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THAILAND: Online Censorship Triggers Fear among Bloggers

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Dec 20 2010 (IPS) - When he is not designing another house for this city’s sprawling urbanscape, a Thai architect in his mid-forties worries about another run-in with this kingdom’s cyber police.

This fear has been with him or the past two years, admits the architect, as he sips on an iced coffee at a street-side café in a historic neighbourhood of Bangkok.

This is the price Soonthon Prueksapipat has to pay for refusing to be a silent bystander in the face of the political turmoil that has shaken up this South-east Asian kingdom since its last military coup, in September 2006.

His weapon for taking on the powerful military, which has returned to dominate the country’s political stage, was a website he launched with a team of Bangkok-based professionals – including doctors, engineers, bureaucrats and entrepreneurs – he had met in cyberspace.

“Our website has been shut five times because the people in power are not happy with the information we provide, but we managed to get back online using a new name or turning to a foreign server,” reveals Soonthon, editor of the website that has been targeted by Thai censors since April 2009. “The government’s censors are not happy with our mission to protect democracy and to keep the army out of politics.”

From the first time that ‘Thaifreenews’, the original name of the website, was shut, Thai authorities have been consistent in keeping the victim in the dark. “The government doesn’t inform us about the reason to close us down. It is always a surprise when we discover we are censored because access to our website is blocked in Thailand,” says Soonthon of his widely read Thai-language political news portal, which has recorded 15 million visitors since it was set up in late 2006.

But Soonthon, at least, is daring to be public about the battles he has waged with this country’s growing army of censors, and even with his worries and fears.

Not so are other bloggers and web editors living in Bangkok and neighbouring towns who were interviewed by IPS. They are only willing to talk on condition of anonymity in the wake of their websites being shut by the censors.

“I am scared something may happen to me because of the information I uploaded on a website I launched four years ago,” says a 32-year-old Bangkok resident, who makes a living as a graphic and website designer. “It is not safe to open new political websites.”

Her fear is not misplaced, explain media and human rights activists who have been monitoring the growing climate of censorship under the current, two-year-old coalition government led by the Democrat Party.

“Many netizens are resorting to self-censorship,” reveals Pokpong Lawansiri, a human rights activist. “There have been a series of arrests of bloggers and the government keeps the country in the dark by not mentioning who and how many have been arrested.”

Activists are pointing an accusing finger at the current government and the military, which helped bring it to power in a backroom political deal struck in December 2008, for shaping a strategy aimed at silencing political dissent in cyberspace.

This strategy was enforced in the wake of the open clashes between the authorities and the anti-government street protest movement, known as the red shirts, this year, they add. Over 90 people died and close to 2,000 people were injured during bloody showdowns in April and May between Thai troops and red shirt protesters on the streets of Bangkok.

A recently published study on Internet censorship in Thailand confirms the trend of blocking websites by citing threats to national security. From January to November 2010, courts have ordered 43,908 URLs or specific web pages to be blocked, bringing to 74,686 the total number of URLs that have been blocked since late 2007, revealed the report, ‘Control and Censorship of Online Media through the Use of Laws and the Imposition of Thai State Policies’.

Those websites were blocked under the 2007 Computer Crime Act (CCA), which was the first piece of legislation rushed through by the parliament appointed by the military junta that came to power in the 2006 coup, Thailand’s 18th putsch.

An equally draconian emergency decree, which gives the military sweeping powers to mount a crackdown on the red shirts, has also fortified the censorship policies. This decree became a useful tool of the military-led Centre for the Resolution of the Emergency Situation (CRES), which was created this year to target the anti-government movement.

“A reliable source from among Internet service providers notes that the number of websites that have been blocked by order of the Centre for the Resolution of the Emergency Situation has run into tens of thousands,” added the Internet censorship report, co-authored by Sawatree Suksri, a lecturer at the faculty of law at Bangkok’s Thammasat University.

Some media rights activists put the figure of blocked websites since April at 312,000. “The emergency decree suspended the rule of law and handed over the power of censorship to CRES,” reveals C J Hinke, founder of Freedom against Censorship Thailand (FACT), a local media rights organisation. “At least seven statements in the Thai media quoting government officials point to 312,000 websites being blocked under the emergency decree.”

“Netizens in Thailand have a reason to worry, because the government is using the two laws to bludgeon them,” says Hinke. “Officials have been given the licence to censor without any transparency.”