Chinese censors block Obama’s call to free the Internet
Associated Press: November 17, 2009
http://www.japantoday.com/category/world/view/chinese-censors-block-obamas-call-to-free-the-internet
U.S. President Barack Obama prodded China about Internet censorship and free speech, but the message was not widely heard in China where his words were blocked online and shown on only one regional television channel.
China has more than 250 million Internet users and employs some of the world’s tightest controls over what they see. The country is often criticized for its so-called “Great Firewall of China” — technology designed to prevent unwanted traffic from entering or leaving a network.
During his town hall meeting in Shanghai on Monday, Obama responded at length to a question about the firewall — remarks that were later played down in the Chinese media and scrubbed from some Chinese web sites.
“I’m a big supporter of non-censorship,” Obama said. “I recognize that different countries have different traditions. I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet — or unrestricted Internet access — is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged.”
Obama may have been hoping to set a personal example for China’s leaders when he said he believes that free discussion, including criticism that may be annoying to him, makes him “a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear.”
One prolific blogger who goes by the name of Hecaitou said that a transcript of the exchange posted on the portal Netease was taken down by censors after just 27 minutes. A full Chinese-language transcript of the event was later posted on the official Xinhua News Agency web site but required four clicks to locate the relevant section.
Only local Shanghai TV carried the event live. It was streamed on two popular Internet portals and on the White House’s web site, which is not censored, though both the video and audio feeds were choppy and delayed inside China.
The People’s Daily online briefly summarized Obama as telling the crowd that the Internet has “enormous power in assisting information dissemination,” but made no mention of his comments on censorship.
China has the world’s most extensive system of web monitoring and censorship and has issued numerous regulations in response to the rise of blogging and other trends. But the Web remains far more open than the country’s tightly controlled print and television media, which is the only source of news for the vast majority of Chinese.
Yang Hengjun, 45, a blogger and novelist based in the southern city of Guangzhou, said he was impressed by Obama’s frank admission that some free speech irks him, and by U.S. laws that are intended to keep the government from censoring criticism.
“You see, freedom of speech in America is not given to the people by the president but is something that the people use to supervise their government and president, to protect themselves,” Yang wrote in an essay titled “Why do I Blog? Obama has answered that question.” Posted online late Monday, links to the essay were spread via Twitter.
Because Twitter is blocked in China, Yang and others use proxy servers to get around the controls.
China defends ‘net censorship-IDG
23-11-09
China defends Internet censorship after Obama lauds openness
Owen Fletcher
IDG News Service: November 17, 2009
China today defended its control of information on the Internet that it deems sensitive or harmful, one day after U.S. President Barack Obama told students in Shanghai that information should be free.
The remarks highlighted ongoing tensions between China and the U.S. over human rights, another ideal Obama extolled in China.
“For the Chinese government, we hope online communications can move smoothly, but at the same time we need to ensure that online communications do not affect our national security,” Chinese Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei told reporters at a question-and-answer session in Beijing. China also aims to prevent “adverse content” online from harming children in the country, he said.
China blocks Web sites including YouTube as part of its efforts to prevent sensitive political content from appearing online. It added Twitter and Facebook to its blocked list earlier this year after deadly ethnic riots in its western Muslim region, which also led China to cut off virtually all Internet access in Xinjiang province.
Obama, making his first visit to China as president, told local students at a question-and-answer session this week that freedom of information online can help people hold their government accountable and encourages them to think for themselves. Obama did not mention China’s Internet policies, but his statements went beyond the views usually expressed by Chinese government officials or local media. Chinese Web site owners are expected by authorities to censor certain information about sensitive issues like corruption on their domains, including when it is posted by users, and can risk punishment for failing to do so.
“All men and women possess certain fundamental human rights,” Obama said in a speech in Beijing on Tuesday that was broadcast on live national television. Chinese President Hu Jintao stood expressionless on the stage beside Obama as he spoke. “We do not believe these principles are unique to America, but rather they are universal rights, and they should be available to all peoples, and to all ethnic and religious minorities.”
