Thread: The Great Firewall Is Coming

Just saw this on the local news feed it looks like the internet here is going be censored even heavier along the lines of China, and North Korea. Getting more scary by the day.


Govt orders great firewall of Thailand
Don Sambandaraska

BANGKOK: -- Thailand’s military government has ordered the creation of a great firewall of Thailand to control the flow of information on the Internet.

General Prayuth’s cabinet ordered the ICT and Justice Ministries and the National Police Department to set up a single internet gateway in order to control inappropriate websites and to control the flow of information into the country from overseas via the internet.

A subsequent cabinet resolution ordered the agencies to report back with any laws that would need to be enacted or amended prior to setting up the single gateway.

The order was quietly given by the Cabinet on 30 June and the follow-up order for the agencies to report back with any laws that needed amending was given by the cabinet on 4 September.

The cabinet resolution was just unearthed on social media by someone browsing the official government cabinet resolution repository.

General Happiness orders Great Firewall of Thailand

Thailand’s military government has ordered the creation of a great firewall of Thailand to control the flow of information on the Internet.

General Prayuth’s cabinet ordered the ICT and Justice Ministries and the National Police Department to set up a single internet gateway in order to control inappropriate websites and to control the flow of information into the country from overseas via the internet.

A subsequent cabinet resolution ordered the agencies to report back with any laws that would need to be enacted or amended prior to setting up the single gateway.

The order was quietly given by the Cabinet on 30 June and the follow-up order for the agencies to report back with any laws that needed amending was given by the cabinet on 4 September.

The cabinet resolution was just unearthed on social media by someone browsing the official government cabinet resolution repository. Prem Sichanugrist or @sikachu on Twitter said, “Yes. Thailand is about to have The Great Firewall just like China, except it will be s****ier and corrupted as hell”.

He also tweeted that politics aside, from a systems point of view, having a single gateway and a single point of failure is a bad idea.

Back in the old days, only CAT Telecom ran a commercial gateway alongside a handful of tiny academic connections. Deregulating this sector and creating competition is arguably the only success the Thai telecom regulator has had since it came into existence, speeding up internet access and enhancing reliability.

CAT has always acted more as a rent collector rather than a telco. It’s 2G era CDMA network was an unmitigated disaster and in the 3G era things are not that much better despite all the free spectrum and public money.

From an internet connectivity point of view, one sees Thailand at the center of the region, yet it seems like all the major cable systems skirt around Thailand, coming up through Malaysia then jumping into the sea before surfacing again in Vietnam.

Some say it was CAT’s fault as it tried to charge exorbitant fees, so much so that everyone decided to go submarine instead of overland.

The continued existence of the single gateway project makes a total mockery of everything new ICT Minister Uttama Savanayana said about turning Thailand into a data center hub for the region and building better connectivity. Would anyone in their right mind host a regional operation in Thailand under these circumstances?

A return to the gold old days of a CAT monopoly would be disastrous. The people of Thailand can kiss a fast internet goodbye purely from technical incompetence, not to mention all the monitoring, censoring and deep packet inspection the military want. Would VPN and encryption be outlawed? That would be a logical next step.

The cabinet resolution was for a way to censor and to control the flow of information and that cannot be done with strong encryption. The cabinet resolution said to report back on any laws that needed to be changed to make this possible. Banning encryption would be a logical law to pass to make the original cabinet resolution implementable.

Good bye privacy. It was nice to have known you.

General Happiness orders Great Firewall of Thailand | Telecom Asia

TD could be first against the wall then.

Bad move general, information works for you as well as against and an informed population can only be good.

But then I suppose they could do it the US way and monitor everyone's phones as well as their internet. For security purposes of course..

The TNN coordinator added that the MICT then even proposed the idea of creating a special version of Facebook for Thailand and to require people to fill in their ID numbers before using the internet.

From another site....

great way to get people jailed just get there ID and post what you want.

The special version of Facebook for Thailand will be called SavingFacebook, yes.

Losefacemuchbook....... thailand is awesome...

Originally Posted by birding

Bad move general, information works for you as well as against and an informed population can only be good.

Too much false information and negative commentary is bad for Democracy in Thailand.

It does make you worry for Thailand's future, things are going to go from bad to worse in the not to distant future.

Hmmmm... Might be time for one of those anonymous IP thingies (I think that's the technical term)

Originally Posted by stroller

Originally Posted by birding

Bad move general, information works for you as well as against and an informed population can only be good.

Too much false information and negative commentary is bad for Democracy in Thailand.

Paranoia, the destroyer.

Originally Posted by AntRobertson

Hmmmm... Might be time for one of those anonymous IP thingies (I think that's the technical term)

What I use [over 250 IP addresses (all over the world) you can pick from],......

https://www.ipvanish.com/

Do you think Conehead knew something ?...timing outstanding....come in suckers

Originally Posted by Horatio Hornblower

great way to get people jailed just get there ID and post what you want.

Would be tough getting all the primary school spelling mistakes 'right'.

Any fool knows that a well run military organisation relies heavily on two way communication ..... oh wait

Originally Posted by birding

Bad move general, information works for you as well as against and an informed population can only be good.

But then I suppose they could do it the US way and monitor everyone's phones as well as their internet. For security purposes of course..

"Could"?

Great country hey tezza.....even just the thought of it speaks volumes....to implement it...outstanding effort

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Originally Posted by birding

Bad move general, information works for you as well as against and an informed population can only be good.

But then I suppose they could do it the US way and monitor everyone's phones as well as their internet. For security purposes of course..

"Could"?

I was surprised how many Thai gov, military and police institutes were on the block list of my anti-spy software!

The Thai elite, whoever they are, because I have no interest in them, have underestimated how popular Facebook has become with everyday Thais, living everywhere in the world.
Thais post on FB post the most subversive material, look My food I eat, look my new dress, look my friends visiting me, look my bag of 10kilo Thai rice, buy for £15 from Thai market shop in Rochester.

Splendi news our better suntainted by ignorance,nepotism and corruption are leading the challenge to Miss Info

Quite a week for Thailand. New York Times doesn't get printed due to a front page story and the news about the firewall comes out.

The economist had a similar story.

Originally Posted by Horatio Hornblower

The economist had a similar story.

I believe The Economist has been on the Thai establishment's black list/censor list for a few years now - bad blood between the two.

Originally Posted by thaimeme

Paranoia, the destroyer.

Kinky.