Pakistan's plan for the "coldblooded murder of the Internet"

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This doesn’t sound good.

Pakistan’s plan for the “coldblooded murder of the Internet”

Pakistan’s plan for the “coldblooded murder of the Internet”

By Nate Anderson | Published about 5 hours ago

The PTCL homepage. That logo is apparently an eye, and it’s watching you.

You know that “overwhelmed” feeling you get when trying to censor the entire Internet manually? Pakistan does. Its current Internet censorship regime is run by hand at its two major Internet backbone companies, PTCL and TWA, and at various local Internet providers. The system isn’t working, says the government, which instead plans to deploy automated Internet censorship hardware capable of filtering up to 50 million URLs per box.

“Pakistani ISPs and backbone providers have expressed their inability to block millions of undesirable websites using current manual blocking systems,” said the government’s request for proposals (PDF) last week. “A national URL filtering and blocking system is therefore required to be deployed at national IP backbone [sic] of the country.”

The plan is to install the hardware on backbone links in Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad, from which it can be “centrally managed by a small and efficient team.”

The spec sheet

Pakistan has a long wish list for this censorship gear. It should be “capable of URL filtering and blocking, from domain level to sub folder, file levels and file types.” The hardware should be standalone and carrier-grade with redundant power supplies and “100 percent uptime.” it should provide for remote monitoring through SNMP, and it should do its dirty business on layers 2 or 3 of the 7-layer standard OSI networking model (those are the “data link” and “network” levels; particular application traffic, such as that from Skype or a Web browser, is way up at level 7).

Each installation should be scalable—Pakistan’s total Internet bandwidth is growing at around 50 percent each year—and each installation should be capable of filtering 100Gbps traffic with less than 1 millisecond of delay. Each piece of hardware must be able to “handle a block list of up to 50 million URLs,” and the system must support a Web-based app to update the block list categories.

Although the proposal makes clear that “Internet access in Pakistan is mostly unrestricted and unfiltered,” the new scheme isn’t leaving much to chance. In addition to filtering Web traffic, Pakistan also demands that the system be “rapidly programmable to support new protocols and applications.” In a follow-up document (PDF) answering questions about the system, the government makes clear that this refers to future filtering “for other well-known protocols like SMTP, FTP, etc.” So in addition to Web filtering, Pakistanis can soon look forward to having their e-mail scanned and censored by the government.

It’s impossible to know exactly what might be blocked, but Pakistan appears ready to grab international child porn blacklists from the Internet Watch Foundation in the UK to supplement its own lists.

Making censorship more efficient

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, Pakistan has had a long history with Internet censorship.

Ever since the Pakistan Telecommunication Act, passed in 1996, enacted a prohibition on people from transmitting messages that are “false‚ fabricated‚ indecent or obscene,” the PTA has increasingly intensified their efforts to censor content online. The PTA blocked thousands of sites in 2007—not just those containing pornographic material or content offensive to Islam, but numerous vital websites and services—in response to a Supreme Court ruling that ordered the blocking of “blasphemous” websites. In 2008, they briefly blocked YouTube because the site hosted Geert Wilder’s film “Fitna.” They blocked it again in 2010, over a hosted clip of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari telling an unruly audience member to “shut up.” In May of 2010, the PTA blocked Facebook in response to a controversy over a competition to draw the Prophet Mohammed.

Most recently in November of last year, the PTA sent a notice to Pakistani mobile carriers to ban 1,600 terms and phrases from SMS texts within seven days or they would face legal penalties. It was soon revealed that the list originated from an American National Football League’s “naughty words” list—words that were banned from being printing on American football jerseys.

Not all Pakistanis like this. Bytes for All, a local tech organization, called on foreign firms to stay out of the bidding to “show their support for freedom of expression, speech and opinion in Pakistan.”

“A society without fundamental rights, particularly freedom of expression, speech, opinion and choice cannot call itself a democratic society,” the group’s statement concluded. “Let’s join hands to stop the coldblooded murder of the Internet in Pakistan!”

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Re: Pakistan’s plan for the “coldblooded murder of the Internet”

Has a hint of SOPA/PIPA-Pakistan.

It’s up to the public there to raise voice and let the representatives know what is acceptable and what is not.

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Re: Pakistan’s plan for the “coldblooded murder of the Internet”

Well I do support the censorship but not that it effect the privacy of people. If you think Pakistan is doing it the hard way then what about the Gulf proxy that is doing this and more (blocking voip calls) from a decade or more?

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Re: Pakistan’s plan for the “coldblooded murder of the Internet”

This sounds good to me. For a country like Pakistan, censorship will always be there but Pakistan ISPs are moving from “gadha gari” (donkey cart) type of system to more efficient, automated and managed system. Why is that not good? They should look at Websense/Ironport/ScanSafe products from Cisco or maybe Barracuda appliances but not sure if its good for a backbone.

If RPF doesn’t come through, just ask our friends in Saudi what they using? :smiley:

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Re: Pakistan’s plan for the “coldblooded murder of the Internet”

Actually its nothing like SOPA/PIPPA at all.

As for the Cencorship idea I think its is actually a good thing it would be stupid of any regime to not curtail the power of the internet as it can be a force of evil as well as good.

Let me say also that this idea has nothing on “the great firewall of China”. I remember when I was in LongQuan and Norinco they had the most powerull censorship you can imagine! But it was a good thing too as it kept people focused on the tasks at hand.

