03 Jan 14 | Digital Freedom, News and features
Chinese websites
In 2010 China shut down 1.3 million web sites with popular pages, such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, blocked. Three years later and China has employed over 2,000,000 people to monitor microblogging sites, a further clampdown on free speech in the country.
Having blocked major social media sites it’s not surprising that a large percentage of China’s hundreds of millions web users have turned to microblogging sites to offer up their opinions on society. Although the Beijing News stated that the monitors are not required to delete posts they view online they do gather data by searching for negative terms relating to their clients and compiling the information gathered into reports.
Weibo, China’s largest microblogging platform, has more than 500 million registered users who post 100 million messages daily. Postings on the website that criticise the Chinese government are often removed.
Global internet access
The internet is often taken for granted by those with regular and easy access to the online world. However, a staggering 4.6 billion people live without access to it; that’s around 68% of the global population. The number of internet users has grown by 566% since 2000 but considering the positive effects the internet can have on employment, communications and finances more of the world should have access to this valuable resource.
Africa has the poorest access to the internet; only 7% of total global internet usage comes out of the continent with, on average, 15.6% of the population using the internet.
YouTube
YouTube was bought by Google in 2006. Seven years later and localised versions of the video sharing site have been implemented in 56 countries, allowing for the content posted on to YouTube to be tailored specifically to the country it is serving. Although localising YouTube for specific countries can help with issues surrounding copyright, it also means that governments can block specific content from being uploaded and viewed on the website.
In Pakistan the online video sharing site has been banned since 2012. Google is looking to localise YouTube in the country, allowing the population access to the site, but only if the search engine makes it easier to block any blasphemous or objectionable content. Iran, Tajikistan and China are the only other countries with a block on YouTube.
India and the internet
India may be able to claim to be the world’s third largest internet user (behind the U.S and China) but that does not mean the country’s 74 million internet users have free access to the web. According to the Google Transparency Report, India leads the way in the number of take-down requests issued. Between July and December 2012 Indian authorities requested, without court orders, that 2,529 items be removed from the internet- a 90 percent increase from the first half of 2012.
In 2013 amendments were made to the Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules which stated, under Section 79 of the IT Act, that intermediaries had only 36 hours to respond to complaints or content deemed by regulators to be “grossly harmful” or “ethnically objectionable”. The clarification meant that this content does not have to be removed from the web, but failure to respond or acknowledge to the request within the short time frame, which does not take into account weekends or holidays, can result in a criminal procedure.
This article was posted on Jan 3 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
23 Dec 13 | News and features, Pakistan, Religion and Culture
In May 2010, terrorists attacked two mosques belonging to the Ahmadi community. Ninety-four people were killes and more than 120 were injured. (Photo: Aown Ali / Demotix)
“It was staged and pre-planned,” said Shahid Attaullah, referring to the arrest of a homeopath Dr Masood Ahmed on charges of blasphemy.
Narrating the details of the events preceding the arrest of a 72-year old doctor, who is also a British national, Attaullah, the spokesperson for the Ahmaddiya Jamaat, said: “Two men posing as patients, came to his clinic in the Anarkali, an older part of Lahore, on November 25. After a few minutes they started discussing religion. Supposedly the doctor responded to their questions about Islam and then they left. Within minutes, a mob gathered around the clinic. A complaint was lodged and the police arrested him for preaching. He is in lock-up and his bail denied.”
According to news reports, the doctor was arrested for ‘posing’ as a Muslim.
Ahmadis consider themselves Muslims but in 1974, the government promulgated an ordinance, declaring them non-Muslims. According to Pakistan’s constitution, this community cannot call themselves Muslims; are banned from referring to their places of worship as mosques and cannot recite the Kalima, which is the first tenet of Islam, whereby a Muslim proclaims that he is a Muslim. The Ahmadis are banned from even singing hymns in praise of Prophet Muhammad. Of late there have been incidents where they have been harassed for keeping Muslim names.
Attaullah sees this to be a long-drawn case now that a first information report (FIR) has been lodged. “It is now gone into the court.” Last year 20 trumped up charges were registered, while this year as many as 33 people have so far been booked including the doctor.
