Internet Monitoring And Censorship

[Steve2UK]

"INTERNET MONITORING AND CENSORSHIP

Net slowdowns suggest Govt is monitoring traffic

DON SAMBANDARAKSA

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 (Database section) June 4 2008.

Full article: http://www.bangkokpost.com/040608_Database...008_data003.php

[Crushdepth]

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."

I'm not sure that this qualifies as 'monitoring', more likely they are giving certain types of traffic a low priority. Encrypting your traffic works because then they can't see what sort of stuff you're sending and therefore its harder to 'discriminate' against you.

That is not to say that the Thai government isn't sticking their noses into people's biz, but it's hardly news as pretty much everyone that can, does.

[MacSpruce]

Internet in my apartment today is virtually useless -- extremely slow, frequent "unable to find page, server not responding" messages, cannot get into wikipedia at all. Anyone else having similar problems? Is this due to the 'monitoring' mentioned above?

[Spudger]

Internet in my apartment today is virtually useless -- extremely slow, frequent "unable to find page, server not responding" messages, cannot get into wikipedia at all. Anyone else having similar problems? Is this due to the 'monitoring' mentioned above?

mines fine. no.

[jaideeguy]

mine has been sucking for the last week between 9am and 8pm, but when it is on, I'm getting double speeds. maxnet

[Prasert]

Nice article and actually no surprise.

It's a very acceptable explanation to why TOT blocked port 25. Not for fighting spam (official explanation) but to force everyone to use their smtp server, making it extremely easy to monitor email traffic.

Extremely easy when you have the knowledge and resources to actually monitor it without anyone knowing about it.

Which is not the case in Thailand.....