Banned director burns his bridges with gay film
Associated Press: November 21, 2009
| http://asiancorrespondent.com/breakingnews/banned-director-burns-his-bridges-w.htm
A prominent mainland Chinese director banned by Beijing from making movies brought his new gay romance film to Hong Kong on Friday for what is likely the last of a handful of screenings on his home soil. In 2006, China banned Lou Ye from shooting movies for five years after he screened Summer Palace at the Cannes Film Festival without government approval. In the film Lou tackled the Chinese military’s brutal crackdown on pro-democracy student protesters at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June 1989. But he defied the ban, secretly shooting the love story Spring Fever with small, digital cameras in Nanjing last year. He also entered it at Cannes this year, where it won best screenplay in May. In Spring Fever, he takes on homosexuality — another taboo in China — with graphic gay sex scenes. The 115-minute movie is about a private investigator hired to spy on a married man having a gay affair. But the investigator falls into a love triangle with his own girlfriend and the boyfriend of the husband he is investigating. Commercial distributors have bought Spring Fever for release in Russia, South Korea, France, and the US, but not so in China. It was only screened in four showings at an independent film festival in Nanjing last month. On Friday it screened as one of the two opening movies at this year’s Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. But a Chinese distribution deal is unlikely, given Lou’s status. Lou said, however, that Chinese film officials have turned a blind eye to his supposedly illegal activities, including for shooting Spring Fever and showing it at the independent film festival in Nanjing. He has also been allowed to travel freely in and out of China, but he wants the ban lifted so his films can be screened more widely in China. “It’s regrettable that this film won’t be released in the Chinese market,” Lou told The Associated Press in an interview before the Hong Kong screening. Lou, whose credits also include Suzhou River and Purple Butterfly, urged the Chinese government to shorten his ban. “Everyone should be able to make movies. I hope this ban will be canceled earlier and I hope the government won’t impose any more bans on other directors,” the 45-year-old director said. Lou arrived in Hong Kong on Friday from Paris, where he was preparing for his next project, his foreign-language debut — a French film about a Chinese student’s romance in Paris. |
[FACT comments: Big or small, insecure govts rely on “national security” to suppress free speech…or try to.]
Husband of Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez attacked
Reuters: November 21, 2009
Yoani Sanchez: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoani_Sánchez
The husband of Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez said he was attacked by government supporters as he waited on Friday to confront state security agents accused of detaining and beating his wife two weeks ago.
Sanchez, whose writing about the hardships of Cuban life were praised this week by President Barack Obama, said men believed to be government agents forced her into a car and hit her repeatedly in a brief detention on November 6.
Reinaldo Escobar, also a blogger, said he had gone to a Havana intersection hoping that state security agents would respond to a challenge he issued earlier to meet there for a “verbal duel” about his wife’s incident.
He said he was speaking to reporters when, in what appeared to be an orchestrated event, several hundred people gathered and began shouting “Viva Fidel” and “Viva la Revolucion.”
About 20 of his supporters began shouting back and the situation turned violent, he said.
“They pulled my hair, hit me with a shoe, tore my shirt, pulled away my bag of books. I lost my glasses,” Escobar, aged 62, told Reuters.
His wife, who was not with him at the attack, wrote on Twitter: “Until when will the language of force, of intolerance and disrespect for the opinion of others be the one that prevails in my country?”
The Cuban government responded quickly to Escobar’s accusations, emailing to foreign journalists a story published in the website laRepublica.es with the headline “The Cuban people are tired of Yoani Sanchez.”
The website, which describes itself as “The free newspaper, for an informed citizenry,” said state security agents saved Escobar from injury when he was surrounded by young people shouting “This street is revolutionary” and “Down with traitors” to the beat of a conga drum.
The agents took him from the scene “so he would not suffer the ire of a people that has tired of so many provocations,” the website said.
Escobar said a group of men grabbed him as he was being attacked by the government supporters, put him in a car, drove him to a neighborhood on Havana’s outskirts and dropped him off without saying a word. He said they did not strike him.
“SUPPOSED AGGRESSION”
Cuba’s government, which views its opponents as mercenaries working for the United States and other countries, has said nothing about the attack on Sanchez.
But laRepublica.es said the “supposed aggression” against her had been “totally refuted” by comments it published earlier in the day by doctors who attended her and said they found no injuries.
Sanchez, 34, has said she considered the incident a warning from the government to quiet her criticism.
On Thursday, she published in her Generation Y blog (www.desdecuba.com/generationy) responses by Obama to seven questions she had sent him by email.
“Your blog provides the world a unique window into the realities of daily life in Cuba. It is telling that the Internet has provided you and other courageous Cuban bloggers with an outlet to express yourself so freely,” Obama wrote.
