All Content Related to Pakistan

Pakistan

miriam — Thu, 10 May 2007 20:12:50 -0400

Background

Press freedom in Pakistan is restricted by the military-run government, headed by General Pervez Musharraf since 1999. In addition to applying military control over the judiciary and the ruling party in Parliament, print and electronic media have been censored where the content is deemed to be antigovernment or anti-Islamic. Government repression of media is particularly acute with regard to Balochi and Sindhi political autonomy, content considered blasphemous, and other antistate or antireligious content. A vibrant civil society movement working against Internet censorship continues to operate within Pakistan and monitors all developments in URL blocking.1 International human rights groups have reported on the persecution of journalists at the hands of the Pakistani military intelligence agency.2

Internet in Pakistan

Internet usage in 2005 is reported to be 10.5 million, with a 6.8 percent penetration rate.3 According to September 2006 estimates, there are approximately twelve million Internet users in Pakistan, at a 7.2 percent penetration rate.4 Pakistan has experienced considerable growth in its information communications technology (ICT) sector; in 2003 the government deregulated its telecom market, opening itself up to corporate competition in telephone, mobile, and Internet services.5 Internet access is widely available at cybercafés, which accommodate many lower-income and casual users. Rates for usage range from USD0.15/hour to upward of USD0.50/hour, depending on location and amenities. Although the Net Café Regulation Bill 2006 requires Internet cafés to monitor their patrons, there is currently no effective mechanism to verify compliance or enforce this law.6 Athough Net café managers are expected to monitor the activities in their establishments, based on user experience these cafés appear to be unregulated by the regular police.

Since deregulation the market has become highly competitive, and there are currently over thirty Internet service providers (ISPs) in Pakistan of varying size and quality of service. The largest ISPs in the country include Cybernet, Comsats, Brainnet, Gonet, and Paknet (a subsidiary of the Pakistan Telecommunications Company Limited, or PTCL). Modem, DSL, and recently high-speed Internet service are all available in Pakistan, but the reliability of these connections remains low. The majority of home Internet users are connected by modem, while cybercafés tend to split one modem or DSL connection over many computers, reducing connection speed. High-speed Internet service is currently accessible only to wealthier patrons or businesses.

All Internet traffic in and out of Pakistan is routed by the PTCL through its subsidiary, the Pakistan Internet Exchange (PIE), with three international gateways at Islamabad/Rawalpindi, Lahore, and Karachi, and small/medium points of presence (POPs) in six other cities.7 Currently, PIE handles 2,324 Mb/s of IP backbone traffic that comes to Pakistan using SMT4s on SMW4 and STM1s on SMW3 connected with BT, France Telecom, Telecom Italia, Verizon, and so on.8 Bandwidth through FLAG Telecom in collaboration with PTCL is at 620 Mb/s. Domestic Internet traffic is peered at the PIE gateways within the country. The PIE’s Karachi exchange reportedly processes at least 95 percent of Pakistan’s Internet traffic passes.9

Bloggers across Pakistan objected to the intermittent block on Blogspot.com and the temporary blocking of Wikipedia in 2006, and initiated a virtual civil society movement to repeal the orders.10 This virtual civil society engages in awareness and advocacy work on Pakistan’s Internet censorship through up-to-date blogs, as well as by posting information on Wikipedia. Through these sites, users share a multitude of techniques to circumvent the URL block and continue to access their Web sites of choice. An example of this is the use of pkblogs.com to access and post on banned blogspot.com sites.

