Govt renews gateway plea

The government has urged cyber activists to moderate their protests against its single internet gateway proposal.

“Cyber activists should restrain themselves. Nothing about the [single internet gateway] project has been done yet,” Suwaphan Tanyuvardhana, a Prime Minister’s Office Minister, said yesterday.

The warning came after activists threatened a new round of attacks on state agency websites unless the government scraps its single internet gateway policy by Oct 14.

Last week the activists launched a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) on government websites to overload servers and make the web pages temporarily unavailable or slow down.

The group of cyber activists wrote on its Facebook wall called “Single Gateway: Thailand Internet Firewall”, on Saturday claiming the project had been approved by the cabinet and that action to finalise the scheme is now under way.

“How can the government scrap its gateway plan? It hasn’t been enacted yet,” the government’s deputy spokesman, Werachon Sukhondhapatipak, said yesterday.

On Friday, Prime Minister Prayut Chano-cha reassured netizens about the gateway policy, saying he had not directed any state agency to go ahead with the project.

Instead, the premier instructed agencies to come up with security measures to protect internet-based social networking sites against cyber attacks.

The single gateway was one of several options raised, he added.

The Information and Communication Technology Ministry has been monitoring the activities of this cyber activist group, Mr Suwanphan said.