“The government and people of the United States join all of you in looking forward to the day all Cubans can freely express themselves in public without fear and without reprisals,” Obama said.
Sanchez, 34, has won several international awards and was named by Time Magazine last year as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
Obama’s response added to her international stature as Cuba’s leading dissident voice, but she is little known on the island where Internet access is limited.
The Cuban government has made no secret of its distaste for her, but she is among a growing group of young Cubans who have taken to the Internet to express their desire for change on the island.
(Reporting by Jeff Franks and Esteban Israel; editing by Anthony Boadle)
[FACT comments: Does this sound familiar???]
Latin America: Former Mexican Foreign Minister Accuses Army of Extra-Judicial Executions in Drug War
Drug War Chronicle: November 20, 2009
Jorge Castañeda, Mexico’s foreign minister under President Vicente Fox, said Saturday that the Mexican military is engaging in the extrajudicial execution of members of drug trafficking organizations. The frank and surprising comments came as Castañeda spoke on a panel at the 2009 International Drug Policy Reform Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
“We are having more and more ‘false positives,’” Castañeda said, referring to a term used in Colombia to describe people executed by the military and then described as guerrillas killed in combat. “Here in Mexico, apparent gang war killings are in fact being carried out by the military. Every time the cartels catch the police and military infiltrators and slice them up, the army says ‘We’re taking out ten of yours.’ The statistics say that 90% of the killings are within the cartels, but the army is engaging in these killings.”
President Felipe Calderon deployed the military against the so-called cartels in December 2006. Since then, more than 15,000 people have been killed in prohibition-related violence in Mexico, including more than 6,000 so far this year. Hundreds of police and soldiers are among the dead.
In response to a question asking for documentation of his assertions, Castañeda said: “The only known incident was a town in
Chihuahua where the bodies of 29 sicarios (assassins) were found, with witnesses who said this was after they were detained. The press has not wanted to investigate this.”
But the military can’t keep its mouth shut, Castañeda said. “They go to bars and restaurants and get drunk and talk and they are going around saying how many people they have knocked off,” he reported. “The 12 military officers killed by the cartels in Michoacan — that’s why the army went out and killed a bunch of other people.”
Castañeda’s comments come as the US State Department is preparing the process of certifying Mexican compliance with human rights conditions as part of the $1.4 billion Plan Merida anti-drug assistance package. The bill authorizing the aid requires that portions of it be withheld if the State Department determines Mexico is not in compliance.
Castañeda also criticized President Obama for turning a blind eye to human rights violations by the Mexican military. “Obama regrettably said that the human rights violations he was most concerned with was with the victims of the drug war,” the former diplomat noted.
[FACT comments: Journalism is about speaking the truth. Speaking truth to power, even when that power comes from the barrel of a gun. If you’re not fearless, make another career choice. Criminals are killing criminals in Mexico (any many other places) for money. This situation has been created simply by US prohibition which has led to wars on drugs, killing thousands of innocent civilians in many countries, including Thailand. In Mexico, no violence has spilled into ordinary citizens which is more than we can say for Thailand’s wars on drugs which resulted in more than 3,000 extrajudicial murders or the US war on drugs which has resulted in race-bias for five million drug prisoners.]
Guns and journalism – reporting from South America’s drugs frontline
Candido Figueredo risks his life exposing traffickers on Paraguay’s lawless border
The Guardian: November 18, 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/18/south-americas-drugs-frontline
Candido Figueredo, caught up in the violence of guns and drug trafficking in the border town of Pedro Juan Caballero. Photograph: Tom Phillips
Candido Figueredo sits on his bullet-riddled porch holding the tools of his trade: a reporter’s notepad, a mobile phone and a black 9mm submachine gun.
“I’m a rare species of journalist,” admits Figueredo, the regional correspondent of Paraguay‘s largest daily newspaper, ABC Color, who also boasts a 24-hour security detail and a collection of 11 bones and two human skulls he has personally dug up from clandestine cemeteries.
After seeing his newsroom machine-gunned twice and suffering a barrage of death threats as the result of his reports on organised crime in the border region between Paraguay and Brazil, Figueredo is taking no chances.
“I’m not an idealist, I’m a pragmatist. I don’t want to become a martyr,” he says. “I’m a product of the environment in which I’m working. If a drug trafficker is going to shoot me, I won’t hesitate in shooting him first. I’d prefer to kill him than to die.”