Legal and regulatory frameworks

Internet censorship in Pakistan is legally regulated by the PTA, under the directive of the government, the Supreme Court of Pakistan, and the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunications (MITT). The PTA implements its censorship regulations through directives handed down to the PTCL,11 of which the Emirates Telecommunications Corporation (Etisalat) took majority control in 2006.12

In February 2002 the PTA challenged the legality of the use of Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP) as a replacement for long-distance calls. Because VoIP has achieved considerable popularity as a cost-effective alternative to long-distance calls, the PTCL banned VoIP and voice chat Web sites in early 2002; the service was undermining revenues for outgoing long-distance phone calls to the United States.13

In January 2003 the MITT directed the PTCL to block pornographic and blasphemous sites by placing content filters at all Internet exchanges,14 an effort that was not entirely effective.15 In March 2004 the Federal Investigation Agency also ordered all ISPs to block pornographic Web sites, a task beyond the technical capability of the ISPs at the time.16

On February 28, 2006, the PTCL issued a blocking directive banning a dozen URLs determined to have posted controversial Danish cartoons depicting images of the Prophet Muhammad.17 Within two weeks in March, in a series of escalating instructions, the Supreme Court directed the government to block all Web sites displaying the cartoons; to explain why they had not been blocked earlier; to block all blasphemous content; and to determine how access to such content could be denied on the Internet worldwide.18 The Supreme Court also ordered police to register cases of publishing or posting the blasphemous images under Article 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code, where blasphemy or defamation of the Prophet Muhammad is punishable by death.19 Desecration or derogation of the Quran is punishable by life imprisonment.20

On September 2, 2006, the MITT announced the creation of a committee to monitor content of offensive Web sites. According to the Ministry statement, “the committee, headed by the secretary of the MITT, will examine contents of websites reported or found to be offensive and containing anti-state material.”21 To address the grievances of Internet users with this censorship body, the government set up a Deregulation Facilitation Unit to deal with users’ complaints.22

ONI testing results

ONI field testing was conducted on Brainnet, Cybernet, and Paknet ISPs. Testing results showed that blacklisted URLs were blocked at either the ISP or PIE level, or at both locations. The PTCL has implemented a limited, perhaps symbolic, block on pornography and religious conversion sites. However, more aggressive efforts have been made to target content regarding Balochi independence movements, Sindhi human rights and political autonomy movements, material considered blasphemous, antigovernment material, and anti-Islamic materials, though a clear pattern or criteria for what is filtered is lacking. Among these categories, Web sites depicting blasphemous content or addressing Balochi political independence were the most comprehensively blocked.

Because one of the twelve Web sites identified as depicting the Danish cartoons was hosted on blogspot.com, the PTCL used a blocking mechanism that filtered the entire domain. As a result of this strategy, thousands of personal blogs hosted on blogspot.com were inadvertently filtered for most of 2006. Most material relating to the Danish cartoon incident was blocked by the ISPs; only one Web site containing the cartoons that was reportedly blocked (http://danishcartoons.ytmnd.com) was found to be fully accessible through the testing process.

By April 2006 the PTA extended their blocking to antistate Web sites as well as those promoting Balochi human rights and political autonomy.23 ONI testing confirmed that internal security conflicts were a strong focus for filtering: all Web sites tested relating to independence (for example, http://www.balochunitedfront.org/) and human rights (for example, http://balochestan.com) in the province of Balochistan were blocked, as well as selected sites promoting Sindhi political autonomy and human rights. Notably, though Balochi and Sindhi independence and human rights sites have been filtered, the few existing Web sites pertaining to Pashtun secessionism were fully accessible. This may be because the majority of Pashtuns are illiterate in their local language, and secessionist politics in the northwest frontier province are significantly less potent than in Balochistan and Sindh provinces. Therefore the more politically organized Balochi and Sindhi movements arguably pose a greater threat to the central government than these selected pro-Pashtunistan Web sites.

In addition to blasphemous, secessionist, and human rights Web sites, a variety of blogs and Web sites containing anti-Islamic and anti-Pakistani content were blacklisted, such as Indian militant extremist sites (http://www.hinduunity.com) and anti-Islamic blogs (http://www.jihadwatch.com). A number of less polemical Web sites, including personal blogs hosted on blogspot.com, and Web sites dedicated to promoting religious tolerance (http://www.faithfreedom.com) were also blocked.