Also the great firewall protects other countries from being bombarded by Chinese Spam battalions. Even President Obama and Tony blair got hammered online when the chinese let the restrictions off on a temporary basis. The most powerfull man in the world Mr Obama watched on in horror as his machine crashed due to the veritbale assualt that was launched onnhis inbox from angry chinese messengers. So the firewall does not only block the chinese from outsiders it protects outsiders from them too. :smiley:

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Re: Pakistan’s plan for the “coldblooded murder of the Internet”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/03/technology/pakistan-builds-web-wall-out-in-the-open.html?pagewanted=1

Pakistan Builds Web Wall Out in the Open
By ERIC PFANNER
Published: March 2, 2012

PARIS — Many countries censor the Internet, but few spell out their intentions as explicitly as Pakistan.
The government published a public tender last month for the “development, deployment and operation of a national-level URL filtering and blocking System.” Technology companies, academic institutions and other interested parties have until March 16 to submit proposals for the $10 million project — but anger about it has been growing both inside and outside Pakistan.

Censorship of the Web is nothing new in Pakistan, which, like other countries in the region, says it wants to uphold public morality, protect national security or prevent blasphemy. The government has blocked access to pornographic sites as well as, from time to time, mainstream services like Facebook and YouTube, Google’s video site.

Until now, however, Pakistan has done so in a makeshift way, demanding that Internet service providers cut off access to specific sites upon request. Apparently, that approach has been ineffective, so the government now wants to build an automatic blocking and filtering system, like the so-called Great Firewall of China.

While China and other governments that sanitize the Internet generally do so with little public disclosure, Pakistan is being surprisingly forthcoming about its censorship needs. It published its request for proposals on the Web site of the Information and Communications Technology Ministry’s Research and Development Fund and even took out newspaper advertisements to publicize the project.

“The system would have a central database of undesirable URLs that would be loaded on the distributed hardware boxes at each POP and updated on daily basis,” the request for proposals says, referring to uniform resource locators, the unique addresses for a specific Web page, and points of presence, or access points.

“The database would be regularly updated through subscription to an international reputed company maintaining and updating such databases,” the request for proposals adds.

The tender details a number of technical specifications, including the fact that the technology “should be able to handle a block list of up to 50 million URLs (concurrent unidirectional filtering capacity) with processing delay of not more than 1 milliseconds.”

Following the Arab Spring, which demonstrated the power of the Internet to help spread political and societal change, the disclosure of Pakistan’s intentions has set off a storm of protest among Pakistani free-speech groups. Opponents of censorship say they are doubly appalled because they associated this kind of heavy-handed approach more with the previous regime of Gen. Pervez Musharraf than with the current government of President Asif Ali Zardari.

“The authorities here are big fans of China and how it filters the Internet,” said Sana Saleem, chief executive of Bolo Bhi, a group that campaigns against restrictions on the Internet. “They overlook the fact that China is an autocratic regime and we are a democracy.

“What makes this kind of censorship so insidious is that they always use national security, pornography or blasphemy as an explanation for blocking other kinds of speech,” Ms. Saleem said, adding that her site had been blocked for several months in 2010 when it made reference to a ban on Facebook. Access to the social networking service had been restricted because of a page featuring a competition to draw the prophet Mohammed — something that is considered blasphemous by Muslims.

Ms. Saleem said she had tried, without success, to contact the technology ministry’s Research and Development Fund, which states that its goal is to “transform Pakistan’s economy into a knowledge based economy by promoting efficient, sustainable and effective” information technology “initiatives through synergic development of industrial and academic resources.”

She has had better luck approaching Western technology companies — some of whose products, she fears, could be adapted by local Pakistani companies or researchers for what the Research and Development Fund calls an “indigenously developed” project.

Ms. Saleem wrote to the chief executives of eight international companies that make Net filtering technology, asking them to make a public commitment not to apply for the Pakistani grant.

On Friday, one of them, Websense, which is based in San Diego, responded, declaring in a statement on its Web site that it would not seek the contract.

“Broad government censorship of citizen access to the Internet is morally wrong,” Websense said. “We further believe that any company whose products are currently being used for government-imposed censorship should remove their technology so that it is not used in this way by oppressive governments.”

Websense had previously withdrawn the use of its technology from Yemen after facing accusations from the OpenNet Inititative, a U.S.-Canadian academic group, and other organizations that it had been used by the government of that country to stifle political expression on the Internet.

Governments around the world buy filtering and blocking technology to root out illegal content like child pornography. Some private companies employ it to restrict access to social networks and other distractions on company computers.

But the use of Western technology to restrict political speech in countries with repressive regimes has come under increasing scrutiny in the wake of the Arab Spring. The OpenNet Initiative said in a report last year that at least nine governments in the Middle East or North Africa used such products, with the Western companies maintaining lists of sites to be blocked, ranging from sites featuring skeptical views of Islam to dating services.

Even before implementing its new system, Pakistan has been an active censor. The country ranked 151st, out of 179, on a ranking of press freedom by the Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders in 2011.

“Reporters Without Borders urges you to abandon this project, which would reinforce the arsenal of measures for communications surveillance and Internet censorship that have already been put in place by your government,” the group wrote in a letter Friday to Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani.

To free-speech advocates in Pakistan, the government’s seeming insouciance about censorship is a particular cause for alarm.

“This is a case study,” said Ms. Saleem of Bolo Bhi, which is based in Karachi and whose name means “speak up.” “No government has ever done this so publicly.”