Global Voices Advocacy » Awab Alvi

Pakistan: PTA Blocks President's “Shut-Up” Video

Awab Alvi — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:13:54 +0000

Sunday evening [7th February 2010] Youtube.com started facing intermittent reports of irregular inaccessibility across various ISP's in Pakistan. It initially started off with a simple white page displaying the word “This Site is Restricted” throughout the Youtube domain which were reported widely on Herdict Web, roughly displaying that the site-wide inaccessibility lasted for about an hour but after that everything seemed to have been recovered back to normal.

Instead it was then reported that the Internet governing body Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, which monitors internet access from Pakistan has placed a URL-specific ban on one particular video in which the President of Pakistan Mr. Asif Ali Zardari is seen to deliver a very forceful and curt “Shut-up” to some participant at the rally he was addressing a rally barely a few weeks back.

It must be noted that Mr. Zardari actually says in Urdu

“What has happened to this democracy ……. Shut Up”

Many Pakistanis would find this as a hilarious coincidence coming from a infamous corrupt leader who has a quite a large number of corruption cases outstanding against him. In 2007, his wife Benazir Bhutto was assassinated after which Mr. Zardari successfully hijacked her party and nudged his way into the power corridors in Pakistan and land up in the Presidency. All this was only possible as he negotiated a compromise with the then President of Pakistan, General Pervaiz Musharraf by fabricating an illegal constitutional order [NRO - National Reconciliatory Ordinance] which pardoned him of all his corruption cases

Link to the Blocked Video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzuHD5x1fEU [a few other variants have also been blocked]

Sources analyzing this recent censorship attempts suggest that the PTA engineers were yet again testing & fine tuning the URL-block list as they slowly nudged these videos inaccessible to Pakistani, this risky trial and error has been the hallmark of the very same PTA engineers who in February 2008 masterminded [accidentally] to knock out the entire youtube.com network as then PTA tried to block a certain election vote rigging video ending up to misconfiguring the DNS records of Youtube resulting an serious outage world wide for a good few hours before youtube scrambled to fix the errors

Political analysts believe this recent run of censorship is more a knee-jerk reaction by the present rulers of the country as they are facing pressure from a number of areas, more specifically the previously side-lined corruption cases that they had in 2008 nudged away by some illegal constitutional reforms, to get themselves elected have been reopened for a detailed investigation by the Supreme Court of Pakistan which as done away with the various constitutional reforms bringing at stake their appointment to these high-level offices

Pakistan: Army Human Rights Video being censored

Awab Alvi — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 10:02:36 +0000

A certain video showing images of Pakistan Army's military brutality during its offensive in Swat has surfaced across the web.

BBC: The video shows of an officer in Pakistani army battle uniform interrogating several suspects, some of whom are quite elderly and are presumably relatives of men being sought.

When the officer does not receive satisfactory answers, he motions his soldiers to rush in and beat him with belts, fists and small whips. In the process the suspects are savagely kicked all over the body by soldiers wearing heavy army boots. The suspect is heard screaming and imploring the soldiers to stop in the name of Allah, repeatedly saying he has told them all he knows. At two specfic occasions the commanding officers restrains the soldiers adminsitrating the beating.

After an initial round of punishment, the officer tells a suspect that this is “soft treatment”. Unless the suspect tells all, the officer says he will have to administer “hard punishment”. “You don't want me to cut off your hands and feet,” the officer says.

On a question to the Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said the army was investigating the alleged abuse, but declined further comment.

The video was hosted by PkPolitics.com in a blog post titled Human Rights Abuses by Pak Army which triggerd the Government of Pakistan to block the specific URL across various ISP's in Pakistan, to show “This Site is Restricted” the Herdict Web portal is being effcitively used to monitor the trend across Pakistan with confirmed reports from inaccessiblity from quite a number of ISP's though there are some ISP's that are not blocking the specific URL

Pakistan: Funny SMS's may land Pakistanis in for a fourteen year prison sentence

Awab Alvi — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 11:20:02 +0000

A scare tactic by the Government of Pakistan

Pakistans’ Minister of Interior Rehman Malik recently announced a 14-year prison sentence for anyone found propagating SMS and emails ridiculing or making fun of the present Pakistani leadership and its elected government officials. The statement issued by the Ministry of Interior, referenced the Cyber Crime Act of 2009 which apparently would subject the violators to a prison sentence of at least 14-years.

It has been a long time, the Government of Pakistan has been trying to enforce a cyber crime law which since 2007, when it was first initially tabled in the form of a draft by the Ministry of Information and Technology. The then Cyber Crime Ordinance of 2007 was critically evaluated by the IT community and was found to be unfair, practically giving all encompassing powers to the Federal Investigative Agency (FIA), the local intellegence agency, to be the judge jury and executor with very minimal protection to any innocent bystanders who may become prey to any unwarranted political intentions.

