The Anonymous hacking collective has issued a statement declaring war on Thailand’s military government and in particular CAT Telecom for pushing ahead with the Single Internet Gateway as part of #opsinglegateway.
The statement has been tweeted by regular anonymous accounts @anonymousasia and @latestanonnews and was released in the wee hours of last night.
“The latest project of the Thai military government is to deploy a single gateway in order to control, intercept and arrest any persons not willing to follow the Junta orders and your so called moral,” read the statement.
“No interception systems ever stopped any terrorist attacks, neither any national security threats in Asia or any western countries. It only allows greedy governments and large corporations to get more profits and less freedom of speech for the people of this country.”
The move follows an announcement by acting CAT CEO Colonel Sanpachai Huvanandana who said the state telco was pushing ahead with a rebranded single gateway, now dubbed the national gateway, ostensibly as a cost-saving measure to reduce costs for Thailand’s ISPs.
The move has been criticised as at best being a cartel that reverses years of deregulation and puts CAT back in the driving seat as a defacto regulator rather than just one operator.
The Anonymous statement, if true, clearly marks out CAT Telecom as a legitimate target for the collective to attack.
A week earlier, Prime Minister General Prayuth Chanocha dismissed the cabinet resolutions pressing for the Single Gateway as a clerical error and vowed to deal with the clerk involved. Prayuth said that the Single Gateway was just an idea and earlier, at the Bangkok Post’s annual Post Forum, promised that it would be shelved.
Meanwhile, TelecomAsia has received a set of leaked documents that would suggest the Single Gateway project has been a priority and pushed by the highest levels of the army for years.
One of the documents dated as early as March 2006 call for the establishment of an army cyber-warfare group for information warfare.
Another document dated October 2006 established the army command, control, communication, computer and intelligence system (c4i).
The cache of documents also include recent e-army training material which clearly calls for the establishment of an “offensive defence” division.
One slide in particular listed target media that needed to be put under surveillance - Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Wordpress, Blogger, Flickr, Instagram and Tumblr. Local webboard Pantip.com was also in the list as were a number of media outlets known for their extreme views. LINE instant messaging was singled out as the only IM on the list.
The training materials taught the operatives to collect information and depicted four categories of national security targets - one of the pictures were of Muslim girls and the other the Prime Minister himself on a podium.