Bangkok: Thai authorities have detained at least nine people on suspicion of hacking, a senior junta official said yesterday, following days of disruption to government websites sparked by the passing of a controversial cyber censorship law.
Earlier this month Thailand's rubber-stamp parliament unanimously approved a new security law that will make it much easier for the junta to scrub the web of content it dislikes.
The broadly-worded bill bans people from uploading anything deemed "in breach of good morality" and empowers a new committee to take down websites.
Since the bill's passing, hactivists have targeted Thai government websites.
"We have arrested some hackers, there were about nine people and we will continue arresting them," deputy prime minister Prawit Wongsuwan, the junta's number two, said yesterday.
Yesterday, police in Bangkok paraded a 19-year-old hacking suspect who had been handed to them by the military after undergoing interrogation for an unspecified number of days.
"The suspect confessed that he faked an identity and accessed the system (of) the royal police office," Supaset Chokchai, commander of the national police's computer crimes unit, said.
Rights groups and cyber activists have vowed to challenge the new law in the courts.
