This is cross posted from Bolo Bhi. We, at Bolo Bhi, have been actively involved in campaigning against Government’s attempt to blanket censor the internet. Below is a press kit designed to help journalists interested in writing about the issues. The FAQs are a resource for others who may want to understand our campaign better. … Continue reading »

By Eric Pfannier for The New York Times

Many countries censor the Internet, but few spell out their intentions as explicitly as Pakistan.

In an effort to tighten its control over the Internet, the government recently published a public tender for the “development, deployment and operation of a national-level URL filtering and blocking system.”

Technology companies, academic institutions and other interested parties have until March 16 to submit proposals for the $10 million project, but anger about it has been growing both inside and outside Pakistan.

Censorship of the Web is nothing new in Pakistan, which, like other countries in the region, says it wants to uphold public morality, protect national security or prevent blasphemy. The government has blocked access to pornographic sites, as well as, from time to time, mainstream services like Facebook and YouTube.

Until now, however, Pakistan has done so in a makeshift way, demanding that Internet service providers cut off access to specific sites upon request. With Internet use growing rapidly, the censors are struggling to keep up, so the government wants to build an automatic blocking and filtering system, like the so-called Great Firewall of China.

While China and other governments that sanitize the Internet generally do so with little public disclosure, Pakistan is being surprisingly forthcoming about its censorship needs. It published its request for proposals on the Web site of the Information and Communications Technology Ministry’s Research and Development Fund and even took out newspaper advertisements to publicize the project.

“The system would have a central database of undesirable URL’s that would be loaded on the distributed hardware boxes at each POP and updated on daily basis,” the request for proposals says, referring to uniform resource locators, the unique addresses for specific Web pages, and points of presence, or access points.

“The database would be regularly updated through subscription to an international reputed company maintaining and updating such databases,” according to the request, which was published last month.

The tender details a number of technical specifications, including the fact that the technology “should be able to handle a block list of up to 50 million URL’s (concurrent unidirectional filtering capacity) with processing delay of not more than 1 milliseconds.”

Following the Arab Spring, which demonstrated the power of the Internet to help spread political and social change, Pakistan’s move to clamp down has set off a storm of protest among free-speech groups in the country and beyond.

Opponents of censorship say they are doubly appalled because they associated this kind of heavy-handed approach more with the previous regime of Gen. Pervez Musharraf than with the current government of President Asif Ali Zardari.

“The authorities here are big fans of China and how it filters the Internet,” said Sana Saleem, chief executive of Bolo Bhi, a group that campaigns against restrictions on the Internet. “They overlook the fact that China is an autocratic regime and we are a democracy.”

“What makes this kind of censorship so insidious is that they always use national security, pornography or blasphemy as an explanation for blocking other kinds of speech,” Ms. Saleem said, adding that her site had been blocked for several months in 2010 when it made reference to a ban on Facebook. Access to the social networking service had been restricted because of a page featuring a competition to draw the prophet Mohammed — something that is considered blasphemous by Muslims.

The Technology Ministry’s Research and Development Fund says in its tender that the Internet filtering and blocking system will be “indigenously developed,” but campaigners like Ms. Saleem say they think it is likely the agency will try to adapt Western technology for the purpose.

To try to prevent this from happening, Ms. Saleem wrote to the chief executives of eight international companies that make Net filtering technology, asking them to make a public commitment not to apply for the Pakistani grant.

On Friday, one of them, Websense, which is based in San Diego, responded, declaring in a statement on its Web site that it would not seek the contract.

“Broad government censorship of citizen access to the Internet is morally wrong,” Websense said. “We further believe that any company whose products are currently being used for government-imposed censorship should remove their technology so that it is not used in this way by oppressive governments.”

Websense had previously withdrawn the use of its technology from Yemen after facing accusations from the OpenNet Initiative, a U.S.-Canadian academic group, and other organizations that it had been used by the government of that country to stifle political expression on the Internet.

Governments around the world buy filtering and blocking technology to root out illegal content like child pornography. Some private companies employ it to restrict access to social networks and other distractions on company computers.

But the use of Western technology to rein in political speech in countries with repressive regimes has come under increasing scrutiny since the Arab Spring. The OpenNet Initiative said in a report last year that at least nine governments in the Middle East or North Africa had used such products, with the Western companies maintaining lists of sites to be blocked, including sites featuring skeptical views of Islam and even dating services.

Even before implementing its new system, Pakistan has been an active censor. The country was 151st, out of 179, on a ranking of media freedom by the Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders in 2011.

“Reporters Without Borders urges you to abandon this project, which would reinforce the arsenal of measures for communications surveillance and Internet censorship that have already been put in place by your government,” the group wrote in a letter Friday to Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani.

To free-speech advocates in Pakistan, the government’s seeming insouciance about censorship is a particular cause for alarm.

“This is a case study,” said Ms. Saleem of Bolo Bhi, which is based in Karachi and whose name means “speak up.” “No government has ever done this so publicly.”