Figueredo, probably South America’s most heavily armed journalist, also covers one its most perilous news beats.
The last 15 years have seen Pedro Juan Caballero – a dusty town where drugs are cheap and life cheaper – transformed into Ground Zero for South American gangsters, known here as “peces gordos” or “big fish”.
“I consider Paraguay my second fatherland,” Brazil’s most notorious drug lord, Fernandinho Beir-Mar, told Figueredo in a 2003 phone interview while he was on the run from police.
Authorities openly admit that Paraguayan and Brazilian traficantes have overrun Pedro Juan Caballero, putting this town of just under 90,000 residents at the centre of one of South America’s most important trafficking routes.
“We have information that more and more people are working in this [area],” says Juan Bartolome Ramirez, an ally of Paraguay’s leftist president Fernando Lugo and governor of Amambay state, which is at the heart of the marijuana growing region and is an entry point for Bolivian, Peruvian and Colombian cocaine and weapons. “If the traffickers lose 1,000kg [of cocaine to the border police], 20,000kg are getting through.”
The trade in illegal weapons is also booming along the border, fuelling bloody shoot-outs between cocaine traffickers and police hundres of miles away, as the crow flies, in the slums of Rio de Janeiro.
“All of the guns that come through here are all going to the favelas,” claims Figueredo, who describes the region as a mecca for members of Rio’s Red Command and Sao Paulo’s First Command of the Capital or PCC factions. “Pistols, machine guns, anti-aircraft weapons. Everything.”
The recent shooting down of a police helicopter in Rio de Janeiro has cast the spotlight on to places such as Pedro Juan Caballero, along 16,000km of “dry border” between Brazil and its neighbours. Police in Rio say they have seized nearly 800 rifles since January 2007 and 3,500 firearms since 2000. Many are thought to have passed through the town.
“It is time for the federal government to come down hard on the border … sealing it in everyway possible,” the head of Rio’s military police, Mario Sergio Duarte, told the Rio paper Extra, arguing that the city’s drug conflict would not end unless the influx of weaponry could be halted.
Last month, Brazilian authorities announced they were sending 20 members of the National Security Force to beef up security on the border, creating an anti-trafficking base close to Pedro Juan Caballero. Paraguayan authorities say much more is needed. “We can’t control it all,” said special agent Mariano Baez, who heads a 12-man anti-drug taskforce in Pedro Juan Caballero backed by the US government.
Baez, who describes the town as “the most critical point” along the border, said the profits involved in drug and gun trafficking were simply too great.
“Here an AR-15 assault rifles costs between $3,000 and $5,000 (£3,000). A light assault rifle costs $5,000. A Glock costs $1,500.” In Rio de Janeiro, police say such weapons can fetch up to 10 times those values. “Here you pay $3-3,500 per kg [of cocaine],” added Baez. “In Europe this cocaine is worth $30,000 or $40,000.”
So far this year Figueredo has recorded nearly 80 homicides, making Pedro Juan Caballero statistically one of the most murderous towns on Earth, with a homicide rate that is more than three times that of Rio de Janeiro.
Figueredo possesses a spinechilling personal archive of photographs that document the rising death toll. They show those who have crossed the local traffickers – skinned, burned or with their hands or tongues chopped off. One body had its heart ripped out.
Special agent Baez says one recent victim was found with his lips padlocked together. “He talked.”
Ramirez said the only solution was for Latin American leaders to rethink their drug laws. “Cocaine is a lost war – the way we are fighting it. Brazil spends trillions and can’t solve the problem of the favelas. Mexico spends even more and they have lost control. As long as people can make millions out of cocaine, repression will not solve the problem.”
Figueredo meanwhile beats a monthly retreat to Paraguay’s capital, Asunción, where he can relax without worrying about being executed.
“I’m a hostage in my own town,” he complains. “I don’t go out walking. I don’t go to the supermarket. I don’t have any friends here any more. Nobody wants to visit me. They are scared.
“Here there is only one truth,” he said. “If you get involved in the underworld you will die. You can be sure of it.”
• This article was amended on 19 November 2009. The original said that the border area where Pedro Juan Caballero is located is thousands of miles from Rio de Janeiro. This has been corrected.
