October 01, 2015•Update: October 01, 2015
By CS Thana
BANGKOK
The Thai junta is to educate people in a single gateway internet initiative that critics have termed "The Great Firewall" as it seeks to array fears it is seeking ways to control what people view online.
Minister for Information and Communication Technology Uttama Savanayana told reporters Thursday that the government will host a forum to help citizens "better understand" a proposal that he says is "still under consideration."
Critics have said such steps will allow the military government to monitor and spy on content as well as block websites it deems subversive.
On Wednesday, thousands of Internet users were reported to have flooded government websites in an effort to the force the pages to crash by exceeding their bandwidth capacity.
Websites belonging to the ministry, Ministry of Defense and Government House were overloaded and left unavailable by the sheer numbers of users trying to access them.
A Change.org petition against the initiative had attracted 131,000 signatures as of Thursday.
Savanayana says the activists will not be prosecuted and that the government understands their concern.
"The government is worried about our youth and how they are using the Internet, that is why we have studied the use of a single gateway," he told reporters.
