When a new form of evil extrudes into American society, demands for Internet regulation seem to arrive faster than a greyhound on crack.
--- Declan McCullagh 1999

In the above, replace “evil” by “porn” or “Shaheen Sehbai”; for “America” read “Pakistan”. And, dear innocent reader, if you don’t know “crack” think of “heroin”. A greyhound is a bitch – no, I mean a dog!

You get the idea. Our telephone company, the monopoly holder for conveying Internet traffic, has lately been working overtime as the morality policeman. A few days ago it was asked to double up as the protector of the government’s reputation. Now isn’t that exactly what a public sector organization is not supposed to do?

Several thousand porn sites have been banned by Pakistan Telecommunication Corporation Ltd (PTCL) making them inaccessible to the novice user. Amongst all this has sprung up the devil in the shape of Shaheen Sehbai, with his forked spear punching holes in the underbelly of the government functionaries, the army and its leader. Isn’t anything sacred anymore?

In the May issue of Spider magazine, PTCL’s supremo, Akhtar Bajwa, was asked about their criteria for blocking websites for porn, blasphemy and others regarded as ‘objectionable’. He responded, “We have a judgment to follow (what does that mean?). Deciding whether online content is porn and how to block it is a very difficult job for a commercial organization…We will not do it of our own accord but if it’s a government directive we have to comply with it. We are doing our best to insure [that] pornography is stopped. As a professional, personally I say there should be an independent entity doing this and not PTCL.”

I lived just down the street from Mr Bajwa in Islamabad and would have loved to pass on to him the article “The Names of Shame:Defining Indecency and Obscenity at the Ends of Centuries” from where I took the introductory quotation. He and others can, thanks to the Net, find it at http://tinyurl.com/e1oa .

Ardeshir Cowasjee’s 8 June Dawn column (http://tinyurl.com/dtzb) is about the foolishness of the controllers of PTCL. But PTCL’s attempt to stop access to the South Asia Tribune comes as little surprise. Dawn’s own Spider magazine had predicted this possibility at a time when the IT Division closely controlled PTCL – that was during Prof Atta-ur-Rahman’s era. Spider’s Executive Editor Altamash Kamal’s prescient note about the likelihood of blocking ‘objectionable’ sites is worth reading at http://tinyurl.com/dtyb. Background material about this issue also appears at http://tinyurl.com/dtym .

I don’t regularly read the dailies but on Sunday 8th my electronic mailbox contained Cowasjee’s column, sent by South Asian Tribune, the very newspaper that Islamabad’s mandarins would like squashed. What they do not realize is that the Net was designed to survive a nuclear holocaust! It is not solely dependent on a single electronic route from the information source to the recipient. If a particular link in the long route breaks down, the bits and byte flow automatically via another extant link – and there are an awful lot of alternatives, thankfully. PTCL clearly forgot to mention this to those who ordered this blockage.

We are told that Awais Ahmad Khan Leghari and Sheikh Rasheed have nothing to do with any blocking. Let’s assume that this is so, and one expects ministers to be truthful! Since the blocking is a fact and has carried on for quite sometime now, it is their responsibility to find out and let the public know who did this. Thereafter it is for Prime Minister Jamali or maybe his boss, General Musharraf, to stop it.

It is clear that South Asia Times is strongly against the current political arrangement and some have accused it of yellow journalism. Even if that be so, blocking it is foolish and gives the Pakistani leadership a bad name. PTCL which is desperately trying to sell of its assets to the private sector could also have done without such bad publicity. International commentary is making Pakistan appear as a place that cannot tolerate dissent. See http://tinyurl.com/dtul for example.

If this censorship trend isn’t halted right away banning of Indian and Israeli newspapers may be next. Also secular websites may be obstructed the way that “porn” sites are currently blocked. According to my IT mole within the government, “PTCL [knows that blocking sites greatly slows down access – a technical reason from refraining from such foolishness] but are perhaps afraid to say this as they are carrying out a directive. They are now getting a powerful piece of software which will not only block porn (whatever that means) but will also help in curbing the menace (from the PTCL’s perspective) of Voice over IP (that’s your Net phone connection). And oh, while it is at it, this nifty software will also conveniently block things like MMA, Isa Daudpota, Shias, etc on the command of the masters of the day.”

It is now up to people like Prof Atta-ur-Rahman and Gen Musharraf who want to see a tolerant Pakistan to make known their concern (and that of most enlightened Pakistanis) about the arbitrary censorship of the Net. The report http://tinyurl.com/e4ar gives the general’s viewpoint on such matters clearly – he has comes out in favor of a pluralistic society. It is, however, not good enough to just express an opinion where in fact action is needed. In the case of the PTCL censoring, if he and the government fail to put an end to it, his American trip will generate a lot of adverse commentary about this unwarranted action and his inability to control it.

Finally, for civil libertarians reading this, here is something to consider. Anonymous “proxy servers” are a plenty on the net and these allow a user to access sites that are blocked. Tribune’s site, for example, can be reached easily by typing in http://tinyurl.com/e4dc . One uses such servers to bypass censorship. For the eyes/computers of your ISP/government you are only connecting to the proxy, they can’t easily see, that the proxy is connecting you to a "bad site". See http://tinyurl.com/e4at for more information about such proxy servers. For a listing of the large number of such servers use a search engine. In a recent email Shaheen Sehbai provide half a dozen alternatives to his site’s visitors, and the government surely cannot block all of them. Netters whose weekly diet includes the spicy Tribune need not fear blockage, but they would do well to take its contents with a pinch of salt.