Bangkok: A group of anonymous internet activists has set up a website to display information about Thailand that comes from the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks, which is blocked to some viewers in the Southeast Asian country.
The group calling itself Wikicong said on Friday it set up the thaileaks.info site as "a tool to break the censorship" — an apparent reference to alleged efforts by the Thai government to block access to the material, which includes a private video of the country's Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn.
Some access to the main WikiLeaks site has been blocked in Thailand since at least late June. It has been accessible, however, using some variants of the domain name, and through some local internet service providers.
WikiLeaks drew worldwide publicity in late July when it posted a huge trove of secret US military documents about the war in Afghanistan.
Aree Jiyorarak, director of the Computer Crime Office of Thailand's Ministry of Information and Communication Technology, told The Associated Press that WikiLeaks is not blocked by his office, but may not be accessible because of a technical glitch.
"I know some people said that the website is blocked, but it's only a server problem," he said. "I can access Wikileaks from my office. I can assure you that the website is not blocked."
Blocked websites
Aree said about 1,300 websites were now blocked, mostly because they stream or have links to videos of political gatherings in Thailand. Other estimates put the number of blocked sites in the tens of thousands.
Thousands of anti-government demonstrators besieged the Thai capital for two months before a military crackdown scattered them in April. The street clashes between so-called Red Shirt protesters and government forces killed 91 people and injured more than 1,400, and Thai authorities have been wary about further unrest.
