Thailand Wants To Set Up Its Own Great Firewall

Hadrians Wall, The Great Wall of China. These things have one thing in common, they were built to stop people accessing a certain area. In this day and age we can travel easily enough, but our data has even greater freedom to travel, with the ability to navigate from one side of the world to the other in the blink of an eye. This is quite a scary concept and certain countries are afraid of this, so the ‘great firewall’s were created. Every piece of communication that comes into a country or wants to leave it has to pass through this central point. China is famous for using it to monitor and control what people are able to see, even forcing people to use specific sites or reject people from seeing certain results on search engines. Thailand is the latest to announce plans for their own great firewall.

Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o cha, with his cabinet, has requested the help of the National Police, Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Information and Communications to set up a single internet gateway, which would in effect funnel all communication in and out of Thailand through a single government controlled point.

This doesn’t come as a surprise as they requested earlier in the month any laws that may need changing or being created in order to make this step as legal as possible.

While a great tool for checking for anything illegal or dangerous, people are always afraid of steps like this and the control and possibility of the government misusing all that information. How would you feel if your government created their own ‘great firewall’?

Thank you CNet for the information.

Image courtesy of VPNAnswers.