ONI testing showed that the majority of newspapers and independent media, circumvention tools, international human rights groups, VoIP services, civil society groups, minority religious sites, Indian and Hindu human rights groups, Pakistani political parties, and sexual content (including pornography and gay and lesbian content) were accessible on all three ISPs. Pornographic content was largely accessible, with only symbolic blocking of selected sites. Civil society groups contend that all blogspot.com sites have been blocked; however, ONI testing found the site for the “Don’t Block the Blog” campaign (http://help-pakistan.com) to be accessible on all three ISPs.

The lack of technical sophistication of the PTCL explains the comprehensive block on Blogspot. The PTCL lacks the capacity to target the specific URLs that contain offensive content, and simply blocks the entire IP address on which the offending site was hosted. Although this filtering system has resulted in the collateral blocking of entire domains such as blogspot.com, the rudimentary nature of the blocking mechanism also makes it easier for users to circumvent the block using proxy servers or other bypassing methods.24 Not only is the PTCL charged with blocking blacklisted URLs, but the it also hands down blocking directives directly to the ISPs to implement. The ISPs then implement, or attempt to implement, the blocking orders; the results of the ONI testing show that this sometimes led to a redundancy in blocking at both the ISP level and the central Internet exchange point.

Conclusion

Currently Pakistanis have unimpeded access to most sexual, political, social, and religious content. However, the Pakistani government continues to use repressive measures against antimilitary, Balochi, and Sindhi political dissidents, and it blocks Web sites highlighting this repression. The government also filters high-risk antistate materials and blasphemous content.

The Pakistani government does not currently employ a sophisticated blocking system, nor does the government have a coherent policy on what sites should be blacklisted. The recently established ministerial committee will probably contribute to the development of a comprehensive framework for government censorship as methods for implementing blocking directives are refined. Civil society activists and cyber-dissidents continue to advocate for free expression and blogging rights, which are curtailed by crude blocking methods that have imposed blanket blocks on entire domains such as blogspot.com.

NOTES

1. Pakistan 451, http://pakistan451.wordpress.com/ ; and Don’t Block the Blog campaign, http://help-pakistan.com/main/dont-block-the-blog/.
2. Reporters Without Borders, Pakistan: Annual Report 2007, February 19, 2007, http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=20794.
3. International Telecommunication Union, World Telecommunication Indicators 2006.
4. Internet World Stats, Asia: Marketing Research, Internet Usage, Population Statistics and Information, February 19, 2007, http://www.internetworldstats.com/asia.htm.
5. Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited, http://www.ptcl.com.pk/introduction.html.
6. Zulfiqar Ali, “Cabinet approves bill to regulate cyber-cafes: Bill makes cyber-cafe owners liable for prosecution if any ‘unethical’ or ‘immoral’ activities are detected within their premises,” Asia Media, May 26, 2006, http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=46879.
7. E-mail interview with Convener of Internet Service Provider Association of Pakistan (ISPAK).
8. Ibid.
9. Naveed Ahmad, “PTCL blocks vital Internet sites to comply with SC order,” The News, http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=6254.
10. Don’t Block the Blog campaign, http://help-pakistan.com/main/dont-block-the-blog/.
11. Wikipedia, “Internet censorship in Pakistan,” February 20, 2007, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Pakistan.
12. DAWN, “Deal signed to give Etisalat PTCL control,” March 13, 2006, http://www.dawn.com/2006/03/13/top5.htm.
13. Daily Times, “PTCL still directionless over VoIP issues,” January 26, 2003, http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_26-1-2003_pg7_30.
14. DAWN, “PTCL directed to block porno, blasphemous sites,” January 29, 2003, http://www.dawn.com/2003/01/29/nat5.htm.
15. Imran Ayub, “PTCL to block all objectionable websites,” The News International Pakistan, December 27, 2003, http://www.apnic.net/mailing-lists/s-asia-it/archive/2003/12/msg00028.ht... ; World IT Report, “Pakistan faces difficulties to block porn sites, February 3, 2003, http://www”.worlditreport.com/News/&mod=search&searchWords=Pakistan%20PTCL&st_id_search=93657&time=1&sub=1.
16. Reporters Without Borders, Pakistan: Annual Report 2004, http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=10794.
17. Ammara Durrani, “Ban on ‘blasphemous’ websites: PTA blocks blogs not carrying profane material,” The International News, March 6, 2006, http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/mar2006-daily/06-03-2006/national/n8.htm.
18. Ibid.
19. Article 295-C, Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 1986, (Gazette of Pakistan, Extraordinary, part 1, October 12, 1986), http://www.thepersecution.org/50years/paklaw.html; Daily Times, “SC orders case against cartoon publishers,” April 18, 2006, http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006%5C04%5C18%5Cstory_18-... see also Akbar S. Ahmed, “Pakistan’s blasphemy laws: Words fail me,” Washington Post, May 19, 2002, p. B01, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentI....
20. Article 295-B, Pakistan Penal Code (Act XLV of 1860), http://www.thepersecution.org/50years/paklaw.html.
21. Nasir Iqbal, “Body set up to block websites,” Dawn News, September 3, 2006, http://www.dawn.com/2006/09/03/nat3.htm.
22. Ibid.
23. Pakistan Telecommunications Authority, Blocking of Websites Access, April 25, 2006, Nasir Iqbal, “Body set up to block websites,” Dawn News, September 3, 2006, http://www.dawn.com/2006/09/03/nat3.htm.http://ice.citizenlab.org/blogim....
24. Khalid Omar, “Connecting the dots,” Spider: Pakistan’s Internet Magazine, April 2006, http://www.spider.tm/apr2006/main.html?pgsrc=szone&submenu=szone1&dirtar....

