State telecommunication surveillance: A comparative study of the US and Thai telecommunication privacy laws

Abstract

State surveillance of telecommunication data is argued to be necessary for lawful purpose such as national security and law enforcement On the contrary, such practice affected the right to privacy of individual. This paper explores the legal protection of telecommunication privacy in case of surveillance conducted by state agent. The scope of this paper includes the comparative study of the U.S. and Thai telecommunication privacy laws by using content analysis method. The results indicated that Thai constitution, compared to the U.S. constitution, protects privacy in the context of telecommunication data. However, the constitution provides exception for lawful state surveillance. Contrary to the U.S. where there is Federal statues directly regulate the interception, Thai laws relating to interception are not united. The result indicated that Thai related laws can be classified into two main groups. The first one is specific Acts prohibiting telecommunication surveillance. The second one is several fragmented laws authorizing government agent to conduct surveillance, including the interception of telecommunication data, in order to enforce those specific laws. Furthermore, compared to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) which is Federal statue directly regulate the interception, the Telecommunication Business Act (TBA) and the Computer Related Offence Act (CROA) of Thailand can be applied to protect privacy in telecommunication data. Nevertheless, the results of comparative study indicated that there are several controversial issues in applying these laws to protect telecommunication privacy in case of state surveillance.