Prisoner of Tehran-NY Times
23-11-09
Haleh Esfandiari: Prisoner of Tehran
Laura Secor
The New York Times: November 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/books/review/Secor-t.html?ref=todayspaper
Stephanie Luykendal / Getty Images
In 2007, Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Middle East Program, told Iranian intelligence everything she knew. She was interrogated for almost eight months, nearly four of them inside Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. During that time, she explained the institutional structure of the Wilson Center, identified its board members and described her work organizing conferences. She translated reams of material from the center’s Web site into Farsi. But it was a dialogue of the deaf.
MY PRISON, MY HOME
One Woman’s Story of Captivity in Iran
By Haleh Esfandiari
Illustrated. 230 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.99
She knew the smirking, ubiquitous bureaucrat assigned to her case as Ja’fari, and his sinister, smooth-talking superior only by a Persian honorific, Hajj Agha. As she recounts in her new memoir, “My Prison, My Home,” these men were certain that Esfandiari, the refined 67-year-old daughter of a high-born Iranian botanist and an Austrian mother, was a central figure in an American plot to topple the Iranian government. Her answers to their questions, they believed, were evasions. What they wanted to understand was the deep structure of the conspiracy. They asked her to tell them about meetings that had never taken place and people she’d never met; they asked her the same questions, in jumbled order, with numbing frequency, hoping to catch her in a lie. She was not cooperating, they told her, and so the interrogations would go on. She could put an end to the intimidation by inventing a story to please them — but only at the cost of incriminating herself and others.
Esfandiari had come to Tehran to spend Christmas with her elderly mother. It took a staged armed robbery, the seizure of her Iranian and American passports, a raid on her mother’s home and several weeks of interrogations at an ersatz “Passport Office” before she fully understood that she was ensnared in two ugly and intractable struggles. One was the Islamic Republic’s nearly 30-year cold war with the United States; the other was its battle with its internal opposition. These two enemies, the Iranian intelligence ministry had come to believe, were linked. The domestic opposition spoke a language of democracy and civil society that resonated suspiciously with the agendas of foundations like the Open Society Institute. The regime’s hardliners associated such foundations with the opposition movements that overthrew autocratic regimes in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine.
At a time when the Bush administration had made no secret of its desire to forge ties with the Iranian opposition, it was hardly irrational for the unpopular regime to fear that it would come to a similar end. The revolving door between American government and Washington research institutions made it relatively easy for Iranian investigators to draw maps that connected internal opponents to prominent expatriates to the United States government. The president of the Wilson Center was Lee Hamilton, a former congressman: this, to their minds, was evidence that Esfandiari was recruiting fifth columnists at the bidding of the United States government.
Esfandiari and her husband mobilized an army of devoted friends and loyal colleagues as the trap closed around her. They knew people who had served in various ministries during the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami, or who had contacts inside the intelligence apparatus, or clout, they hoped, with the hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In a sign of just how serious Esfandiari’s case was, her friends in Iran, presumably under threat, stopped inquiring about her case, dropped contact with her and in one instance even hung up the phone when she called. During her imprisonment, she did not know that she had become an international cause célèbre; her interrogators told her that she had been forgotten in America. (Reading about Esfandiari’s tribulations, the reader may spare a thought for Iran’s young and unknown political prisoners — the journalists, feminists and student activists who do not have powerful friends, American passports or international media attention, and who are often terrorized into confessing to crimes they did not commit.)
Esfandiari recounts in measured, at times chilling, detail her journey into the bowels of the Iranian intelligence apparatus. Neither the fear nor the fury that she undoubtedly felt compromise the clarity of her observations. Ja’fari, though malevolent, is not a cartoon villain but a creature of a certain sweaty banality, constantly interrupting interrogations to take cellphone calls about the teaching job he holds after hours. The prison guards discuss their skin problems and do their laundry at the prison; Esfandiari recalls at least one of them, a pious older woman, with warmth. At Evin, Esfandiari exercises constantly, refuses medicine and food other than what she can get from outside, loses a frightening amount of weight and avoids allowing her belongings to touch the dirty floor. What might look compulsive under ordinary circumstances becomes, in solitary confinement, the means to survival, a stubborn insistence on personal agency even if its sphere is as small as a prison cell, or, smaller still, the body.
