My personal brush with censorship

I run a popular travel website on Pakistan, offroadpakistan.com, along with a website on “all things tech” in Pakistan, wiredpakistan.com. They’re both hosted on the same server, and on Feb 3rd, the PTA ordered them blocked. I contacted a couple of ISP’s, and found out from them that my websites were being blocked at the Pakistan Internet Exchange, through which most Pakistan’s internet bandwidth is filtered.
I received numerous emails and phone calls from people in Pakistan, especially users of PTCL, Pakistan’s largest ISP, that they could no longer access my website in Pakistan. I told them it was blocked by the Govt. of Pakistan – but I couldn’t tell them why, as I still don’t know myself!

I sent repeated emails to every single public email address belonging to the PTA, PTCL and PIE, yet I never received a reply to any of my queries trying to find out why my website was blocked. Finally, someone who personally knew the head of enforcement at the PTA got in touch with him, sent me his personal email and phone number, and asked him to do something. That finally got me a terse one line reply from the PTA saying “they’d look into it”, and a week later on Feb 15th another email saying “it’s now working”. I talked to lawyers, newspapers, the media, PTCL, PIE, the PTA, ISP’s, and a lot of other random people over the 11 days the block remained in place – and I still don’t know why, by whom and for what reason.

My websites are now unblocked, but what really troubles me is the arbitrary nature in which they were blocked, especially considering that offroadpakistan in particular, is a popular website both inside and outside Pakistan, and portrays a very positive image of Pakistan – every day I get positive feedback from all over the world from the website. A number of international websites and newspapers reported on this ban, and while it’s a very small on the larger scheme of things, it’s no wonder Pakistan has such a negative image – all these small, mind-numbingly senseless actions taking by the Govt. add up.

Some other questions the block raised in my mind are is who exactly is the PTA to be going about blocking individual websites? From the charter on their own website, as far as I can tell, this does not fall into their jurisdiction – they’re set up to police the telecommunications industry, dealing with the likes of Mobilink and PTCL – not individual websites. I am not a lawyer, but from their charter, the PTA was not set up as a censorship body, nor does it have the infrastructure in place to do so effectively.

While it is legal in Pakistan for the government to block websites, they must follow some sort of system, codified by a law – at the moment from what I can gather the whole procedure is completely arbitrary. There is a reason the police are required to get and justify and procure an arrest warrant, and there are courts in which you can contest your arrest, post bail, engage lawyers. As more of our lives move online – and if you live in Pakistan, even if you’ve never seen a computer, many of the important aspects of your life – id cards, social security, passports, bank accounts, police records (soon) – and much else is solely online, stored on various computer networks, our personal online identities become increasingly important. Online worlds need laws and policing too, but policing never works arbitrarily – there has to be checks and balances, which today are completely missing here.

My websites are run as a hobby – I generate no income from them, so the 11 day blockage didn’t affect me monetarily – but I know people here whose sole income is now generated online – whether a one man web design firm who depends on his website to attract clients, to people whose sole income is from advertisements on their websites – what will they do if their websites get blocked? As Pakistan approaches the internet age, and the government is proposing rolling out a nation-wide “broadband for all” scheme to bring high speed internet to the masses, more and more people will be logging onto the internet and working online.

I have heard from a source that perhaps the reason my website was blocked was because someone at PIE didn’t ‘like’ it – and so he blocked it. The PTA and PIE seem bent on bringing the regular Pakistani system of nepotism, favoritism and corruption onto the internet also – where you can get access to your competitors website blocked, or worse, slowed down, receive copies of your email correspondence – and much worse.

The Internet is amazing, and many people still don’t grasp the sheer overarching importance of how it’s changing the world and it’s only just begun! We here in Pakistan seem hell-bent on choking it at birth on here, afraid of the open access it provides to everything – especially the government.

An edited version of this was published in the Dawn newspaper, Feb 23, 2008.