Thailand says it will seek to extradite former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, if he arrives as expected in Cambodia later this week.
Mr Thaksin, who's on the run from a graft conviction at home, has accepted an economic advisory role with the Cambodian government. That has infuriated authorities in Bangkok, who believe he'll use the post to further incite his supporters in Thailand.
Mr Thaksin is already engaged in a vigorous online campaign, posting every few minutes on Twitter, where he has more than 40,000 followers. Observers say the use of the internet is escalating in Thailand's internal political struggle.
Presenter: Linda Mottram, Canberra Correspondent
Speaker: Nicholas Farrelly, South East Asia specialist, Australian National University, Canberra
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FARRELLY: Thaksin Shinawatra since he was exiled from Thailand in 2006 has developed a suite of websites, some of which have now been taken offline.
But in that suite he's really put together information and arguments that ensure that he remains a key player in Thai political life.
These days he is a very active Twitterer, and through his Twitter page he keeps in contact with a lot of his supporters and followers, he keeps them up to date with some of his movements when he's travelling around the world he tends to offer them nuggets, ideas, suggestions.
But at other times he can use that kind of forum to really tap into what's going on in Thailand itself and influence how politics plays out on the ground.
MOTTRAM: What about Prime Minister Abhisit, is he able to match Thaksin's approach?
FARRELLY: Prime Minister Abhisit also has a Twitter page, he's also interested in using this technology but he isn't nearly as prolific and to some extent he seems to be lacking some of the technological nouse that Thaksin brings to bear.
We should remember that Thaksin made his initial fortune in the telecommunications business and in many ways this is the kind of thing that probably comes quite naturally to him and to his people.
MOTTRAM: And what about in terms of the wider forces; the red shirts versus the yellow shirts? Are we seeing a clear delineation of sites from them?
FARRELLY: We are and what we see is a battle between two very different kinds of politics that is playing itself out online.
There are those sites which we can see very clearly are aligned with the red shirt movement. On the other side we see some very powerful and very widely read sites that are explicitly yellow in their orientation.
The most famous of those yellow shirt sites is the one that belongs to yellow shirt leader, Sondhi Limthongkul, and that's his Manager website, based around the newspaper of the same name. Sondhi is also a telecommunications tycoon and he has really built up an incredible stable of websites, some of which he can use to influence political matters within the country.
MOTTRAM: And you have a particular favourite here called Liberal Thai, tell me about that?
FARRELLY: So Liberal Thai is a website that fills many of the gaps in the Thai mainstream media's coverage of Thai politics. It runs with the slogan, "We translate, you decide, we inform, you block".
And this is a slogan that makes a great deal of sense to those in Thailand who are struggling to get information about their country's politics that defeats the censors and gets around the other forms of barriers that have been put in place to try and stop open and critical discussion of many of the political players, including the Thai monarchy.
MOTTRAM: So this is where you'll see discussion of the monarchy and the future of the King?
FARRELLY: Absolutely on this site you'll see discussion that draws its inspiration from much of the English language content that circulates in newspapers in countries like Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, and from that content there will be translations made,
rendered I should say into very readable Thai and then put up online, open for comments from the wider audience so that people get a sense of exactly what is being said about Thailand outside the country. Much of that information isn't otherwise easily available inside Thailand.
MOTTRAM: Now a lot of that is very risky territory too, legally for anybody engaging in it. Are there attempts to block these sites by the authorities given that content?
FARRELLY: The efforts by the authorities to block these kinds of websites are ongoing, and in those efforts there is a strong sense that anything online that is even moderately critical of the yellow shirt side of the palace,
which is largely aligned with that yellow shirt end of the political spectrum, is very dangerous to the country, to its national security and to everything that the Thai nation stands for.
MOTTRAM: And just finally you mentioned recently that there'd been a comment made that this could be the world's first internet insurgency. What's your view of that?
FARRELLY: I think that we're seeing a battle between two sides that are at this stage quite unwilling to compromise and in their lack of compromise we do see all sorts of aggressive tactics. The aggression on the government side is to put down what they I'm sure do see as a digital uprising against royal authority and against the political establishment.
On the other side there is a great concern that the coup of 2006 and everything that it meant for Thai democracy has been such a setback that there needs to be a new effort to debate Thailand's future and in that debate we are seeing the insurgents of Thai political life finding forums online.
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