Claws of cyber bill have your name on them

The men are itching to pry, to take a peek into your Line chats, your Facebook inboxes, your email history, the bread crumbs of your digital life. Naturally, you cover your screen and say no. Naturally, in the age of Snowden-Manning-Assange, we're conscious of the fact that the sphere of online privacy is not fair game, or at worst it shouldn't be.

But the bureaucratic voyeurs and paranoid eavesdroppers want to read your private messages and catch you saying the wrong things (or the right things that are too brutal) so much that they're arming themselves with the law. A bonus-pack of digital economy bills was approved this month by the coup-appointed cabinet and will go through the coup-appointed National Legislative Assembly. Among them is the Cyber Security Bill, written with claws outstretched. When critics voiced concern that certain articles would empower state officials to burrow into your hard drive in an unconstitutional manner and probably to violate media freedoms, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, true to form, bellowed at reporters: "So what if I want to pass the bill?"

Get that? So what?

The world is debating the delicate balance between security concerns and human rights. Here we're debating a not-so-delicate balance between political ideology and political hooliganism. We're also debating whether we suffer a case of schizophrenia: reform without listening, progress achieved by backtracking, unconstitutional constitution writing, a creative economy that champions censorship, and now a digital ambition that believes in impeding information.

Article 35 of the Cyber Security Bill is the bomb, or one of them. It empowers the authorities to "request co-operation" from service providers and probe the electronic communications of users under the blanket excuse of national security. It doesn't take Edward Snowden, J Edgar Hoover or Watergate wiretappers to tell us that this is a legal basis for mass surveillance — the sad part is the fact that this disturbing law isn't written exactly to prevent cyberattacks or nefarious hacking, but to bolster the Thought Police to crack down on rogue ideas and blasphemy, notably, as we believe, the lese majeste crime. In the past months, soldiers have visited seminars, classrooms and theatre stages, and next they'll have an all-area pass to visit our digital bedrooms — destroying the lock and storming in like rabid crusaders, all without the need for court orders.

The argument goes, "If you're clean, why worry?" If you just post the pictures of your ego-maniacal cats, why cry foul? Such is the level of contempt against our most precious belonging that must be protected by the law of god and men: the privacy of our thought. In this pressure room of smokescreens, half-truths and state paranoia, to pass another law that can be exploited and weaponised against your own citizens is to further confirm the autocratic blueprint of the post-coup strongmen. That fluffy roadmap to democracy — which never sounded convincing to begin with — will be proven a lie if this search-without-warrant bill comes into play.

Well, so what? Several civil organisations have criticised the bill and now there's an online petition for the government to reconsider it. And unless it is trapped in some Cold War fantasy, it should. No one is doubting the need to support the digital economy, but we should doubt the bills that have been written in the shadows, and that have the potential to discourage companies from trusting their business information with us. We should also doubt anyone who wrote this sentence as part of the controversial Article 35: the authorities have the power to "access postal mail, telegraph, telephone, fax, and all electronic communication devices…" What? Telegraph? Was someone high? That unintended joke is a sign of the anachronisms that characterise the way this creaky coup-installed system is being run.

It had been expected that the grip would tighten. It's just all the more disheartening (and funny) to witness the display of gauche, old-fashioned, 1960s military iron-fistedness that purports to know anything about the 21st century digital rush. To control the sophisticated new world, you need a more sophisticated brand of hypocrisy and cunning (think the American surveillance scandal). That our men had the nerve to ask Line for access to its users' accounts and to ask Facebook to join a meeting to discuss the blocking of sensitive pages — only to be refused flatly by both — is enough to show their level of understanding of the world. To arm these people with more tools of control isn't only unacceptable but downright dangerous.