How Thai law nearly led to ethical webmaster being jailed

WIRED:I'M SITTING UP to the middle of the night in California, waiting for the court verdict of a friend who lives on the other side of the world.

Chiranuch Premchaiporn is a webmaster; the crime she is charged with is managing a discussion website during Thailand’s 2008 state of emergency. During that period of uncertainty in her nation, her site was used by thousands of people, who posted tens of thousands of comments to each other.

It was a discussion board where the average Thai netizen met to share their worries, and find out what was going on in their own country. Like online discussions all over the world, comments on the web forum were posted as soon as they were written. People vividly argued, informed, and expressed their anger and their fears. Some would say things in the heat of the moment that they might go on to regret. Others were elliptical and obscure in their meaning.

In Thailand, criticising the institution (and the person) of the king is a crime. The king is a much-loved figure, seen as above the fray of politics.

Almost all of society is committed to the idea of opposing insults to the royal family. It is always politically popular to show that you are ruthlessly hard on those who commit lese majeste, or an indignity against the monarchy.

Ten posts out of the thousands posted on the site that Premchaiporn managed were reported to the police as violating lese majeste.

Premchaiporn’s team of moderators had already removed all of those that they knew about. None remained after 20 days.

But Thai’s computer crime law is written so that those who run the computers which “import computer data” are as guilty as those who created that content. In other words, just having a computer carry disloyal content is as great a crime as saying it yourself. Even deleting the messages does not eliminate the guilt. The moment the words are posted via your computer, you as a host are guilty. And, with a strict reading of the law, so is the owner of every machine that data passed through – including the phone or cable company, and your internet service provider.

It’s a ridiculously broad law. Similar ones have been seriously suggested elsewhere as a way of dealing with illicit content online. Make ISPs and web hosts like Google and Facebook responsible for their users’ content, the argument goes, and you cure the problem of chasing down the original offenders.

ISPs aren’t anonymous. Big internet companies have a lot of money to pay fines, and could aggressively avoid dangerous commenters or content.

In Bangkok, I watched the result of such laws. Chiranuch Premchaiporn, a small, dedicated woman who has worked for years on reporting labour and Aids issues in the country, spent the last two years in and out of the courtroom, at risk of a punishment that matches that of original lese majeste: 50 years in prison.

I spoke as an expert witness, explaining the nature of the internet and of intermediary law, how if Premchaiporn was guilty, that effectively dozens of other “intermediaries” were guilty in the same case, and how all kinds of Thai digital businesses, from telecommunications companies to local competitors to Silicon Valley giants, would be vulnerable to criminal prosecution if she was.

Bangkok is a vibrant high-tech city, with internet start-ups, microelectronics manufacturing and multinational outposts hooked together with a sophisticated, modern broadband infrastructure. Public officials tweet, and even protesters hitch up huge projectors in its city squares to hear Skype broadcasts from politicians.

To have a quiet, calm, webmaster like Premchaiporn arrested and put in a cell, just for the crime of being insufficiently speedy in deleting a handful of comments from a torrent, made Bangkok look far from the image of a modern, tolerant capital in which it prides itself.

On Wednesday, after three years of waiting, and some final delays that hinted that Thai’s establishment were aware of the global spotlight they were being placed under, Premchaiporn’s verdict was read out in court.

She was not innocent: because one comment took 20 days to delete instead of under 10, she was found guilty of “importing” it. The sentence was eight months, suspended.

Sitting in the dark in California, I breathed a sigh of relief. Then, ridiculously, I kicked a chair across the room. My friend Chiranuch was free to leave the court, but every other webmaster, host and company in Thailand was still left on tenterhooks.

Do they need to delete every suspicious comment in 10 days? If the police fail to inform them (as they did with Chiranuch), do they still have to delete it? If the judge said, as he did, that it was “unfair” that the law said they were guilty the moment the comment went online, did that mean that it was not really a crime? Will they have to spend three years in court, as Chiranuch did, or 50 years in jail, as she might have done?

In Thailand, as anywhere else that considers making the carriers of data responsible for the crimes of that data, this law leaves everyone who runs the internet confused and afraid.

I only hope the confusion does not spread from Thailand to a wider world, where every country has its own taboos and set of must-not-be-seen comments.