Cyber snooping for the monarchy

The growing desire of the military dictatorship to censor, repress and control the internet has been displayed like a prize cock in recent days.

When these dopes in the junta think they have successes, they gloat and advertise their censorship and repression as if civilization has been turned on its head. So it is that when the number of Thais wanted by the junta overseas and slated for extradition has been cut from 40 to 30, they still prattle on about “explaining” the unexplainable: that the monarchy is a national security issue. Few foreign governments will not see how ridiculous the claim is.

Yet they still gloat about “success,” with the thick-skulled Justice Minister Paiboon Khumchaya stating:”investigation and suppression would be easier from now on since all local sim cards had been registered. This also allows the National Intelligence Agency to get a more accurate picture of each group’s activity and to set its targets.” Only a dullard general could trumpet: “Thanks to our serious efforts, the number of blocked websites has doubled…”. They preen themselves without realizing that they make the monarchy more fragile by the day.

For some of the details of their “work,” we can turn to an earlier Bangkok Post report from the Technology Crime Suppression Division claims to have “ordered the closure of more than 500 URLs (uniform resource locators) containing content deemed to violate the lese majeste law” so far this year.That’s about 7-8 a day.

But ordering doesn’t shut them down because the Keystone Cyber Cops “lack of authority in gaining access to them when the servers are located overseas.” Who didn’t know that?

The reports states that “Pol Maj Prakrom Varunprabha, a police inspector with TCSD’s Sub Division 1, who is on a special assignment to curb lese majeste acts on the internet,” said the “URLs that cannot be closed are mostly on Facebook or YouTube which normally take a much longer time to deal with.”

He then reveals some of the politics driving the military dictatorship:

“Previously, when governments were led by political parties, Facebook and YouTube were used widely to gain political benefits. That was why they didn’t want to do anything with [lese majeste movements on these online media]. Instead, those governments pretended they wanted to ensure freedom of expression,” he said….

The highest number of lese majeste acts were found on Facebook, followed by video-sharing sites (such as YouTube.com and Dailymotion.com), free blogs (such as Blogspot.com and WordPress.com), file sharing sites (such as 4Shared.com, Mediafire.com) and free webboards (such as Pantip.com), he said.

He explained that when “tracking lese majeste offenders who use internet servers registered in Thailand, police first have to check for their IP addresses by working together with the owners of the websites or the internet providers.” For overseas sites, Prakrom claimed that a “special technique is needed to obtain the IP address used by the suspect before the legal process can actually begin…”. He did not reveal what this “technique” is. He did complain about overseas authorities declaring them constrained “because internet users’ privacy protection is now seen as an important issue…”.

Not in the military dictatorship’s Thailand!