According to Attaullah while there are some judges who are themselves prejudiced towards the community, those who are not are pressured by religious hardliners.
“There was a case where the judge of the Lahore High Court refused to take decision and sent the application back to the lower court. This is quite unprecedented. Two months ago in another case, after the judge granted bail to the accused, a group of clerics went to the judge’s chamber. I don’t know what transpired inside, but a little later, the judge changed the written order stating ‘no bail’”.
This does not surprise Zohra Yusuf, the chairperson of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. “I can understand the judge’s predicament because a lot of power has been ceded to the clerics and most people buckle under their threats,” she said.
Since 1984, 299 people belonging to the community have been charged under the blasphemy law, 764 booked for displaying the Kalima; 38 for the Azan (calling to prayer); 447 ‘posing’ as Muslims; 93 for offering prayers, 770 for preaching and hundreds others for many such offences.
Little wonder then that Attaullah says: “There is always the sword of Damocles hanging over all of us and the mental anguish is permanent”.
“Many of our youngsters are migrating to other countries,” he said. “They do not see a future in Pakistan and the elderly members don’t want to leave the country they think is theirs,” he pointed out the social quandary they find themselves in.
The religious apartheid has become overt with the oppressors having declared an all out war. “In the last few years, I find the persecution has escalated and the attacks on us are pre-meditated and carried out in a planned manner,” said Attaullah. He further added: “And they always pick on the weaker elements of our community.”
In addition, said Yusuf: “The persecution of Ahmadis knows no bounds and, regrettably, there’s not enough condemnation from society or the media.”
According to Attaullah, the space for Ahmadis in Pakistan is getting narrower by the day.
Talking about the doctor’s arrest, he said: “The complainants had filmed the unsuspecting man reading aloud the translation of a verse from the Quran through the hidden camera.”
A Lahore-based journalist, requesting his name be withheld, (as he has received threats by an Islamic group for covering faith-based issues) has seen the video clip: “It was clear the doctor was trapped into saying what he said, but he was not preaching,” he said.
Further, said the journalist: “Ahmadis don’t talk about religion publicly and never to strangers; these people must be known to him and from the video it seemed they were asking him questions and he was responding to them.”
Attaullah, said they regularly circulate directives telling their people not to participate in any religious discussions with anyone and if the opposite sides wants to pull them in, they should simply disclose they are Ahmadis and the law does not allow them to speak on Islam.
This article was posted on 23 Dec 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
This article was updated to correct an error. Ahmadis were declared non-Muslims in 1974, not 1984 as previously stated.
18 Dec 13 | Uncategorized
Who would’ve thought the news earlier this month of YouTube being finally made accessible in Pakistan, albeit as a local search engine, would open a floodgate of criticism?
Minster of State for Information Technology and Telecommunications, Anusha Rehman certainly did not. She probably thought she had done a good turn — wooed many young digital rights activists who had long been demanding unblocking of the website and calmed others who had demanded blocking of objectionable content from it.
“Instead of installing costly filtration mechanisms, Google will easily be able to block blasphemous content on the request of the Pakistan government,” Rehman told the Senate’s Standing Committee on Information and Technology. “Saudi Arabia and Malaysia have also reached a similar arrangement with Google,” she added.
But Farieha Aziz, director at Bolo Bhi, a not-for-profit geared towards advocacy, policy and research in the areas of gender rights, government transparency, internet access, digital security and privacy, dismissed the news out right saying: “There is no arrangement between the company and the government, unlike the perception the government is projecting.”
“I don’t want a localised version. Remember what became of Disney in India with everything getting dubbed in Hindi! I would definitely prefer the original version,” said a resolute 12-year old Khadeja Ebrahim, a YouTube buff. “I love YouTube, my entire school loves YouTube and we hate the people who have blocked it,” she added vehemently.
Yasser Latif Hamdani, who had filed a case for unblocking the website, on behalf of digital rights campaigners Bytes For All is not too happy with the news. His concern is mainly constitutional.
“It is a matter of principle. I do not think it is alright that the government can decide what I should be able to view,” he said. To him this was a clear violation of Article 19, 19-A and 17 of the Constitution of Pakistan. “Therefore, I do not consider it a great service,” he concluded.
