Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, and it may be a little bit opaque, should Thailand’s sovereignty be designed by a foreign data centre? When I first heard about these data centres - because frankly I was a little bit ignorant - it sounded like a good thing. It was oh, extra computing power and dah, dah, dah. Now I am seeing all this news come out of the States and it's like what are these even for? And apparently they suck up water like a pit in the earth, which then brings into question all the years we have had to listen about the terrors of climate change, and environmentalism is so important, but meanwhile, if a data centre needs something, "oh no, we can give them all the water in Niagara Falls and let's not even worry about it." On top of that, I saw somebody on X the other day that was saying "why is it they need to take fresh potable water also?" If it's only for cooling, wouldn't any kind of water do? Oh no, it's got to be fresh, perfectly filtered water. Why? Are we feeding the machines at the expense of living humanity at this point? It's just insane. It's not insane but it's some Brave New World level stuff we are dealing with here. Of that there is no doubt. That said, I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Immigration to be digitized with new app. Now in a video I made contemporaneously with this one, I get into the analysis of all this new app stuff in immigration, so that is in its own self-incapsulated video. That said, the rest of this video goes to a different place. 

Really quickly before we get into this, people have asked me over the past few months - yes by the way, to the folks that were in our News Service last year, bwh.club is coming; I am working on it. I am sorry it's taking so long, life sort of gets a hold of you. I'm talking to the folks this coming week, yeah next week probably, regarding I'm going to have a website and some other things, there are going to be facilities; I am working on it; I do want to get back to doing some level of news albeit maybe in a more less formalized way, but I am working on that. And folks have asked me, how can we support you? We know you're not monetized. We may not need to avail ourselves of a law firm, but is there anything else we can do? As I have explained in other videos, my better half and I set up a restaurant here in downtown Bangkok. The name of the place is Pancake Palace, as the name implies it's breakfast anytime, but we also have American Diner style food, not breakfast. We also have a British breakfast, an English breakfast set as well. It's not just American breakfast. As the name implies, again we have pancakes, but we also have hamburgers, cheeseburgers, chilli dogs, hot dogs, buffalo wings; we've also got chilli bowls. We've got grilled cheese sandwiches; we have got Coke in glass bottles. If you're interested, and you want to come on by and support us, go ahead and have a look at the link in the description below. 

Now I want to jump into this again from the standpoint of this notion of "designing sovereignty." This creeped me out. So again, Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Immigration to be digitized with new app. Quoting directly: "Amazon Web Services (AWS), Digital Identity Co Ltd and the Thai Immigration Bureau have partnered to develop the Thailand Immigration Management System (THIM), the country's first web and mobile platform for this sector." All right so we all know Amazon Web Service, so yeah, that's basically Big Data if you will. But then my question was, what's Digital Identity Co Ltd? That's a private company. So I went over to Gemini over on Google and I just typed in "what is this?" and it came back with this translated into English, I'll throw it up on screen, quoting directly: "Digital Identity Co Ltd is a provider of identity and corporate verification services." What does that mean? I'm a Thai; I have a Thai ID card. What further needs to be done in terms of verification of me? And then Corporate Verification Services. What does that mean? And what are they verifying? What gives them the authority to verify? “The company specializes in document authentication (such as passports), facial verification matching against databases, and providing consultation, design, and installation for related software and hardware systems." Well it is my understanding, I mean this is occurring at a public-private context. There are new laws in Thailand regarding data protection of the public, so where does that factor in with these people? And again, why is a private company doing this? I mean if the Government's developing an app, whatever, but there is some private intermediary that gets all of our data in there somewhere? Why? And to what end? And what further data needs to be had on a Thai? Again, we have ID cards. Our documentation or Biometrics and things are already recorded. Quoting further: "The headquarters is located in Bangkok (Chatuchak district), having registered and commenced commercial operations in late 2024." So they have only been going for 14 months? So what's their expertise? Why were they picked for this? Quoting further: "Additionally, in Thailand's technology sector, the term "Digital ID" often relates to other prominent identity verification entities, such as: National Digital ID Co., Ltd (NDID):" - and I did a video on this NDID; ndid, and did anybody ask for that? Who wants this? - quoting further: "Thailand's central platform for digital identity verification and electronic Know-Your-Customer services." I don't like “know your customer services” to begin with. I don't want to know my customers. I want to know that they brought money in and value was exchanged for value. I'm tired of this nanny-mindering and I'm really tired of it being just presented as both a fait accompli as well as completely normal. That we are "oh, it's just what we're doing." This nonsense was pulled in COVID, of "well it's just, because COVID" - except for the fact that COVID was nonsense. It was a sham, it was a fraud, it was basically - okay you can sit there and nitpick over those words - but it was a massive over-exaggeration, and it was completely unnecessary. It shut down our economies for 2 to 3 years; we've really never really recovered to what we were prior to that, and we have just seen this continuous roll out of increasingly totalitarian measures which are apropos of what? What are we getting out of any of this? What does the government get by having your biometric facial data on hand? What benefit is derived from that? I don't get it. I mean and especially in a context where we already have Thai IDs - this stuff already exists - so what are these private companies coming in and how are they adding value? It looks to me like it's extractive. Because I remember reading something years back, where they said, "data is the new oil". People's data is what you're going to use. Now my personal opinion, I think the West is hitting the tail end of the logic of their sort of Financial and Banking System and everything, and this is sort of an aspect of that where it's like cannibalizing itself as it sort of diminishes. But here in Thailand where we don't have those problems, although we seem to still be under the spell of the West, what's this going to benefit anyone with? I just don't see it. That said, quoting further:

