Global Voices Advocacy » Pakistan

New Book on Global Struggle for Internet Freedom

Bernardo Parrella — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:26:18 +0000

How do we ensure that the Internet develops in a way that is compatible with democracy? Given the strong push provided by social media to the recent uprisings in the Middle East region and elsewhere, how can people ensure that the same tools are not being used for government censorship and surveillance (often with more than a little help from Western technology companies)? And ultimately, how can we stop thinking of ourselves as passive “users” of technology but rather as “netizens” who take ownership and responsibility for our digital future?

These questions provide the general framework for discussion in Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom, a new book by Rebecca McKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices (and co-author of the twice-monthly Netizen Report on GV Advocacy).

A comprehensive and timely effort, it is a call to action for every blogger or user of Twitter or Facebook, and particularly for cyber-activists at large, to collectively address the urgent issue of how technology should be governed to support the rights and liberties of citizens around the world. With a rigorous analysis and a positive tone, the final message is to get involved in a struggle that all of us have the power and ability to influence (even in small ways), if we only try to understand the complex forces at work, and how we might help shape them.

Divided in five major sections (Disruptions; Control 2.0; Democracy’s challenges; Sovereigns of cyberspace; What is to be done?), the book covers a variety of events over the past decade and is quite up to date, with parts devoted to the Arab Spring and the Egyptian government’s surveillance capabilities, privacy and control in Western democracies, and the rise of “Facebookistan and Googledom”. The book's companion website offers fresh updates and more resources.

The Global Voices network is mentioned here and there, with direct quotes and references. For instance, the book preface speaks briefly about the community's inception, growth, and crucial role in recent events:

As protests erupted in Tunisia in late 2010 and demonstrations spread around the Middle East and North Africa in early 2011, Global Voices contributors worked around the clock to spread information about what was happening in multiple languages, on our own site as well as Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms.

The first part of the book focuses on interconnections in technology, society and business that fueled the Internet's development so far, giving rise to a “digital commons” that includes innovative practices, digital activism, and people's empowerment. This is an exciting environment that nonetheless faces opposition, defined as “Control 2.0”: “…how opaque, unaccountable relationships with Internet and telecommunications companies enables authoritarian governments to control and manipulate citizens.”

China is a primary case study here, with a detailed description of its refined censorship system and recent developments to maintain authoritarian control, while at the same time enabling, “…high levels of lively and even contentious online debate and deliberation, within certain limits.”

After describing similar (or worse) situations in countries such as Iran, Pakistan and Syria, the focus shifts to Western democracies — who unfortunately appear inclined to emulate authoritarian regimes, even if in subtle and insidious ways. That is, technology companies are establishing equally opaque and unaccountable relationships with government agencies, and fail to, “…take responsibility for their power over citizens’ political lives, and their lack of accountability in the exercise of that power.”

Image © Shutterstock.com

The various examples discussed here include WikiLeaks, privacy complaints on Facebook, ‘Big Brother' Apple, and Net Neutrality. Along with the on-going battle about intellectual property vs. free speech and sharing (see the global initiative against SOPA-PIPA, and the recent ‘selective censorship‘ announced by Twitter). Also addressed are lesser-known issues, such as a 2011 proposal to create a “single European cyberspace” that would block “illicit content” at Europe’s borders.

Finally, the last section of the book attempts to answer the question of “What is to be done?”, proposing the development of a Netizen-centric Internet. This part explores efforts by some governments, a few companies, and a growing number of concerned citizens to address the threats to freedom in cyberspace through new initiatives and movements. Some suggestions include: boosting corporate transparency; building processes for corporate engagement with users, customers, and other stakeholders; and building a more citizen-driven information environment.

At the end of the day, this Struggle For Internet Freedom is taking place here and now — in Arab countries, in East Asia and even in Western nations. It is a common struggle, and it is up to each and all of us, as netizens and citizens of the world, to monitor the state of affairs and make sure the Internet remains a force for freedom of expression and political liberation — rather than a tool for alienation, censorship and repression.