The young lawyer uses the popular video-sharing website to listen to debates on law, politics, constitution, philosophy and history. He accesses YouTube through virtual private networks(VPNs), but complains “the experience is just not the same”.
Nighat Dad, of the Digital Rights Foundation doesn’t find the move “encouraging” either and given “how different vague provisions of different laws and constitution have been misused in blocking the content on internet” in the Pakistan” is, in fact, quite wary. She warns: “I see a huge wave of internet blocking and censorship coming our way.”
“If it happens, it will be bad news!” pointed out Shahzad Ahmad, country director of B4A.
Simply put, said Ahmad, it means legalising censorship of digital content on this platform. “YouTube may then become like Facebook. You will only be able to see that content which authorities will allow us to see,” he explained.
Presenting a doomsday-like scenario, he further said: “A new war will erupt among religious factions and the stronger ones may demand a ban on the others. Human rights movement will suffer hugely, political expression will become much more difficult and alternate discourse will die.”
Many say this will put a stop to hate speech, a major issue stoking religious sects and minorities, in Pakistan, especially on social media.
Ahmad disagreed. “Banning hate speech will not end till perpetrators and banned outfits are taken to task. If you expect that banning their Facebook/Youtube or Twitter will solve the problem, then the answer is a no, a big no!” he said emphatically.
The blocking of YouTube in Pakistan, began last year on 17 September after the website refused to remove the blasphemous 14-minute video clip “Innocence of Muslim”.
The video had led to violent protests and demonstrations across the Muslim world, killing over 50 people.
Ahmad said the decision to block YouTube had nothing to do with upholding religious values or blocking blasphemous content. He suspects it had “political” underpinnings to it.
“The authorities have used this incident to strengthen censorship and filtering in Pakistan, and spent millions of dollars, a useless wastage of the public’s hard earned tax money, as nothing can be blocked on the Internet. Citizens have already resorted to VPNs and circumvention tools.
That is true. Over the past one year, hundreds of die-hard users of this website have relied on proxy servers to work around the ban.
“I just came back from China- and while Facebook and YouTube were banned everywhere, you can access them in Shanghai Freezone especially the Pudong district of Shanghai,” said Hamdani. “So even authoritarian regimes understand the futility of such censorship,” he added.
These proxy servers are passed on word of mouth and go viral within moments, but expire every few weeks. Then the process of passing the information starts all over again. “You can imagine our desperation,” pointed out Ebrahim.
But while she and her school friends are mostly using the website for downloading songs or cheat videos for games, there are hundreds who depended on it for their bread and butter.
“I can give you scores of examples of small traders, who marketed and “networked” for expanding their businesses on this free platform because they could not afford to advertise through the mainstream media. The Virtual University, an online learning institute, had uploaded thousands of lectures for its students to access; all that came to a halt. These lectures benefitted not just Pakistani students but millions of those living abroad. Now they have set up their own servers, and which I suspect must have been a huge investment” said Dad.
Toffee TV.com produces songs, stories and activities for children in the Urdu language. They went live on July 2011 and banked on YouTube to take it further and the latter did. It met with enormous success at schools, in homes and even among speech therapists, but saw a huge slump in its business. Before the ban was imposed, TOFFEE was uploading two new video programmes per week with 100,000 new visitors a month and serving five times those many repeat visitors.
The minister for IT said that the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has been tasked with drafting an ordinance that would provide intermediary liability protection to Google/YouTube, thereby not holding the company responsible for what users choose to upload to the platform.
Bolo Bhi is quite disturbed by this news. “Why is PTA, a regulatory authority that deals with enforcement and not policy making, being asked to draft the ordinance?” it asked in a press statement. It also asked what became of the expensive filtering equipment that the government had acquired for its telecommunication networks.
02 Dec 13 | Digital Freedom, News and features, Pakistan, Politics and Society
Urooj M, a former DJ on a Pakistani FM radio channel, also a film aficionado, was incredulous when she found the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) had blocked the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).
She tweeted: “SERIOUSLY #PAKISTAN, WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU BAN #IMDB!!! COME ON, SERIOUSLY!!!???!!!! #FirstYoutubeNowIMDB #WTF.”