With its fractured chapters and frequent subheadings, “My Prison, My Home” sometimes lacks narrative cohesion. Its most revealing passages are those detailing experiences no doubt painful and even boring at the time: the hours wasted testing the obduracy of Ja’fari’s pinched mind, and later, keeping pace with the more sophisticated Hajj Agha, whose face Esfandiari is never allowed to see. Esfandiari writes without literary affectation, to the point of flatness; but in her refusal to aggrandize or feel sorry for herself, there is an unmistakable and persistent dignity.
Laura Secor is writing a book about Iran.
THAILAND: Computer crime law as lèse majesté substitute
Asian Human Rights Commission: November 20, 2009
In recent days police in Thailand arrested and charged another person over causing a decline in the stock market by spreading rumours through the Internet about the king’s health.
According to news reports, Tassaporn Ratawongsa, 42, a radiologist at the Thonburi Hospital was arrested on 18 November 2009 and charged under section 14 of the Computer Crime Act BE 2550 (2007) with distributing “false computer data in a manner that is likely to damage the country’s security or cause a public panic”. She is the fourth person to have been charged in this manner over rumours in October about the health of the king that caused the stock market to drop dramatically. The other three are Katha Pajariyapong, 37, and Thiranant Vipuchant, 43, both arrested on November 1; and, Somjet Itthiworakul, 38, arrested on November 3.
The four join the director of online independent news site Prachatai, Chiranuch Premchaiporn, who is facing a raft of charges over comments that readers posted to the site, not anything that she herself wrote or did, by virtue of section 15 of the same law that, “Any service provider intentionally supporting or consenting to an offence under Section 14 within a computer system under their control shall be subject to the same penalty as that imposed upon a person committing an offence under Section 14.”
All of these accused face imprisonment of up to five years for their alleged offences. Another Internet user from Thailand who made the mistake of thinking that he had relative freedom to do as he pleased in cyberspace who is already serving his term is Suwicha Takor, who earlier in the year was given a 10-year sentence, reduced from 20 because of his guilty plea, for posting pictures deemed offensive to the monarchy.
It is in Suwicha’s case that the intersection between what is superficially going on in these other cases and what is actually going on becomes obvious. Suwicha was sentenced to 20 years because he was convicted not only of so-called computer crimes but also of lese-majesty.
In fact, these other persons could also have been charged with lese-majesty under the Penal Code, but instead the authorities have chosen to target them only with the use of the new computer law.
Is the Computer Crime Act being used as a de facto lese-majesty law? Whether or not people in the administration have this as a policy, these cases suggest it is headed that way.
Throughout 2009 Thailand has attracted a huge amount of negative publicity over the cases against persons critical of its royal family, or persons claiming to act on the royals’ behalf. Attempts to stifle this negative publicity have only backfired, generating even greater amounts of bad press and bad feelings. The extent of this sensitivity was impressed upon the Asian Human Rights Commission in May when the justice minister, Pirapan Salirathavibhaga, in a letter responding to interventions in the case of Suwicha denied that Thailand even has a lese-majesty law:
“Offences against the King, the Queen, the Heir-Apparent or the Regent are considered offences relating to the security of the Kingdom, not ‘lese-majesty’… I am certain that each state as well as Thailand has its own way of interpreting what constitutes offences relating to national security. Therefore, whoever violates the law of the Kingdom will be fairly charged and prosecuted according to the law of the Kingdom.”
The awkwardness of the minister’s proposition, which is anyhow incorrect–the Oxford dictionary defines “lese-majesty” as the insulting of a sovereign, which is precisely one of the criteria for an offence against the king under section 112 of the Penal Code–speaks to the difficulties that the government of Thailand has been having with lese-majesty and suggests why it may be looking for other analogous categories of crimes.
The Computer Crime Act is an excellent substitute. The so-called law was passed in the final hours of the military-appointed proxy legislature following the 2006 coup, and as the AHRC made clear from the start, was designed as a tool to suppress dissent, not responsibly deal with Internet crime in Thailand. Its ambiguous provisions, notably the section under which all these persons have been charged, allow for the prosecution of any type of thought crime on the disingenuous pretext that the crime is one of technology rather than one of expression or of ideas. Therefore, the state can claim that it is bringing people to court for one type of crime, while sending a clear message to a society that the real offence is altogether different.
