After Wikileaks released documents revealing that the Thai authorities allegedly purchased a surveillance program from an Italian firm, the leaked documents also reported that the staffs from the IT firm came to Thailand’s Deep South to deliver certain products.
On 8 July 2015, Wikileaks, a whistleblower website, released series of email correspondence and documents, which show that the Royal Thai Police and the Royal Thai Army each spent 286,482 and 360,000 euro respectively in 2014 to purchase a surveillance program called Remote Control System (RCT) from an Italian surveillance malware vendor Hacking Team (HT).
The emails published by Wikileaks also show that the certain HT personnel came to Thailand’s Deep South to deliver products and carry out certain operations.
The emails show the correspondence between three individuals two of whom are IT field application engineers of the Italian firm and a man who arranged the itinerary for the HT staffs to come to Pattani, one of the three restive Deep South provinces of Thailand, from 30 May-6 June 2015.
The was no email from the customers of HT included in the leaked documents. However, the emails showed that the two HT staffs were discussing about delivering certain IT products of the hacking team to the Deep South.
On Monday, 20 July 2015, Pol Lt Gen Prawut Thawornsiri, the spokesman of the Royal Thai Police, said that the Thai police has no policy to spy on personal information of individuals.
“We might have used it as a case study, but definitely not bought it,” Bangkok Post quoted the police officer as saying.
Lt Col Winthai Suvaree, the spokesperson of the Thai Army, also told Bangkok Post which published an article on the leaked documents recently that the army knew nothing about the purchase of a surveillance program from the Italian operator.