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

Anguish and anger. Yet another journalist in Pakistan, Mukarram Khan Atif of Mohmand Agency, shot dead in cold-blood. The Taliban have claimed responsibility. They are out to eliminate our best, our brightest and our bravest. They will not succeed.

Read Tazeen on how Atif helped her look “beyond the stereotype of a stern and unyielding tribesman with his intelligence, valour, grace, and self effacing sense of humour. He humanized the area and its people for me, a city dweller who only conjured up images of Hakimullah Mehsud and the likes in reference with the tribesmen from FATA” (A Reluctant Mind: Another foul murder). Also read Daud Khattak’s article highlighting the threats journalists in Pakistan face:

‘Tribal journalist Mukarram Khan Aatif was unaware of the tragedy awaiting him when he called the representative of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) in Peshawar to confirm his participation in a training workshop on “responsible reporting” on the morning of January 17.

Throughout the four years of covering the war in Bosnia, we male correspondents secretly feared for our female colleagues. We shared all the dangers and challenges except for one — sexual assault. That was a war where bounties were put out for some reporters and rapes camps inflicted horror for local women; as they told us tales of pat downs and searches that got more and more intimate, as anger at the media rose, we feared it was a matter of time.

Well, that time is now. Now we are fully entering into a harrowing and ghastly chapter of the dangers faced by journalists covering today’s conflicts across the Middle East and elsewhere: sexual assault against female journalists.

In one day two weeks ago in Egypt, two more western female journalists were assaulted — one by a mob in the street, the other while in custody in a police station. It has happened before in Egypt earlier this year, both in a high profile case and others not initially reported. It has sadly become an idea that seems to have taken root as a horrifying statement of anger at anyone in the path of some protestors.

Such assaults have happened before, of course, to local and foreign journalists. The difference now is the startling, brutal and brazen increase in the assaults – as well as journalists speaking out to shame their attackers and to bring light on this very real problem.

Where once journalists were considered neutrals, and harmed only when in the wrong place at the wrong time, today we are often targeted for kidnapping, execution and now sexual assault.

More than 30 years as a foreign correspondent offers much eyewitness to this dramatic shift.

In El Salvador in 1982, journalists formed a loosely organized group called the Salvadoran Press Corps Association. One primary purpose was to create a press card that was recognized by both the government and the guerillas to make the job safer. It worked. There were even tee shirts with “Journalist, Don’t Shoot” written on the back in Spanish.

(Of course, that was for FOREIGN journalists. Over the course of the war, 25 local journalists fell victim to the various death squads operating in the country.)

Interestingly, the 1980s wars in Central American were one of the breakout areas for female war correspondents for several reasons: bilingual skills, sheer opportunity and sharp journalism talent. A 1997 paper called The Marginal Majority: Women War Correspondents in the Salvadoran Press Corps Association (SPCA) underscore this historic impact.

In Central American, foreign journalists were the most part safe, unless they dressed like the guerillas they covered and could be mistaken as the enemy by trigger-happy government troops.

Along came the 1991 coup in Haiti and the dangers became more personal to all reporters. Ironically, reporters there feared most of being killed by the anti-coup side – in a macabre way to force the U.S. to intervene. Suddenly, journalists were tools for political use.

After that it accelerated. Daniel Pearl was sought out and murdered, journalists are chosen for kidnappings. The view of journalists being neutral observer, with that modicum of safety, has completely vanished. Now add a rise in sexual assaults.

The Overseas Press Club, of which I serve on the board of governors, along with other groups such as Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists have recognized this under reported, growing threat. We all must work together to find ways to ensure that our female colleagues are not denied the opportunity to do what they do so well – not from concerned editors who fear they will harmed, nor from those in the streets seeking to do that harm.

A report last summer by CPJ documented this sexual violence either in retaliation for their work or during the course of their reporting. The report includes interviews with 27 local journalists, from top editors to beat reporters, working in regions from the Middle East to South Asia, Africa to the Americas. Five described being brutally raped, while others reported various levels of sexual assault, aggressive physical harassment, and threats of sexual violence. A similar range of experience was reported by 25 international journalists; two reported being raped, five others described serious sexual violation—ranging from violent, sexual touching, to penetration by hands— and 22 said they had been groped multiple times. Most of the reported attacks occurred within the past five years, although a small number of cases date back as far as two decades.

Most interviewed had not previously disclosed their experiences beyond speaking with friends or family. Journalists from all over the world said they largely kept assaults to themselves because of broad cultural stigmas and a lack of faith that authorities would act upon their complaints. But repeatedly they also said they were reluctant to disclose an assault to their editors for fear they would be perceived as vulnerable and be denied future assignments.

Is that the price that must be paid?

This weekend male reporters sharing time while on assignment talked of the insanity of street demonstrations, noting they have long saw Cairo mobs as being particularly dangerous. The chaotic public settings for street demonstration are now prime breeding areas for sexual assaults. Will they silence the messenger?

It seems not. By showing the courage to speak out, the same courage exhibited in their reporting, our colleagues are telling the world they will not stop. Now we must not just hear what has happened but to work to remove the blight.