Pakistan’s Internet has a bad weekend

sally — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:10:15 -0500

This was a dark weekend for the Internet community in Pakistan. A series of unfortunate events started with an order for ISPs to block YouTube in Pakistan, which naturally riled citizens and advocates of free speech. Making things worse, the implementation of the block by one of the ISPs made YouTube inaccessible to most of the Internet around the world for two hours. Inadvertently, much of the global Internet audience has now experienced filtering.

On February 22, a ministry-level order was sent to Pakistani ISPs to block YouTube, ostensibly in reaction to a video making fun of the Prophet Muhammad. Without investing in expensive filtering technology, there are two ways to block access to a web site, IP blocking and DNS tampering (more explanation here). Neither of these techniques permits the selective blocking of individual video clips.

Pakistan Telecom, a major ISP, chose to block YouTube by advertising part of YouTube’s assigned network as its own. This means that the request for YouTube.com could resolve to one of its servers instead of the YouTube servers. In order for this real estate masquerade to work, this new routing information has to be disseminated around Pakistan. Unfortunately, they advertised this switch to the Internet at large. ISPs around the world began routing to Pakistan Telecom’s servers instead of YouTube’s.

This mistake rendered YouTube inaccessible to users around the world for anywhere from half an hour to 2 hours last night. YouTube responded by announcing the problem and international ISPs began to correct the problem, reverting to the proper routing of YouTube traffic. Renesys blog has a timeline of the outage and an explanation of some of the technical details.

Adding to the ISPs embarrassment, PCCW Global, Pakistan Telecom’s upstream provider, took Pakistan Telecom offline completely.

As Steve Bellovin points out, this sort of “hijacking” is not new. Spammers do this intentionally and maliciously to gain access to new IP ranges. There are also several notable events such as this one where it was done by mistake. As Jonathan Zittrain points out to us, trust – that a URL or domain name is what it says it is – is an essential part of the health of the Internet. This event also shows how vulnerable a system that relies on trust can be.

