Internet censorship in Pakistan

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The Government of Pakistan censors all internet traffic by means of routing all connections through a central exchange which is administered by the Internet Exchange. Furthermore Pakistani ISPs are also under orders to block certain websites on their own routers. A common victim by major ISPs in Pakistan are the weblogs hosted at blogspot.com, amongst other important social networking websites.

1 History and law
2 Supreme Court directive
3 How Internet is censored
4 Wikipedia article on Islamic Emirate of Waziristan earns a threat of a internet ban
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] History and law

The Government of Pakistan some years back established the Pakistan Internet Exchange (PIE), as a means to monitor all incoming and outgoing Internet traffic from Pakistan. The primary purpose of PIE is to filter content as the government deems fit. A secondary purpose is to keep track of all incoming and outgoing e-mail, which by parliamentary order are kept for a period of at least three months.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Company (PTCL) announced in April, 2003 that it would be stepping up censorship of pornographic websites. "Anti-Islamic" and "blasphemous" sites were also censored. In early March 2004, the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) ordered Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to all pornographic content. The ISPs, however, displayed absence of technical know-how, and advocated that the PTCL would be better fit to carry out FIA's requirement. A Malaysian firm was then hired to provide a filtering system.

Currently, there is no established law as to which websites the government censors, or when. In the past, mainly pornographic and anti-establishment political websites have been blocked. Once in a while, western news sites have also been blocked, though these blocks were usually short-lived.

[edit] Supreme Court directive

The Supreme Court on March 1, 2006 directed the government to block internet sites displaying the Muhammad cartoons and called for an explanation from authorities as to why these sites had not been blocked earlier.[1] A three-member bench headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhary, summoned the country's Attorney General as well as senior communication ministry officials on March 13 to give a report of "concrete measures for implementation of the court's order".

On March 2, 2006, in pursuant to a Petition filed by Dr. Mohammed Imram Uppal under Article 184(3) of the Constitution of Pakistan, the Supreme Court sitting en banc ordered the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) and other government departments to adopt measures for blocking websites showing blasphemous content. The Court also ordered Attorney General Makhdoom Ali Kahn to explore laws which would enable blocking objectionable websites. In announcing his decision, Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, said, "We will not accept any excuse or technical objection on this issue because it relates to the sentiments of the entire Muslim world. All authorities concerned will have to appear in the Court on the next hearing with reports of concrete measures taken to implement our order," which was scheduled on March 13, 2006.

Consequently, the government blocked a number of websites hosting the cartoons deemed to be sacrilegious. This ban included all the weblogs hosted at the popular blogging service blogger.com, as some bloggers had put up copies of the cartoons – particularly many non-Pakistani blogs.

On the hearing on March 14, 2006, the PTA informed the Supreme Court that all websites displaying the Muhammad cartoons have been blocked. The bench issued directions to Attorney General of Pakistan Makhdoom Ali Khan to assist the court on Monday on how it could exercise jurisdiction to prevent the availability of blasphemous material on websites the world over.[2]

The blanket ban on the blogspot.com blogs was lifted on May 2, 2006 [3]. Shortly thereafter the blanket ban was reimposed, and extended to Typepad blogs. Pakistan also blocked Baloch nationalist websites.

[edit] How Internet is censored

The government of Pakistan currently has a simplistic IP based filtering procedure in place, and since all websites hosted on blogspot resolve to the same IP address, they all have been blocked.

Since the PIE uses Cisco routers to block traffic, which are capable of more complex filtering rules, it is hoped that the government will remove this blanket block on all blogspot weblogs in the near future as it has the capability to only target specific websites.

As all internet traffic is routed through the PIE, Pakistani ISPs have also been ordered to also block certain websites on their routers. Currently, all the major ISPs in Pakistan are blocking weblogs hosted at blogspot.com.

[edit] Wikipedia article on Islamic Emirate of Waziristan earns a threat of a internet ban

On September 19, 2006 when a reporter from the Daily News asked a Government of Pakistan Foreign Office spokesperson to comment on a recent Wikipedia article "The Islamic Emirate of Waziristan", the spokeswoman characterized the article as "baseless propaganda". The news story pointedly ended with a reminder that "The federal government has said several times that it plans to ban several websites and web pages through the Ministry of Information and Technology and Pakistan Telecommunicatoin Authority (PTA). ^[1]