Thai Government Considers Dropping Nationwide Website Blacklist

A Thai government official acknowledged earlier this week that the country's website blacklisting approach is inefficient and should be dropped.

Thongchai Sangsiri, director of computer forensics with the Thai Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MICT) spoke about the issue at the Asia-Pacific Telecommunity (APT) Cybersecurity Forum in Australia on Wednesday.

"The blacklists grow with many, many websites to become a burden on ISPs. Blacklisting doesn't work," Sangsiri said, according to ZDNet.

"We would like [to] leave parents and teachers to decide what to filter… because [the current system] is too much to handle," he added.

Internet censorship has existed in Thailand since 2006. The primary reasons for blocking websites are indecent materials and gambling.

A blacklist of around 32,500 sites is maintained by the Royal Thai Police, while the state-owned telecommunications company, which controls the country's Internet gateways, maintains a separate one.

A third method involves the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology directly asking Internet Service Providers to block certain websites.

Not many details are publicly known about the criteria used for blacklisting and the full extent of the lists, however, the filters are usually easy to circumvent.

The government has begun realizing that the little benefits the blacklists bring, don't justify the costs and technical problems associated with their maintenance.

This turnout of events is kind of surprising, considering that in November 2008, the MICT announced plans to invest $3 to $15 million into a centralized nationwide blacklist.

In addition to indecent content and gambling, sites related to terrorism and the ones offending the monarchy are also blocked. Thai lese majeste laws carry punishments of up to 15 years in jail.

Nevertheless, human rights activists have repeatedly complained that these blacklists are being abused by the government to block politically sensitive content that doesn't fall into any of those categories.