With fewer journalists and editors in Thailand willing or wanting to take up many issues of importance to the public, it is unsurprising that more and more people are turning to the Internet to communicate. The substituting of lese-majesty with computer crime offences may seem to the authorities to be superficially easy but it will not do anything to reduce the global interest in the role of Thailand’s monarchy and future prospects for its lost democracy. On the contrary, by prosecuting these persons the government has only shifted from one type of high-profile crime to another. Internet offences are a subject of interest to hundreds of millions of web users all around the world, and it would be foolish of the authorities to think that by prosecuting these persons under the Computer Crime Act they will do anything to lessen the attention paid to the hand that the protectors of the monarchy in Thailand have in all of this. For its own good and the good of its kingdom, the government of Thailand would be smart to find a way to drop these cases as quickly and quietly as possible.
[FACT comments: Now wait just a cotton-picking minute here! Dr. Thassaporn “admitted she posted false information about the King’s health on the internet”. So what, precisely, was that “false information”—the King’s death??? This article states in error Dr Thassaporn is the fifth arrestee; so far, we’ve only counted four. But Thai police never sleep when they want to clean up govt’s good name: we can bet on some more arrests soon! Incidentally, we need to add a "rumour" to the mix--the rumour here is Thai govt intends to charge Bloomberg News over the original article and close down Bloomberg's Bangkok office.]
Arrested doctor granted bail
- Bangkok Post: November 20, 2009
- http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/local/27737/arrested-doctor-granted-bail
The Thon Buri Hospital doctor arrested in connection with spreading stock market rumours about His Majesty the King’s health has been given bail.
Thassaporn Rattawongsa, 41, was apprehended at her flat in Phaya Thai district on Wednesday and charged with posting inaccurate information that threatened national security, the Central Investigation Bureau said.
If convicted, she could face up to five years in prison and a fine of up to 100,000 baht.
Dr Thassaporn admitted she posted false information about the King’s health on the internet. But she denied being part of a rumour-mongering network responsible for causing the stock market to plunge last month.
The police granted her 100,000-baht bail yesterday.
Dr Thassaporn is the fifth suspect arrested on charges related to the rumours about the King’s health.
The investigation was being expanded with a warrant expected to be issued soon for the arrest of a Buddhist monk at a well-known temple on a similar charge. Police would not release details of the temple.
[FACT comments: We’re not very paranoid but this Reuters post makes the pattern of arrests over the health rumors issue seem directed at webboards where Thais discuss the issues. In particular, Prachatai and Same Sky. The police must have a lot of time on their hands.]
Thai police make fourth arrest in stock rumour probe
Ambika Ahuja
Reuters: November 18, 18, 2009
http://in.reuters.com/article/specialEvents4/idINBKK53989620091118?sp=true
Police in Thailand arrested a fourth person on Wednesday on suspicion of spreading rumours about the health of the country’s 81-year-old king that triggered a slide in stock prices.
A 42-year-old doctor confessed to posting a message on an unidentified website after her arrest at the private Bangkok hospital where she worked, said Police Lt. General Tha-ngai Prasajaksatru, head of Thailand’s Central Investigation Bureau. Police are investigating whether she collaborated with others accused of spreading rumours about the king on Prachatai, a website that lists press freedom as one of its main objectives and is popular with some anti-government activists.
The unidentified woman told police she had no connection to the three others arrested, said Tha-ngai. They were charged under a controversial and wide-ranging computer crimes law. Two are former stock-market analysts.
Thai stocks .SETI plunged 7.2 percent on Oct. 14-15 as rumours circulated over the health of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the world’s longest-reigning monarch.
The king, regarded as semi-divine by many of the country’s 67 million people, has been in hospital since Sept. 19. The palace says he is getting better.
His health is a sensitive topic in financial markets because he is seen as the sole unifying figure in a politically polarised country with a long history of coups and upheaval.
Strict lese-majeste and national security laws make comment on royal matters risky.
“Police are questioning her and we are looking at her appointments on her laptop for more evidence,” said Tha-ngai.
The other three were charged under the 2007 Computer Offence Act covering the posting of false computerised information that causes harm to national security and the public. They face up to five years in jail and a 100,000 baht ($3,000) fine if convicted.
The Department of Special Investigation, which comes under the Justice Ministry, is also conducting an inquiry into possible stock trading irregularities, which it expects to complete in late November.
Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva told Reuters on Nov. 7 that the king had recovered from his illness and would soon be discharged from hospital.
He has made several public appearances at the hospital to help ease public concerns, including participating in a Thai holiday ritual of setting a candlelit float on water on Nov. 2.