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=hzuHD5×1fEU [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.

OpenNet Initiative Releases Results on Filtering in Asia

Jillian York — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 01:08:43 +0000

From the Great Firewall to the Myanmar Wide Web, Asia is well-known for its practices in Internet filtering. China has long taken the lead in blocking Web sites, filtering sites across the spectrum - from social to political content, pornography to Internet tools. The OpenNet Initiative (full disclosure: I'm involved) has been studying the Internet in Asia and around the world since 2002, and has just released its latest reports on Internet surveillance and controls in Asia, and specifically in China.

New research from the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) reveals accelerating restrictions on Internet content as Asian governments shift to next generation controls. These new techniques go beyond blocking access to websites and are more informal and fluid, implemented at edges of the network, and are often backed up by increasingly restrictive and broadly interpreted laws.

According to an recent ONI press release:

“Since 2006, many Asian governments have quickly realized the potential benefits of exploiting opportunities for conducting propaganda or public relations strategies over the Internet, even while cracking down on independent and critical voices thriving in these online spaces- an example of the evolution towards next generation controls,” said Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and one of four principal investigators at the ONI.

These controls were evidenced recently in ONI's analysis of China's latest attempt at controlling the flow of information, Green Dam Youth Escort filtering software mandated for pre-installation on PCs sold in China starting July 1. “However, even China's example demonstrates that restrictions on information are far from uniformly effective, and will meet resistance and be contested by the very groups they are intended to silence,” said Rafal Rohozinski, CEO of the SecDev Group and co-founder and principal investigator of ONI and ONI Asia.

The reports for Asia, as well as Burma, China, Pakistan, and South Korea will be featured in a forthcoming MIT Press volume, Access Controlled: The Shaping of Rights, Rule, and Power in Cyberspace, to be published by MIT Press (2010). Access Controlled will include a series of analytical chapters and regional overviews that contribute to the developing discourse around global Internet regulation and censorship raised in the first ONI volume Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, (Cambridge: MIT Press) 2008.

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

Pakistan: Partial Block of Youtube

Sami Ben Gharbia — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 00:33:34 +0000

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has directed (see above) the country's ISPs to block access to the videos sharing website YouTube for allegedly featuring a blasphemous video.

However, and according to the Pakistani “Don’t Block The Blog” there are two theories that could explain PTA's recent move to ban YouTube: vote rigging videos showing alleged evidence of election fraud in Karachi and a blasphemous video disgracing Prophet Mohammed.

Pakistan blockpage (Source: National Blockpages Gallery via Don’t Block The Blog)

Some Pakistan ISPs are urging their customers to write to Youtube to remove the objectionable movie:

Dear Internet Users

Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (www.pta.gov.pk)has directed all ISPs of the country to block access
to www.youtube.com web site for containing blasphemous web content/movies.

The site would remain blocked till further orders from PTA. Meanwhile, Internet users can write to
youtube.com to remove the objectionable web content/movies because this removal would enable
the authorities to order un-blocking of this web site.

The ban was originally supposed to be implemented on one video hosted on Youtube and three IP addresses that belong to the service, but it seems that the entire site was blocked by some ISP's:

Since yesterday we all witnessed a domain wide blockade of all content from youtube.com and we generally had confirmed reports that this existed throughout out the country, only today did a kind gentleman shared with us screen captures of his computer showing the unblocked youtube website but the specific offending URL is censored from all TWA users. A bit of history all ISP’s in Pakistan connect through the FLAG backbone via the PTCL/PIE link but some ISP’s choose to go via the other bandwidth hub coming via TransWorld.

PIE sadly does not have the ability to enforce a URL specific block and is forced to employ an IP wide block hence we say the entire Youtube domain off limits to us, while TWA with its advanced filtering system can specifically block URL’s

For more information about the countries blocking access to Youtube-like websites and other web 2.0 applications, check out our Access Denied Map.