ThaiID: The official mobile application for digital identity verification developed by the Department of Provincial Administration, Ministry of the Interior." Is this similar to IDMe in the United States, which is this massive new rollout thing where it's just a whole extra layer to deal with the Government and provides no real value added. It is just a bunch of extra work for the public and a whole lot less accountability and work for the government. That is what it looks like to me. Setting aside the totalitarian, dystopian aspects of all this, where is the benefit? What are we getting out of this? This reminds me of the Digital Wallet where they were like "oh we're going to do the Digital Wallet; it's going to make everything great." How? Money that is programmable, that can be tracked and traced, can be turned on and off, can have a radius of usage? How does anybody benefit from that? And we are going into more debt for all of this stuff. I have talked about it; I've seen it in the Bangkok Post. There's been emergency debt increases and things, and I haven't really gotten into it recently, mostly because I didn't understand what it was for. I thought primarily what we were looking at was a response to Iran where the government basically said "look, we're going to need some dry powder here just in case we need to buy more oil reserves." Okay, that made some sense but if all they are going to do is pay private companies to spy on us using national debt, I really question whether that is a good idea. Now that said, and getting into the whole issue of this "designing sovereignty", this didn't come from nowhere. In fact, I may make the thumbnail for this, a thumbnail from the old show Designing Women. Why a 44-year-old man knows a late 80s, early '90s sitcom involving a bunch of middle-aged women, I believe in Georgia. Well I was once a young boy, and my mother watched her shows, so I remember that show. So when it comes to "designing sovereignty", this is what we're doing, designing women, whatever. That said, quoting directly again from this article: "THIM's architecture uses AWS’s services such as artificial intelligence-powered optical character recognition for passport document verification, e-KYC workflows, compute orchestration, and security and compliance." Well first I will go ahead and try to drop a link to a recent Jimmy Dore show excerpt, clip, from him and tip of the hat to Jimmy, where he was talking about, it's turning out AI is actually more expensive than just using people. 90% of this AI stuff is really kind of a lot of hogwash really. It is not as advertised, I'll put it that way. There's one in there where one company in the United States ended up getting billed $500 million because they didn't put any parameters on their employees’ usage of Claude, which is apparently an AI system. What is that? I mean that doesn't even make any sense. 

Again, setting aside the totalitarian, the dystopian, all of that, where is the benefit we're getting out of any of this? We already have Immigration; we already have the people. So what? We're going to put all these people out of work, or we are just going to have a bunch of government employees that don't do anything? And we, us plebs, admittedly with immigration I get it. It's foreigners but then they just have to deal with a system, and by the way, this is all again put on there like this is all going to be some flawless non-buggy thing. Anybody who has ever dealt with the online 90-day reporting system can tell you, this stuff is less than optimal at best. That said, quoting further: "Vatsun Thirapatarapong, Country Manager of AWS Thailand, said Governments across Southeast Asia increasingly view digital infrastructure as "a strategic enabler of national competitiveness and citizen trust." What does that mean? and by the way, Governments; governments or the people across Southeast Asia? And who in these Governments? Six bureaucrats somewhere who think it's a good idea to nanny-mind us and nitpick us all the time? and they thought it was a “strategic enabler of national competitiveness and citizen trust". What? I may now change the thumbnail. I'll put up that scene from The Departed where it's Citizen's Bank and I probably won't use Designing Women, I like this better. Where it is Citizen’s and it is crossed out. Citizen, "citizen trust". What? Trust in what? The Government's voracious appetite for our data and its voracious desire to constantly nitpick us, nanny-mind us and oh yeah, like figure out everything we are doing so they can tax and trace it all. Citizen trust. “National competitive" what, are we in a race? This is a cross country race? What? National competitive, and how does biometric data gathering increase and enhance national competitiveness? In what way? And who are we competing with? The Martians? The Tongans? Who? This is nonsense platitudinous phrases. You know there is something up when you hear the platitudinous phrases that make no ostensible sense. 

That said, quoting further: "A crucial factor for the public sector is keeping personally identifiable information within the country." How about you just not collect it like this? If we are Thai, you already have our data, so how does adding this do anything, other than adding citizen trust and national competitiveness, what ever that means. And then finally, this is where, this was at the end of this article. Quoting directly: "AWS utilizes a "sovereignty by design" approach, ensuring all data remains in Thailand and is strictly managed and controlled under Thai jurisdiction." Well, says who? If it it's the Thai Authorities doing it yeah, I know that they'll deal with it right, but we're now, again, it comes back to undue foreign influence. We have talked about this with OECD, we have talked about this with World Economic Forum; it's this amorphous sort of etheric, misty, opaque sort of supranational organization that wants to do X, Y and Z here in Thailand and meanwhile, if we just don't have anything to do with them, we will probably be better off. The safest way to keep Thai data in Thailand, is to not let outsiders have access to it. Seems pretty simple to me; then it's foolproof. And by the way, how many times, in how many countries, have we seen how many different “hacks” and “leaks” and all kinds of other things involving these big data corporations that then “oh, we got hacked” or “oh, we left something open and somebody found something and therefore they gained access to all this stuff” - both government and non-government.

Really, this stuff, I find it deeply concerning. I'm very hopeful cooler heads prevail before we go down this line because again, how much money are we going to spend in terms of the public funds and what benefit do we get out of all of this?