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Thai Premier Spams Nation, Prompts Consumer Outcry
patiwat writes "Newly installed Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's first act was to send a spam SMS to tens of millions of Thai cell phone subscribers. The message, signed 'Your PM,' urged people to help him solve the Thai political crisis and respond with their postal code at a charge of 3 baht (10 US cents). The new premier was criticized for violating privacy regulations."
I wonder what this plan to solve the crisis involves. Figuring out who is more likely to respond to unsolicited mail/email/etc...?
I think the charge of 3 baht per message says it all.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The charge is from the mobile network, not Saree.
No existe.
The postal code reply would give the government a clearer idea about which parts of the country wanted to take part in the government's attempt to solve the crisis.
Seems more likely that you'll get a sense of where the concentrations are of idiots who believe that they can actually solve a political crisis by sending their postal code in a text message.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
People over use the word spam these days. All the new PM did was try to rally his people to a cause. It was in bad taste perhaps but seeing as how Thailand doesn't have the type of emergency broadcast system we have here in the USA I'd think this isn't totally uncalled for.
If he had made this a habit and over used it then I would call it spam, but this looks like a one time deal during a genuine state of emergency. I wouldn't call that spam personally.
...get the phone company to provide the cell tower location they are connected to....
I'm not sure you comprehend the logistics involved in doing this for tens of millions of users. And besides supposedly, according to the article, people spending the effort to send back the text message will give him an indication of "those who wants to 'help' solve the crisis", not "those who received this message". Otherwise, just pulling the address database from the telecoms would be a helluva lot easier then your method.
This whole attempt, of course, speaks volumes, mostly to the apparent idiocy of a PM who believes that either:
1) The people who respond really want to help (instead of just responding to the novelty of it)
2) People that don't respond want the crisis to continue
3) The people that are intelligent/capable enough to actually provide major support for his efforts would be attracted to his cause by this text message.
I'm betting more that he's actually not an idiot, but has some shady deal/debt with the telecoms.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Newly installed Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's first act was to send a spam SMS to tens of millions of Thai cell phone subscribers. The message... urged people to help him solve the Thai political crisis and respond with their postal code at a charge of 3 baht (10 US cents)
Step one: don't make it so easy for a politician to send a text message to everyone in the country that has a cell phone. If they can do that, they can abuse it.
The cost to send an SMS in Thailand is typically 3 baht. Pre-paid plans on the major carriers (True, DTAC, AIS) all charge about 3 baht per SMS.
The SMS wasn't sent to all mobile phones either. I have 3 phones, and the only one to receive the SMS was the one without Thai fonts.
The papers tried to make a big deal out of it over here, but I haven't met a single person who so much as mentioned it.
If this gets too much press coverage, politicians in other countries might get the idea to start doing this!
Thailand *is* in a crisis situation right now, and the PM could fudge his way out of this.
But the US auto industry is also in a crisis. Would you like to receive some spam everyday from US Senator Carl Levin, asking you to support the bailout? (For the non-US folks, Carl Levin happens to be the Senator from Michigan, where most of the US auto industry is based).
If the government in the country where I live gets the ability to spam everyone, as they please, first I will chuck my cell phone, and then I will move.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I read the article, but couldn't decipher the picture with the Thai text.
But I think I recognized "Pad Thai" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pad_thai) in there somewhere.
So this message could be just "spam, Pad Thai and spam." There is not much spam in that. Of course, you could ask the waiter to replace the Pad Thai with spam, and the you would have "spam, spam and spam."
Hmmm . . . Pad Thai . . . is it ok to eat that for breakfast?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
If every politician and businessmen here sent a message to rally people for their cause, we'd end up with dozens of spam messages per day. Actually, I get ~2 spam messages/day from businesses in Thailand already (I live here).
This is abuse of communication, not privacy.
Oh and it was from 'yourPM', no spaces. I got it on my cell, here is the translation:
"I am your new prime minister. I ask that everyone join hands for Thailand / if you are interested in talking with me please send me a postcard to your main postoffice at #9191 (3 baht)"
My thai friends thought the SMS was a prank . . . The majority population feels he became PM through very immoral means, so I can see this SMS message making a lot of people not happy over here . . .
I may be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure that Thaksin (the deposed PM from two years ago) sold all his stock in the telecom and moved the money to Singapore in the weeks before the coup.
Also, the new PM is from a coalition of minor Thai parties and has nothing to do with Thaksin.
This story also appears to be a non-starter in Thailand. I went back to the 18th at thairath.co.th (a Thai language newspaper) and found no mention of this story in the political section.
Anyway, I'm not sure I would consider it spam if Obama had a message stating something like "I, the new President, invite you, the people of the U.S., to join together and help us rise out of our current situation. I welcome your comments." (The picture in the Bangkok Post is too blurry for me to make out every word the Thai PM wrote, but that's the gist of it.) In fact, I fully expect Obama to do something very similar in his first week, though it will be an announcement on TV pre-empting your favorite show. I doubt it will be quite as short or too the point, either.
Put identity in the browser.
GOOD DAY TO YOU SIRS OR MADAM
I AM [PRIME MINISTER OF KINGDOM OF THAILAND]. I HAVE BUSINESS PROPOSITION TO MAKE YOU. Have URGENT POLITICAL CRISIS to get out of the country; need you to send 10c ([TEN CENTS]) to me and it's yours.
Is NOT pyramid scheme
Signed,
[Thai prime minister]
None of this is to absolve Mr Thaksin and his cronies of their sins. But even his gravest abuse -- a "war on drugs" in 2003, in which police were suspected of hundreds of extra-judicial killings -- was not entirely his fault. The dirty war against supposed drug-dealers was misguidedly supported by Thais of all social classes. Even the king, in an equivocal speech that year, sounded at times as if he approved of it.
Wrong. Thaksin explicitly gave the police in the north the right to execute suspected drug dealers on sight. No right to a trial by peers. No trial for the public record. Just a bullet to the back of the head. It wasn't "suspected." It was well-documented and widely reported.
Never mind that the police up there are just organized crime and used the "War on Drugs" to consolidate power. You didn't even need to be a low-level drug dealer because the police could just plant some heroine and be cleared. A friend of a friend was executed that way. (The army is no better. They fight the police over what part of the country to control. I know guys who have been at the meetings dividing the drug routes between the two.)
The only good thing that came out of TRT's reign was OTOP (One Tambon One Product). All the pork projects, cheap loans, and other Eua Athorn projects were just ways for TRT to buy and keep popular support from upcountry while mortgaging the country's future and lining the pockets of Thaksin and his friends.
For about forty years, Thailand was the only country in the area that had any prosperity. The only constant during that time was the king. The Economist seems to believe that people are brainwashed to follow him. They aren't. If you get close to them, they'll talk about their misgivings. They'll even talk about inbreeding. Still, Thaksin lost his popular support when he claimed to be sovereign and at the level of the king. That's because almost all of them truly love and revere him.
Everyone fears the day he dies and the crown prince becomes the new king. He doesn't have the moral backbone to lead a largely conservative and Buddhist country. He's the Prince Charles of Thailand.
It is even possible to dream of the red- and yellow-shirt movements transforming themselves into a well-behaved, mainstream two-party system with broad public participation.
The fact that the Economist wants a two-party system for Thailand just proves that they have their heads up their asses. They don't even discuss Islamic separatists. Wow.
p.s. I used to "joke" about Thailand's war on drugs being a real war and that U.S. officials should learn to use English correctly.
Put identity in the browser.