Syria: Blogspot blocked? What to do next?

Sami Ben Gharbia — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 21:25:11 +0000

According to the last report from Syria, Google's Blogger platform, which hosts the popular blogspot.com blogs, is apparently being blocked by all Syrian ISPs. Syria has blocked access to Blogspot on more than one occasion. It started in February 2006 when Damascus-based bloggers reported that both government-affiliated ISPs, Syrian Telecom and Aloola (former Syrian Computer Society -SCS), have blocked access to all blogs hosted at Blogspot. In October 2006, subscribers of the private ISP AYA, reported to be unable to reach blogspot blogging platform, although access to the main www.blogger.com (dashboard) was still available. In June 2007, The Syria News Wire reported that the ban on Blogspot has been lifted.

This reminds us once again of the Pakistani blanket ban on Blogspot and the circumvention techniques employed by Pakistani and then Indian bloggers:

In March, 2006, the Memon brothers (Yasir Memon & Naveed Memon) created the proxy servers pkblogs.com to bypass the ban on blogspot.com. And later, in July 2006, when Indian ISPs have begun blocking access to Blogspot, Memon brothers launched Inblogs.net which is similar to pkblogs.com but more suited for the Indian traffic.

The Pakistani blogger Mansoor has created a GreaseMonkey script for FireFox which automatically converts blogspot links to pkblogs and subsequently inblogs.

Adnan Siddiqui has written a JavaScript that allows websites visitors to automatically use pkblogs for all outgoing blogspot links. You can download the .zip file from Don't Block the Blog.

Now, with the Blogspot block in Syria showing no sign of abating, and if the above circumvention techniques won't work for one reason or another, and in case you get tired finding proxies and workarounds to bypass the ban on Blogspot, you may consider it worthwhile to import your blog from Blogger.com into wordpress.com.

Click on the image to watch the video

As illustrated in this video, importing blogger into wordpress.com is a very easy procedure. However, before starting the import, please read carefully what to do after the import process, like what to do with your old images still hosted on Blogger.com and how to deal with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) issues, such as Google indexing your old blog content.

You should also think about informing your visitors and friend of your new blog (blog URL, blog name). You may also redirect them automatically to your new blog by adding a redirecting script into your blogger.com template like this one (just replace the old code with this script and make sure to put the right URL of the new wordpress blog) :

Pakistan: blogspot.com blocked again

Sami Ben Gharbia — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 13:56:21 +0000

The Don’t Block The Blog reported today that access to the popular blogging platform blogspot.com, which is owned by Google Inc, has been blocked again in Pakistan:

For about four months (since May, 2007) Google fortunately had changed the IP address of its Blogspot servers. The new IP addresses were not demarcated as prohibited by the censorship filters located at the Pakistan Internet Exchange. Today, for some odd reason, Google has suddenly reverted back to its original IP address, which has been on the block list since March of 2006. This move has resulted in the blocking of all internet traffic to the blogspot.com domain. Millions of blog readers in Pakistan now are unable to read or and interact with any of these websites.

The “Don’t Block The Blog” (DBTB) campaign was launched in response to the blanket ban on the Blogspot.com blogging platform instituted by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) more than a year ago, on 3rd of March 2006.

You can read our previous interview with Omer Alvie, the co-fonder of (DBTB), about the blanket ban and the Pakistani campaign to support online freedom of speech.

This flash animation is converted from the Powerpoint Presentation made by Dr Awab Alvi for “The Battle for the Internet.” conference (His presentation can be viewed here-original file .ppt)

Pakistan: block on Blogger has been lifted! Until…?

Sami Ben Gharbia — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 22:29:30 +0000

According to Dr Awab Alvi, co-founder of the Pakistani “Don’t Block The Blog” campaign, the block imposed on blogs hosted on Blogger has been lifted for about a week. The Don't Block The Blog campaign was launched in response to the blanket ban on the Blogspot.com blogging platform instituted by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) more than a year ago, on 3rd of March 2006.

