In a complete turnaround from his first interview after taking office in October last year, Information and Communication Technology Minister Professor Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom has announced that for the final half of his tenure, he will focus on Thailand's IT and software sector and that Thailand's "IT brand to the world" will involve embedded systems and open source software.
In an exclusive interview, Sitthichai said that he will unveil plans to support these two promising and niche industries in due course, now that he has managed to save the two telecom state enterprises, CAT Telecom and TOT Corporation, which were in dire need of assistance when he came to power.
"Call me old-fashioned but I believe that the core communication network still needs to be under the government. What if we have an economic collapse and the private sector turns off networks in remote areas?" he asked.
He also said that while the concept of merging IT and communications into ICT may be possible on a technical or engineering level, when it comes to policy, it will always have to be "C" first and IT later.
"Even if we put more money into ICT infrastructure, it won't solve all our problems. We need education. Fiber-to-the-home does not fit into our culture as we do not like to work at home," he said.
Sittichai said that censoring YouTube was something that anyone in his position would have to do without a second thought and that everyone around him agreed with the action. "I am a minister serving his Majesty the King. If it happens again somewhere else, I will do it again. It's not something you have to think about."
Asked about the 17,699 Web sites currently blocked by the MICT, Sitthichai claimed that he has only blocked around 30, all of which were pornographic, and that the rest were the handiwork of the previous government. He pointed out that Camfrog was unblocked as soon as they put in a self-regulating feature to prevent the strippers and that YouTube will be unblocked as soon as the offending videos are removed.
"It was a statement of our position and it worked. Google is now in negotiation with us and they are considering removing the videos in question," he said.
The reason the MICT had to block the entire YouTube.com domain rather than just the offending pages was because not every ISP had a cache engine or transparent proxy that could do the advanced filtering needed, hence they had to block by IP address. He said that he is now working with those private ISPs so that they will install the right cache engines that can allow more precise blocking in future.
He was unconcerned that the actions had introduced an entire generation of people to the use of anonymous proxies and encryption to evade state control.
However, he did put yet another interesting spin on the new cybercrime law when asked if users of anonymizing proxies such as Tor would now be prosecuted. "I don't think the intent of the law is to prosecute anonymous proxy use. If you use proxies to access legal sites, then it is fine. If you use proxies to access bad sites, then that is illegal. Whether you use proxies or not is beside the point."
The other interesting point in the cybercrime law is that it is now illegal to e-mail pornographic or other illegal material. So how is the MICT going to enforce it?
"We cannot monitor every message. The point of the law is that if we have evidence presented in the form of an e-mail record, we can now act on it. It is the same with the telephone [and wiretap information] today. You cannot say illegal things over the telephone," he said, reassuring us that Thailand would not be turned into a police state overnight.
Sitthichai has also made a u-turn regarding 3G, which he now agrees with as the future of mobile. 4G is at least 10 years away and current radio technology simply cannot deliver the bandwidth needed, he claimed.
"4G will not work below 10GHz. I think we should have a carrier frequency of around 50GHz, or at least 30GHz. Mahanakorn university today is doing research into 30GHz and 60GHz, but it is still at least 10 years away. I've changed my mind and I think that we still have a window of opportunity for 3G but unfortunately, we still do not have an NBC (National Broadcasting Committee) to allocate spectrum," he said.
Sitthichai went as far as predicting that in 15 years, historians will call WiMax the first attempt at 4G and one that did not work.
The Software Industry Promotion Agency (Sipa), an autonomous agency under the ICT Ministry, has been the center of controversy regarding the appointment of a number of executives who until recently were working for Shin Satellite and even one with the surname Damapong.
Its president, Dr Arvuth Ploysongsaeng, himself was vice president of Shin Satellite but was appointed under the previous, heavily politicized board some time before the current government. But why did Sitthichai not block the appointment of former Shin Satellite marketing director for broadband services, Thanapong Na Ranong, as vice president, among others? Furthermore, how did Sitthichai come up with a Software Industry Promotion Board that has no experience in the software industry?
Sitthichai explained that he was not directly involved in the selection of the Sipa board and that when presented with a shortlist of names, he simply told the selection committee to sort the names by degree of conflict of interest and said that is how the current board was appointed.
"In the telecom and aviation sectors, you see how much of a mess we got when we have people with a vested interest on the board of directors. It's not that I do not trust the software industry, but I am simply working to the same standard as other boards," he said.
As for the growing number of former Shin Satellite staff working three stories under him in Sipa, Sitthichai dismissed the concerns since Sipa is not an organization of strategic national security and he was not going to micro-manage Arvuth's selection of subordinates.
Asked why he was talking about buying back the Thaicom satellites when they already belonged to the Royal Thai Government under a Build Transfer Operate contract, Sitthichai said that he never spoke of buying back the satellites, and that it was a misinterpretation by the media. What he did say was that if the people so desired, he would find a way to buy back the operating concession from Singapore.
So why is he not doing anything now and why has all that talk resulted in no action? Can the MICT not simply cancel the operating contract as Shin Satellite seems to have broken a number of laws? For example, the Budget Act, which requires the insurance money from the crippled Thaicom 3 to be paid to the Ministry of Finance, or the reduction in Shin corporation's holding in Shin Satellite, which was never approved by the cabinet as was stipulated in the original contract.
Sitthichai explained that he was powerless to act on these, and many other telecom-related contract matters, as they have been passed from the MICT to the Council of State and are awaiting a ruling by the council, essentially the government lawyer, on whether the contracts were broken or not. Nothing was as clear cut as the media had made out and he has to wait for the official opinion to come down before he makes any move, which hopefully will not be too far away.
However, Sitthichai was more vocal on the long-running smart ID card saga. "Yes, I did think of stopping the project, but the public seems to think that it's cool. Personally, I think the project is nonsense, but it is something that the people demand. Who am I to go against the will of the people? All I can do is get acceptable cards at the cheapest price. I'm not brave enough politically to tell everyone that we should go back to using the old type cards," he said.
The reason that the Terms of Reference had not been updated to include the latest encryption technology was that he did not want the card to be expensive and that the card was not to be used to its full potential anyway.
As for the aborted card procurement--which involved his former student Jumrud Sawangsamud and the IRC-led consortium that failed a clause in the Terms of Reference on the burn test that arguably no card could pass--Sitthichai said that he would in fact welcome a lawsuit from IRC and promised to fully cooperate with disclosing information. He added he would not protect civil servants if there really is any wrongdoing within the ministry.
As for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project proposed by Nicholas Negroponte and which it had been reported that Thailand would be one of the first buyers, the ICT Minister suggested that we should concentrate on industry standard computers rather than this first generation proprietary solution.
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