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E-laws: still a lot of work to be done

Experience has shown that each step in passing a cyber law takes longer than anticipated, while existing laws need amendments

Work began on updating Thailand's laws for the digital age in 1992, when the National IT Committee (NITC) started work on modernising Thailand's public sector bodies. In 1995, the NITC set up a sub-committee to study the drafting of IT laws. Back then, the NITC secretariat was Nectec, and it was Nectec deputy director Dr Chadamas Thuvasethakul who has worked on these cyber laws for the past 12 years.

In 1998, the NITC sub-committee had identified six urgent cyber laws, which were put to the Cabinet of Ministers for approval. These are laws on electronic transactions, electronic signatures, data privacy, electronic funds transfer, national information infrastructure and computer crime.

Chadamas explained that the intention was to enact a balance of laws to help promote the use if ICT and e-commerce, and at the same time enact laws to prevent people from abusing technology.

The Cabinet gave the green light in 1998 and a law drafting sub-committee was set up under the lead of Sethaporn Cusripituck, who is today one of the NTC commissioners. He decided that the most urgent law was the electronic transaction law.

A draft quickly followed based on model laws by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) and this law was passed in December 2001.

However, things slowed down in 2002 when the government started to get stuck into the business of civil service reform. This had a direct effect on the laws, as many required an office or secretariat, and there was much debate on which Ministry each needed to be under.

The other delay was that the reform led to the establishment of the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology. All the relevant work under the Ministry of Science and Technology had to be passed to the new, understaffed, Ministry. This included the secretariat of the NITC, which was shifted from Nectec to the MICT's Office of the Permanent Secretary.

Chadamas explained that one of the biggest delays came when the Office of the Official Information Commission felt that the the data privacy law should be under its jurisdiction rather than the MICT. They disagreed so much that they put forward their own draft law to the Cabinet to compete with the Nectec-drafted version.

In the end, the ICT Minister of that time, Suvit Khunkitti, managed to negotiate a compromise whereby most of the MICT's points were included in the OIC's version, but they could not agree on control of the Data Privacy Office would be via the OIC, as an autonomous agency under the Prime Minister's Office, or the MICT.

''The laws merged quite well, but what they can't agree on are the policy decisions, that's why the law is still pending today,'' she said.

Other changes that happened were the merging of the Electronic Funds Transfer Law into the Electronic Commerce law, and the recent passage of the Computer Misuse Act by the current National Legislative Assembly.

Chadamas said that it was just a coincidence that the first law the NLA debated was the Computer Misuse Act, as it was next in the queue before the September 19 Coup. Also, it was renamed Computer Misuse rather than Computer Crime as its scope was only recently extended to cover new acts such as spam and phishing, which is a misuse rather than a crime in the traditional sense.

Bangkok Post, 07 Jan 2007