The ramifications of this are partly temporary—the outage was based upon human error, and we don’t expect to see this repeated often (especially now). However, there may be more lasting outcomes, which are worth mention. It is possible we could see Pakistan join the growing list of countries that ask YouTube to filter the site selectively in that country. Thailand and Turkey have already asked for this, to restrict access to videos that that offend the Thai king and Ataturk, respectively. Filtering for videos that disparage the Prophet Muhammad are analogous. However, the motivation for the original blocking in Pakistan is not clear, and there have been allegations that this block is not totally motivated by videos of the Prophet Muhammad; there are new videos of vote rigging and those that contain other political opposition content. The timing of the YouTube block order is somewhat suspect given that blasphemous content has been available for some time and is still available on other sites in Pakistan, including Wikipedia.

Filtering in Pakistan has also been problematic within the country, with ISPs using IP blocking to restrict access to several blasphemous sites in the past year bringing down access to millions of sites, in a large case of collateral filtering. Look for the forthcoming ONI bulletin on this issue.

In this instance, the collateral damage of Internet filtering affected users of one the Internet’s most popular sites around the globe. Many who may have regarded overseas filtering with complacency thus far now have had first-hand experience with filtering and the damage it can have to the overall health of the network. For Internet users at large, this event lays open the fragility of the Internet. For Pakistan, the story of YouTube blocking is far from resolved.

crime vs. cybercrime

sally — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:47:39 -0500

Pakistan's new cyber crime bill went into effect on 31 December 2007. Over the past few weeks, individuals and organizations have condemned the toughness of the bill, which limits online expression and communication that uses the Internet. This opens an interesting question about what it makes sense to put into a cyber crime bill, and what might be better treated elsewhere.

For example, blogger Teeth Maestro wrote:

The law provides for the death penalty for anyone causing the death of another person by means of email messages. A Federal Investigation Agency representative in Islamabad tried to justify the law by referring to Daniel Pearl’s murder and describing the exchange of emails between the kidnappers as a “cyber-crime.”
In this case, it seems that such communications could be better covered in a general criminal law that addresses communications that lead to a crime. Placing one type of communication in a separate layer of the law seems to introduce unnecessary complexity and a greater potential for unforeseen consequences.

Reporters Without Borders takes issue with the bill's treatment of user-generated content:

Article 13 on “Cyber stalking” makes it a crime to “take or distribute pictures or photographs of any person without his consent or knowledge.” Citizen journalism of the kind practised by bloggers is based on precisely this sort of activity.

With restrictions that limit citizen journalism, this distinction seems to be more difficult to place. On the one hand, standard press laws are often too narrow to accommodate the common practices of citizen journalism. On the other hand, if such practices end up lumped under a cyber crime provision, it can end up overbroad.

As we see more countries implement legislation that attempts to rein in what's happening on the Internet, these questions will continue.

[also...]

Also worrying, is a report of blogs being blocked again in Pakistan, contemporaneously with the new bill.

Media Jumping from TV to Internet

sally — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 21:08:46 -0500

In May of this year, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez decided not to renew TV station RCTV's license, and troops seized the station's equipment.

In Pakistan, President Musharraf ordered some TV stations to be shut down in June, and an apparent media blackout has accompanied Musharraf's declaration of emergency rule, police intimidation included.

With the crackdown, some networks turned to the Internet. In Pakistan, TV network Geo emphasized its Internet channel when first shut down, and they continued to film content and streamed it on the Internet. Viewers around the country, albeit a much smaller, wealthier subset than their usual viewers, were able to watch the news online. The site received so much traffic, however, that it could not sustain the bandwidth for so much streaming, and it has gone back to text-based news. The loss of Geo as a TV news source for Pakistanis without Internet access is troubling, but the streaming did give a brief window to the Pakistani news media from outside the country.

The crackdown on the media is set to continue beyond the anticipated end of emergency rule this weekend, in the form of agreements that were signed by media networks before they were allowed to return to the air. This 'code of conduct' bars networks from speech against the government and especially against the head of state, among other things.