Filed under: Arab, blasphemy laws, China, Freedoms, Islam, Pakistan, Pakistanis Tagged: Arab Spring, blasphemy, Censoring in Pakistan, Censors, Censorship, China, Facebook, Great Firewall of China, Internet, Middle East, national-level URL filtering and blocking system, North Korea, Pakistan, Pakistan Censors, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, Reporters Without Borders, URL, URL Blocking, Web Pages, World Wide Web, WWW

Google, Reddit, and Wikipedia all are using their considerable web presence today to protest legislation pending in the U.S. Congress. According to the Google announcement:

Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American business. Millions of Internet users and entrepreneurs already oppose SOPA and PIPA.

It may appear to the casual reader that this is an effort by entertainment corporations (Hollywood) to impose their particular view of internet regulation on the rest of the country and encountering opposition from Silicon Valley. What’s not commonly understood (and why this is a subject for our discussion) is that provisions of these laws block foreign websites. In other words, the U.S. Congress has taken it upon itself to legislate for the world. This is why Wikipedia (a global encyclopedia) has blacked-out it’s English-language version that is available all over the world. While this is much more common than most would think (the U.S. Congress often sets standards that other countries and businesses must meet in order to do business in the U.S. – often their largest market – which makes the U.S. Congress a de facto global lawmaking body) it’s an excellent example of the global scope of American laws.

It’s particularly ironic that the U.S. Congress is seeking to curtail internet access while another branch of the U.S. government, the Executive Branch (namely the State Department) is seeking to undermine those countries that censor the internet. As this report notes:

The United States plans to pump millions of dollars into new technology to break through Internet censorship overseas amid a heightened crackdown on dissent in China, officials have said. State Department officials said they would give $19 million to efforts to evade Internet controls in China, Iran and other authoritarian states which block online access to politically sensitive material [...] The funding comes out of $30 million which the US Congress allocated in the current fiscal year for Internet freedom.

The New York Times clarifies some of the specific strategies and tactics the U.S. will use as this policy is implemented:

The State Department plans to finance programs like circumvention services, which enable users to evade Internet firewalls, and training for human rights workers on how to secure their e-mail from surveillance or wipe incriminating data from cellphones if they are detained by the police [...] Administration officials say that the emphasis on a broad array of projects — hotly disputed by some technology experts and human rights activists — reflects their view that technology can be a force that leads to democratic change, but is not a “magic bullet” that brings down repressive regimes.

A commendable policy, to be sure, but what happens if the repressive regime is the U.S.?

We are witnessing a very odd development in which other countries seek to block access to politically sensitive material while the U.S. seeks to block access to commercially sensitive material. Some would say it amounts to the same thing: state-sponsored censorship.

It is now a stock phrase among presidents and presidential candidates that they want to champion U.S. values abroad. Here is a perfect opportunity for them to do that. Does the U.S. stand for freedom of expression or censorship? The upcoming votes on SOPA and PIPA may well provide the answer.

Image Credit: CNN/AFP/Getty Images

Like me, if you live on Internet and Pakistan, strong are the chances you’re already familiar with the Authority of Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA). We know PTA from their active involvement in our SMS, Watching us online, and yes banning Facebook and other websites in general.

Most recently over 1,000 porn sites were blocked by internet service providers (ISP), directed by PTA. It was also stated by a source, “They are adding to the list on a daily basis.”

Here is where I and PTA get face-to-face, my problem is not like they have blocked my favorite porn site. History is history, we all share it. Instead they added my innocent site in the list too, and it is blocked today.

My website (http://hometownshoes.com/) is about selling shoe, not even close to porn. But who knows, when the ‘athletes foot’ is banned. May be they found a link between shoes> athletes foot>something unethical, but I don’t know about.

When you visit the link in Pakistan, it reads: “THE SITE IS RESTRICTED” and site name appears as PTCL. So I instantly called to PTCL helpline inquiring them the problem my website is facing. But after a 13 min long wait, their busy CSR told that it is blocked from PTA and PTCL has nothing to do with it.

While writing this post, too much to my surprise, I find I am not alone. In fact, PTA has blocked all sites in Pakistan which contain the word ‘shoes’ in its URL and first of it took place one Nov 01, 2011. Now somebody please explain me what is wrong with sites containing shoes.com in its address. That is totally ridiculous.

From its website, PTA claims ‘‘To promote and protect the interests of users of telecommunication services in Pakistan.” But instead from my experience PTA is causing loss to my business and now I’m insecure about running my website in Pakistan. How sad..!

Any ways, I visited PTA website assuming for some help, but in vain. No one answered my call from any of their contact numbers. More, I wrote an email, hoping that they would solve my problem at an earliest when they see my complain message.

This is not at all childish or minor mistake. PTA has the responsibility to make our life easier on web and telecommunication in general. But such continuous stupid mistakes are making it worse for people like me. I am angry and sad at the same time.

PTA is keeping to over use its authority. Shall we stop them?

Filed under: Hello, Pakistan