Thailand Muzzles the Internet by John Berthelsen 23 Dec 08 (http://asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1625&Itemid=185)
A shaky government, citing lese majeste laws, blocks more than 1,000 websites
Thailand's increasingly prickly Ministry of Information and Communication Technology has issued instructions blocking more than 1,300 websites in 23 countries from Australia to Vietnam over the past several months, according to Freedom Against Censorship Thailand, a press freedom group, which made public a list of the sites over the weekend.
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After months of devastating political turmoil, the Democrat Party, headed by the Oxford-educated Abhisit Vejjajiva, was installed to head the government last week, ending more than three years in which allies of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra held royalist forces at bay. Vejjajiva has styled himself as a reformer, although he and his party have already come under considerable fire for the undemocratic way in which a raucous band of protesters paralyzed the country until a constitutional court declared the People's Power Party illegal under questionable circumstances. Ranongruk Suwanchawee was appointed the new Information and Communication Technology minister. The blocklists do not fall under her administration and reformers are waiting to see if she will review the bans and reverse any of them.
According to FACT, although no website may be blocked legally without court order, the Thai police and internet service providers often block as they wish. The "blocklists," as they are called, that were leaked to FACT cover seven months of actions by the authorities. They include court orders detailing applications of the Ministry authorizing most of the blocks and cite reasons of lese majeste, or insults to the royalty, and national security and are dated June 27, August 1, August 25 and December 9 signed by ICT ministry officers. Ironically, the PPP government that was blocking hundreds of websites on grounds of lese majeste was in a no-holds-barred squabble with the royalists for political primacy.
Among the most famous, or infamous of the blocked sites in Thailand is of course YouTube, which was put on ice in July after it showed a 44-second series of pictures of the 81-year-old King Bhumibol Adulyadej, in one with a pink Afro and a red clown nose superimposed on his face.
Other blocked websites are located in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, the European Union, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Vietnam, the press freedom group said in a press release. Among them, apparently, is The Economist, which in its Dec. 6-12 issue carried a cover story titled 'The King and Them" and gave what it called "the untold story of the palace's role behind the collapse of Thai democracy" (although the story had been largely told repeatedly in
Although every site that was ordered blocked came under the lese majeste laws, FACT said that "It would appear, in fact, that the court did not examine each site before issuing its order but instead relied on the Ministry of Information and Communication's judgment. Although we have not yet found the opportunity to examine each website censored, as in the past, an eclectic mix of censorship has been revealed resulting in overblocking of many benign webpages."
Also blocked, FACT said, are weblogs referring to author Paul Handley's authoritative biography of
"Typically, web censorship in
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