, forged or false data likely to cause injury to another person, the public or national security; and data which constitutes a criminal offense relating to national security or terrorism.39 Individuals who either input these illegal data, which includes online messages and information, into computer systems or publish or forward it with the knowledge of these offenses, are subject to a maximum sentence of five years imprisonment and a 100,000 baht fine.40

In the race to curb the “harmful” effects of social media, user generated content, and the unabated growth of online commentary, Asian governments have enacted cybercrimes laws that purport to deter acts of online defamation and vigilantism, but could also potentially be applied to stifle citizen journalism. The Thai cybercrimes law creates civil and criminal liability for individuals who publicly post photographs of others that are “likely to” impair their reputation or expose them to shame, public hatred or contempt.41 In Pakistan, a cybercrimes ordinance taking effect September 2008 made “cyber stalking”–which requires “intent to coerce, intimidate, or harass any person” using computers or networks — a crime punishable by up to seven years’ imprisonment.42

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As the proliferation of borderless social media reduces the effectiveness of the blacklist-and-block model, governments are increasingly looking to technology companies to act as gatekeepers for facilitating transnational public-private filtering.121 In Asia, Thailand may present an example of an alternative to the approaches taken by China and Singapore. Thailand also blocked YouTube in April 2007 for hosting a number of videos that insulted King Bhumibol Adulyadej or his family, which constitutes a crime of lèse majesté, punishable under Thai law by up to fifteen years’ imprisonment.122 By May 2007, YouTube agreed to remove a number of the specified videos for violating its terms of service, and the block on the YouTube domain was lifted in August 2007 upon Google’s creation of a program of geolocational filtering for blocking access to specified videos for users in Thailand.123 In 2008, investigations by a project of the MIT Free Culture group appeared to have uncovered the code for a technical mechanism that YouTube uses to allow certain videos to be seen everywhere except in those locations specified in a media restriction tag.124 Although Thailand’s filtering of the Internet has been ramped up in recent years, Thai law also requires court authorization to block a Web site. Thus, Thailand has secured the cooperation of the world’s dominant video aggregator site in implementing selective geolocational filtering on its behalf, without having to resort to a formal or transparent legal process. Its experience could also signal further public-private transnational cooperation between governments and private technology companies that result in selective filtering: a Vietnamese information ministry official stated in 2008 that the government would ask transnational gatekeepers such as Google and Yahoo to help regulate the Vietnamese blogosphere.125