Hello,

Today, in collaboration with Sinar Project and the Thai Netizen Network, the OONI project published a research report on "The State of Internet Censorship in Thailand".

You can view our joint report here: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/thailand-internet-censorship/

Over the last 4 months, ooniprobe was run across 16 local vantage points in Thailand, through which we collected and analyzed thousands of network measurements with the aim of examining and uncovering recent censorship events in the country. Our study also includes an examination of Thailand's legal environment and network landscape.

The key findings of our study confirm the blocking of 13 websites in Thailand across 6 different ISPs, including the following types of sites:

- News outlets (nypost.com and dailymail.co.uk)

- wikileaks.org

- Circumvention tool sites (such as hotspotshield.com)

- Pornography

Thai ISPs appear to primarily be implementing censorship through DNS hijacking and through the use of middle boxes (HTTP transparent proxies) which serve block pages. Since sites were not found to be blocked across all networks, Thai ISPs appear to be blocking websites at their own discretion.

On a positive note, the Tor network, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger were found to be accessible across all 16 networks in Thailand where tests were run during the testing period (6th November 2016 - 27th February 2017).

Given the limited transparency around information controls in Thailand and their potential for abuse, we encourage public debate based on the findings of this study.

Finally, we thank the OTF and Access Now for funding this research. We also thank all the anonymous and brave volunteers in Thailand who have run and continue to run ooniprobe, thus making this research possible.

Please contact us with any questions you may have! Feedback is always welcome.

~ The OONI team.
-- 
Maria Xynou
Research and Partnerships Coordinator
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.torproject.org/
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