This widely used online entertainment news portal, a prominent source of reliable news and box office reports regarding films, television programmes and video games from all over the world, was blocked on 19 November, but the ban was lifted by 22 November.
Pakistan is notorious for blocking websites. It has banned more than 4,000 websites for what it considers objectionable material, including YouTube, in 2012 for a film that was deemed blasphemous by Muslims around the world. In 2011, in a particularly ill-thought-out move it announced censoring text messages containing swear words. In 2010, after a decision by the Lahore High Court, Facebook was blocked as a reaction to the ‘Everybody Draw Muhammad’ page that was seen as offensive to the prophet.
Users were given no reason for this sudden and selective ban. However, Omar R. Quraishi, a journalist had tweeted: “PTA official declined to give specific reason for ban on IMDB – said is placed for 3 reasons: “anti-state”, “anti-religion”, “anti-social”.
While these “targeted bans” are small irritants in his life, as he can easily by pass them, Ali Tufail, 26, a Karachi-based lawyer, finds them wrong on principle as he sees them infringing upon the fundamental rights of the citizen as given in Article 19 and 19 A of Pakistan’s Constitution.
He said the government must give users sound “reasons” why they block a certain website and “what benchmarks or what standards are used to come to the decision to enforce these sudden bans” and if there is a committee that takes these decisions, “we must be told who these people are.”
The same was endorsed by Nighat Dad of Digital Rights Foundation (DRF). “We strongly oppose any form of censorship employed on citizens, curbing their basic right to information.”
However, netizens believe the ban was enforced to block the movie trailer for The Line of Freedom, a film that highlights the issue of the crises in Balochistan province showing Baloch separatists abducted by Pakistani security agencies without charges in a bid to stamp out rebellion.
“Our team did a quick survey with the help of tweeters around the country,” said Dad. “We checked various other movie titles but only Line of Freedom seemed to be blocked on IMDb and several other websites were accessible otherwise.” The DRF termed it an “unprecedented event” because the government had “used all sorts of means to curb the dissidents’ views” from Balochistan.
“I didn’t even know there was a movie by this title which was giving the government so much heartburn and so I just had to see what was so unsavoury that the government had to block the entire website,” said Dad who watched the whole 30 minutes or so of it by circumventing the various firewalls. “This is what happens, when you forcibly close the internet, word gets around and people get curious!”
Malik Siraj Akbar, editor of the online Baloch Hal, who sought asylum in the United States, is not surprised at the ban. His own newspaper was blocked in November 2010 and even now the ban has not been completely lifted, he says. “Since 2010, it has been available in some parts of the country and not others and access has not been very consistent,” he said adding there were hundreds of other Baloch websites, “mostly those supportive of the nationalists that have been blocked”.
But Tufail added: “This is one battle which the government would find difficult to win as newer, maybe more objectionable [to Pakistani state] websites, will keep popping up which they would never be able to keep pace with,” terming such bans an “exercise in futility”.
There could be some truth in the story of the ban on the Baloch film. Because their voices remain unheard, several family members made a 700km journey on foot from Quetta to Karachi to see if that would make a difference.
Naziha Syed Ali, a journalist at English-language daily Dawn, had recently visited Awaran, a stronghold of the separatists in Balochistan, which had been badly affected by the earthquake on September 24. She said she got a sense of “hostility expressed mainly towards the army and paramilitary rather than Pakistan per se. Then again, the army is seen as a symbol of the country, so it’s pretty much the same thing.”
Ali said “More than fear, they don’t want to take help from what they see as an occupation force.”
According to her the “feelings of alienation have been greatly exacerbated by the issue of the missing people and the kill-and-dump tactics”.
In addition, while Ali found there to be “sufficient food for now”, there was dire need for health services and proper shelter “as the tents that have been distributed are not warm enough for winter”.
The problem is the army is not allowing international and local non-governmental organisations to carry out any relief work there. Instead, the charities run by religio-political organisations and even banned outfits are seen freely roaming about. For years, the state has kept a stony silence over the issue of the disappearances of the Baloch nationalists. Rights group say if the state lets the various organisations into the region, their dark secrets about grave human rights abuses, for now a national shame, may become a problem for it on the international front.
This article was published on 2 Dec 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
