Guess who's reading your email?

[SukhumvitRoad]

A jaw dropping story in the Bangkok Post today, although they shuffled it back to the Database section apparently to take some of the bite out of it. It started this way:

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.

The full piece is here: http://www.bangkokpost.com/Database/...08_data003.php

What the rest of it says essentially is that the Thai government has made a complete mess of the monitoring process and that the primary impact has been to bog down international net connections and make Thailand "look Mickey Mouse" to the rest of the world. Gee....there's a surprise.

[Snick]

Hard to tell if its active monitoring or just massive incompetence

The Thais have been very cheap about buying additional Internet capacity and to compensate have been using a lot of caching - some of it poorly configured.

As for blocking port 25 (sending email to an overseas server). They've been doing that for 3+ years - primarily to stop spam, and thats a common practice everywhere.

[SamplerDoc]

Interesting Thread and Read.

[BAM]

I keep telling everyone over there to always use a VPN connection because they are monitoring you... it may not be the government or police... it could be anyone interested in intercepting your communications for their own gain. When I was staying at the Pattaya Marriott like most all hotels you need to first log into their proxy server and agree to buy some time like 24 hours. As soon as I was connected I would go to whatismyip.com and verify an outside connection... then I would turn on my VPN and only after I was connected to my VPN server would I start to use my computer for anything. One day I found that they were blocking all ports except port 80. I called the hotel front desk and was passed over to the hotels IT manager who didn't seem to have a clue what I was talking about however he was quite insisting that he comes to my room to check on my computer which I refused he do. The next day all ports were open again... was this a setup to get me to communicate in the clear so they could snoop on my communications? Who know but I was not taking any chances.

[seanbeag7]

Sorry Bam, but, for me to understand what you just wrote you would have to go through step by step, i am simply not a techno guy.

[SamplerDoc]

Bam,

I too have no clue what you said but I get online everyday and do personal and business emails on an unsecure connection along with banking items etc. Never had a problem but you got me freaked out dude

Can you offer any tips in Laymans english for us dummies? thanks in advance man

[JaiDee]

I don't know even 1/4th of what Bam talks about most of the time, but I do know this;

http://www.actualspy.com/

 any internet cafe can buy one, install it on their PC's, and your passwords for your bank business, e-mail, work websites, anything else you may think is 'secure' is now far from it.   At the very least always bring a laptop, never use those places these days.


   VPN is a virtual private network ..... you are connected directly to your server company if you lease or own space at one so you get on-line via them; for instance, if you lease server space in New York and can get a VPN of your own through them, when you log in you are connecting directly to that New York address;  no Thai servers and no peering eyeballs.  We hope.

[Guest]

I use a VPN when in Thailand.Fuck their censorship and in fact ALL censorship.
For a Country with the highest sex tourist numbers in the World and their phoney pretence of morality, they are a joke.
Perhaps it's just Taksins buddies in the moronic PPP, looking out for " invisible hands" plotting more coups.

[Snick]

I doubt that, the guys running the government (and the coups) don't know how to use email. Even the IT minister gets his email printed out for him.

[aktiv-passiv]

Invest some money in a VPN and encryption service. My personal favourite is:

https://www.steganos.com/en....verview

The advantages:

- You do not leave your IP on on any website.

- Even if you use a public WiFi, your data cannot be read by the router admin or other people logged in.