The civil society in 2007 was in outcry over the cyber crime draft, holding many awareness seminars and discussion panel and were successful in pushing the Ministry to accept some serious revisions of the controversial document with the hope of bringing it under proper international standards as agreed upon during the Cyber Crimes Convention in Budapest 2001. In an extensive meeting with the stakeholders the Ministry of IT were then presented with a long list of problems and it was primarily suggest to rewrite the entire document rather then accede to a patch up of a grossly irregular document which differed significantly from internationally accepted norms

Suddenly on 31st December 2007, the then President of Pakistan, General Prevaiz Musharraf quietly signed the un-revised ‘first draft’ as an ordinance titling the new document as the Pakistan Electronic Crimes Ordinance of 2007. An Ordinance according to the Constitutional of Pakistan [Article 89] is a presidential injunction to force a law into effect for a period of four months [120 days] and before its expiry the bill has to be presented on the floor of the Parliament for vetting and debate before potentially voting it into a full fledged law only after a 2/3rd majority vote, historically Presidents of Pakistan have used ordinances for political intentions and for the mere continuation of the law the President merely re-signs the ordinance every four months extending its life for another 120 days without taking the time or making an effort to put it before the legislative body

Since the start of this newly elected government, the local leadership, namely the President of Pakistan Mr. Asif Zardari and Minister of Interior Rehman Malik have been at the receiving end of some very hard hitting gutt wrenching jokes, which in turn have resulted in a massive propagation of SMS's and emails, not only in Pakistan but also across the world. The local leadership have also not helped stop this flame war as they themselves provided fuel-to-the-fire with one funny blunder after another, from the God-Gaad misspelling controversy in September 2008 [while signing a guest book President Asif Ali Zardari accidentally misspelled God as 'Gaad' and that turned out to be a serious cause of embarrassment for the President] or even the Sarah Palin gorgeous-n-hug comment in Washington [in an exclusive one-on-one meeting with Sarah Palin during her Vice-Presidential bid, Asif Zardari commented on Live TV to called her “gorgeous” and then goes on to flirt with Sarah Palin to say 'if he’s insisting, I might hug'] such opportunities generally become the bane of all comical SMS's, emails and blog posts among Pakistanis

Seeing their local leadership at the base of many hard hitting jokes, the government decided to take such critical offenders to task. Here lies a very important problem, it is surprising to note that the Cyber Crime Act does even not exist, it is a fact that the Pakistan Electronic Crimes Ordinance of 2007 ironically had no mention of any crime related to SMS's, let alone punish a person for sending funny SMS's which may tarnish the image of the an ‘unspecified’ local leadership, the maximum prison sentence in that 2007 bill for any cyber crime offense was set at a maximum of 7-years [10-years if it involved a minor].

Initially when the Minister of Interior announced the 14 year sentence people were shocked and taken aback, as it was assumed that the Pakistan Pakistan Electronic Crimes Ordinance of 2007 had lapsed, after 120 days, and there was no news about re-signing of a new Ordinance – soon APP provided us with the text of the Pakistan Electronic Crimes Ordinance of 2009 signed into effect on July 3rd 2009 which was identical word-for-word with the 2007 and there was no mention of an SMS crime let alone a 14 year sentence

The statements made by Ministry of Interior were challenged, and the only official response that has been received till now that the ‘correct draft has not yet been released to the public‘. It only seems that the politically motivated statement was more or less geared towards scaring the general public into submission and hopefully stopping political rivals from ridiculing them.

In a recent development the Supreme Court of Pakistan has nullified all actions taken by General Perzaiz Musharraf during the illegal Emergency that was imposed on November 3rd 2007, the court has in the order requested the parliament to regularize all ordinances enacted by General Pervaiz Musharraf which may actually mean that the Pakistan Electronic Crimes Ordinance of 2007 may stand to be jeopardized, the faith of its subsequent enactment by Mr. Asif Ali Zardari on July 3rd 2009 is still unknown, and hence we can assume that extensive lobbying is needed to undo this irresponsible law and help push the Ministry of IT to develop a document that adheres to the International standards across the world

As per the legal experts in Pakistan there is still no law that prevents the prorogation of funny SMS's and emails, ironically on the other hand the Government of Pakistan still chooses to say otherwise.

Pakistan Censors Pictures of Governor – Harmful for the Integrity of Pakistan

Awab Alvi — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 13:27:34 +0000

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), the internet monitoring body in Pakistan has issued directives to all its ISP providers to block a list of six webpages on the grounds that they were “harmful for the integrity of the country.”

The URL Level block directive by the PTA was in response to the decision taken by the Inter-Ministerial Committee whose charter is to monitor and block anti-Pakistan, blasphemous, and pornographic web sites. The specfic URL's under question carry a bunch of pictures of Mr. Salman Taseer, the Governor of Punjab. These pictures had been making rounds on various email lists across Pakistan some months back ridiculing the lavish parties thrown by the Governor Taseer at the Governor House while his people have been starving on the streets.

It has been suspected that these pictures may have apparently been copied from a facebook picture album of one of the Taseer family and could arguably be deemed private in nature, but one does have to wonder how the Inter-Ministerial Committee chose to classify them as being ‘harmful for the integrity of the country’

Urooj Zia from The News writes

Three of the six webpages on the list issued by the PTA, however, are from dictatorshipwatch.com, a website set up after November 3, 2007, when then-President Gen (Retd) Pervez Musharraf implemented a state of emergency in the country. One webpage is from makepakistanbetter.com, a social and political discussion forum. The fifth page is from friendskorner.com, a general discussion forum, while the sixth webpage is a node from buzzvines.com. Most of the blocked webpages contained articles which claimed to provide information about Punjab Governor Salman Taseer’s “history”; others had pictures of members of Taseer’s family at lavish parties thrown recently at the Punjab Governor House.

None had blasphemous material, or anything which could even remotely be construed as “anti-Pakistan,” unless criticism of one person is considered an act of treason

Teeth Maestro on his blog writes

Though I still choose not to share those pictures myself but some common sense needs to be knocked into PTA and our Governor that its nearly impossible to totally block / censor content on the Internet as even now a simple Google search will list a dozen more websites which are also sharing the same images

The following are the six (6) URL's that are supposed to be blocked from Pakistan