“Net slowdowns suggest government is monitoring traffic”

A very, very strange piece, published in Bangkok Post.

Thailand's Internet is stuttering with a series of unexplained outages and slowdowns that suggest that the government is running a far-reaching programme to monitor its citizens' online activities, one similar to the US Carnivore email policeware programme.

This can be seen in the way YouTube is now all but unusable for TOT subscribers, and how sending large email messages through a foreign server on port 25 often fails, while encrypted, non-standard ports or VPN access over the same network works fine.

A former security-consultant-turned-businessman in Thailand, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the entire situation was seriously damaging business confidence and may be on the verge of being illegal, especially for foreign businesses operating in Thailand. (Bangkok Post)

I don't want to go with conspiracy theories... but from my small point of view, on the ground, I can only say that the Internet is not reliable. I use 2 ADSL lines, work and private, with 2 different operators... And there is no constancy. At all. Since a few weeks, it's hell, particularily for web traffic.

Same for e-mail (delays).

No explanations given, excepted the classic “TIT” (This Is Thailand). If you do a few traceroutes, you can see that the traffic goes through “proxies”... proxies or monitoring systems ?

Are the operators totally clueless and definitely incompetent ? Or do they have to work on government orders ? It's a mystery.

We can also say that the thai authorities do not care at all about laws and privacy, funny -but bothering- western concepts.

Anyway, thanks to the Junta last year, they enjoy a totally insane law (Computer Crime Act, read here). Basically, they can do whatever they want.

They didnt't hesitate to ban YouTube, to close access to other websites, etc. Even without any court orders... Just the “fait du prince”. The IT minister (who is usually a perfect jerk) takes his telephone, and pressurizes internet operators, websites publishers etc.

Now they don't care anymore to give proper justification, like for instance “fight against pornography” (an all-time classic)... They understood that it's better to let the people talk, and do the dirty work behind, quietly.

This offensive against Internet started with Thaksin actually.