However Dr Alvi says the lifting of the ban was not a deliberate move on the part of the authorities:

it was quite simply due to an accident that the PTA was forced to lift the filters. A week back a number of filters at the monitoring center started acting up which resulted in quite a large number of websites getting blocked for one reason after another, showing large timeouts etc.

The current incident began on February 28th when, in a bid to filter out certain websites deemed blasphemous by the Supreme Court, the Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) blocked access not just to a limited number of sites but also to thousands of major websites and email servers. A press release issued by “Don’t Block The Blog” on the 6th March 2007 gave a sense of the scale of the action:

the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority accidentally blocked millions of websites which suddenly came inaccessible for internet users in Pakistan. The accidentally blocked sites are popular, noncontroversial web pages with high traffic, including Google.com, Download.com, Microsoft.com, Gmail.com, Yahoo.com, BBC, CNN, Systematic, Akamai, PC World, MTV, Best Buy, Logitech and ESPN.

Bloggers reacted as well, and were joined in their complaints from an unexpected quarter - blogger Ifaqeer was surprised to see Pakistani newspaper covering the block of thousands of vital websites and email servers:

It seems that the utter stupidity of the blocking of websites in Pakistan has gotten to a point where even the mainstream media (I never thought I would use that phrase for a Pakistani newspaper) has noticed.

Indeed, according to several Pakistani newspapers - like The News which was following the development of the block- the PTA was under heavy pressure from local ISPs and IT-dependent businesses who, according to The News, “suffered 20 to 30 per cent revenue loss” over the five days of the block. Pakistani ISPs were, in their turn, under pressure from subscribers and average non-activist Internet users who went through agonizing five days without connection to popular sites and reacted with overwhelming complaints against local ISPs.

“Every single ISP that is connected to the Internet through ITI* suffers, and the ISPs get to be blamed for PTCL’s dirty job“, a senior official of Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan (ISPAK), is quoted as saying to The News newspaper.

In an attempt to explain the sudden mass-blocking, one ISP sent a letter to all its subscribers:

The sites, like Microsoft, Yahoo etc, pull their content from different servers distributed across different networks. Few of these networks have been blocked by ITI on the PTA directive … The reason is that these networks are also hosting some information which is objectionable, but instead of blocking that particular web site, PTCL has blocked the whole networks, which is causing serious issues in display of Internet content.

This case has made it clear that firm pressure issued from average Internet users, subscribers, ISPs and IT-enabled industry can have a decisive impact on forcing the government to lift the block. And this is what happened on Sunday 11th of March when the PTCL “decided to revert to the pre-February 28 scenario“, adopting seemingly a “more sophisticated and smarter means to filter out the blasphemous material“, The News wrote.

As The Internet Censorship Explorer (ICE) wrote on March 5, 2007:

Overblocking tends to create a significant backlash, especially from non-activist Internet users. While people can often tolerate the blocking of some sites (often extremist, or offensive etc…) it does not significantly impact the experience of everyday users. But when people’s regular browsing and blogging is interrupted they quickly become aware of censorship’s impact and campaign against it.

Because the unblocking of Blogspot.com was “accidental” and a quick-fix solution, Dr Awab Alvi is expecting that it will be resumed shortly. As he told me by mail:

At present NOTHING IS BLOCKED, but we are being very careful as I can almost assume that in short due course it shall resume once they have figured out the problem. If they don't YIPPEE great for us, but looking at the local situation here and the surmounting tension in Islamabad as regards to the Chief Justice crisis, I would not be surprised to see some blocking to come again.

Furthermore, especially after the last statement made by PTCL senior executive vice-president (IT) Ameer-ud-Din and published by the Pakistan Times, we can only fear that the unblock was a temporarily measure:

We have not undone what we did to comply with the SC** order. We are still filtering the websites.

* ITI: Information Technology Infrastructure.
** Pakistani Supreme Court.