Governments can and do mandate similar 'codes of conduct' for news on the Internet, but the mechanisms for implementing them are distinct from that of traditional media crackdown--perhaps different enough that if one is shut down, the other will remain.

Testing for Internet Filtering in Pakistan

sally — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 17:00:47 -0500

Correction: Two inaccessible sites, jihadwatch.org and sindhtoday.net were initially reported here as jihadwatch.com and sindhtoday.com. The correct sites end with .org and .net.

The media climate in Pakistan has become significantly more restricted in the past few weeks, with government forcing many TV and radio stations off the air, and some receiving visits from police. Cell phone jamming has also been reported. In addition, there is a ban on the selling or importing of digital receivers, decoders and dish antenna, primarily to stop people looking for independent news sources. The Internet, however, appears to have remained somewhat more tamper-free, and some Pakistani sites have seen an increase in traffic and activity, as those with Internet access go to blogs and online media outlets for news, and information about the ongoing protests.

Beginning November 6, through a proxy server in-country, ONI replicated some of the testing for Internet filtering that was done in January 2007. Surprisingly, on November 6, no sites that were tested were found to be blocked in Pakistan. This included extremist sites such as sindhtoday.net, balochestan.com, hinduunity.com and jihadwatch.org, despite being consistently blocked in the past. However, these sites were all found to be unavailable by November 12. Also interesting to note, of the danish cartoon sites blocked recently, some of them have been hacked and the rest have been unblocked, contrary to expectations.

Daily tests of a small number of sites across ISPs have found that sites covering the current crisis—blogs and larger media outlets—have not been blocked. The sharp rise in the repression of the traditional media has not spilled over into the Internet sphere, leaving open an avenue for the free exchange of ideas and dissent, albeit only available to a much smaller portion of the population.

Fears of greater crackdown are growing, however. For example, according to an ONI source, it has been reported that there may be monitoring of Internet traffic at the level of the Pakistan Internet Exchange. We continue to monitor developments there.

Pakistan, Martial Law & the Internet

sally — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:31:32 -0500

When Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency and suspended the constitution on November 3 in Pakistan, the blogosphere and traditional media were quick to call it implementation of martial law. It has been widely reported (see a news round-up here and Global Voices has set up a page for continual updates here) that with emergency rule came a crackdown on both traditional media and Internet use.

Restrictions on infrastructure have been reported. ABC news reported that at the time of the declaration, phone and Internet access were cut for a short period. Today, it was reported that phones were again cut at 13:45 local time, purportedly to interrupt a phone call between Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, who has been under house arrest since the crisis began, and the lawyers who are protesting. By 18:00 local time, phones were back up. The Hindustan Times reported that ISPs were asked to cut Internet service on Saturday November 2, and at least one complied, though service resumed several hours later.

Also, with emergency rule comes heightened fear of repercussions for speech. Blogger Dr. Awab Alvi stated in a message to the Society Against Internet Censorship in Pakistan that he has turned over his blog to an activist outside the country, who will be live blogging for him. He strongly urged other Pakistani bloggers to do the same. Even though ISPs and cybercafe owners must keep records of users' names, locations and connection times, among other things, it appears to be unlikely that communications would be linked to the individuals sending them. With a brief look around the Pakistani blogosphere it seems that the amount of live blogging taking place has increased recently, instead of the crisis quelling speech.

When ONI tested for filtering last year, sites were found to be blocked especially sites regarding separatist movements and blasphemous content. The overall openness of the Internet today remains in question.

Pakistan blocks "thousands" of "blasphemous" Web sites

ONI-MENA — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 16:30:16 -0500

Pakistan's Supreme Court ordered the blocking of Web sites containing blasphemous content, Pakistan's The News reported. To comply with the order, Pakistan Telecommunication has blocked access to thousands of vital websites and email servers unrelated to the order. Local bloggers provide a technical explanation, as well as a documentation of the harried official response and the sense of frustration with the extent of overblocking in this latest attempt at filtering in Pakistan.