While the ban on YouTube is as effective as Mamnoon Hussain is as the president of Pakistan, you may blow your cool if you go through the events which have unfolded since the authorities in Pakistan slapped a ban on it. The prohibition was challenged in the courts and the government is seen going back and forth in its defence. The later, in fact, has been issuing sporadic half-promises of lifting the ban, while insisting that the ban will remain in place. Given such absurd tactics and delays on the part of the government it goes without saying that it has handled the issue in a manner that has only made a mockery of Pakistan. An estimated 15 to 20 million netizens in Pakistan have been deprived of direct access to YouTube. Accessing the site from Pakistan is no big deal thanks to the countless proxy servers helping its netizens view prohibited material on the web but the very fact that hundreds and thousands of netizens from Pakistan, most of them practicing Muslims, are increasingly turning to unlawful means to access YouTube, speaks volumes about the adequacy of the ban. This silent evasion of the ban by many Pakistanis shows that people consider it to be unjustified. However, accessing YouTube via proxy servers slows down the buffering speed and thus affects those users who have low bandwidth (mostly students) more than the users surfing the web with a faster connection. Our artistes, who used YouTube as an inexpensive and censor-free platform to launch their work e.g., Aaloo Anday, Waderay ka beta, are among the people who have really suffered at the hands of this ban.

The question is: what purpose has this two-year-old prohibition served apart from exposing the amount of inertia and lack of thinking that runs from top to bottom in the government-run institutions. What message has this ban delivered to cybercitizens in our country apart from teaching them how to use illegal means to access a website which is essentially a useful resource for hundreds and thousands of students, professionals and researchers? What has Pakistan gained in the two years since the ongoing ban on YouTube? While the world is moving ahead in terms of using the internet, we are only being plunged into a recess of the dark ages from where there is no way forward. The ban on YouTube is purely a naked power play by the authorities and is all about controlling the behaviour of millions of netizens in Pakistan and denying them censor free access to the internet.

A recent United Nations Human Rights Council report has examined the important question of whether internet access is a basic human right which enables individuals to “exercise their right to freedom of opinion and expression”. The report was released after the 17th United Nations session on Human Rights. In it, the United Nations emphasised the importance of broadband and internet access throughout the special rapporteur’s conclusions in the report. The report has also underlined that restricting internet access completely will always be a breach of Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the right to freedom of expression.

Access to information is a right that cannot be denied. The Government of Pakistan has been wanting to place ‘filtration mechanisms’ to disallow the viewing of blasphemous videos on the video-sharing website in Pakistan and thus moving in a direction which has no end. The amount of efforts and money invested in devising such a programme is bound to head in only one direction: straight down. As an IT professional, I strongly believe that there is no technical solution that can be used to implement such a filter or block certain content on YouTube despite the ridiculous claims made by the information minister that such a software has been developed.

In the short-term, interstitial warnings — a warning page before a video plays — seems the only acceptable solution if the government is serious about lifting the ban. Google has offered interstitials to Pakistan just like they were offered to Bangladesh, which accepted the solution last year and ended the ban. As a matter of fact, the Government of Pakistan doesn’t even have to request Google for interstitials as YouTube has already applied this on every copy of the video hosted on YouTube and this can be extended to any future videos that result in a crisis of this sort. All the incumbent government needs to do is to restore access to the video-sharing website that has many advantages including being useful for educational, artistic and informative purposes. But for some unfathomable reason, YouTube still remains banned in the country whilst innumerable jihadist websites are easily accessible on the web.

Freedom of expression and information is already curtailed in a country like ours, where democracy is still at a rather nascent stage, and thus we need to resist any attempt to thwart it further. It is imperative to fight against internet censorship in general and the ban imposed on YouTube in particular. Such bans must be seen as a threat to clamp down on civil liberties. We need to strongly resist such tactics aiming to plunge us in a dark era where a centralised authority is able to control our behaviours and all access to information. Instead of concentrating energies on vain attempts, such as deciding what content is permissible for us to watch on YouTube, the government needs to respond to the will of the people and lift the ban from the website.

The writer is a freelance columnist and a political activist who keeps a keen eye on Pakistan’s socio-political issues and global affairs. He tweets at @alisalmanalvi

Express Tribune

During today’s National Assembly session, chaired by Deputy Speaker Murtaza Javed Abbasi, MNA Shazia Marri belonging to the Pakistan People Party (PPP) submitted a resolution demanding the lifting of the ban on YouTube which was unanimously accepted by the lower house of parliament.

Ms Marri had said that the government should lift ban on YouTube as soon as possible.

She added that people were using proxy servers to watch YouTube while the government should not adopt any double standards in this regard.

In response to the resolution, Minister of State for Health Services, Regulations and Coordination, Saira Afzal Tarar, assured the house that the government would lift the ban on YouTube soon.

Tarar said that it was the collective responsibility of all the parties to discuss the matter in detail and requested that the leaders of the parliamentary parties should suggest the names of the members from their parties to take part in the discussions in this regard.

The video-sharing website has been blocked in Pakistan since September 2012 when the then prime minister belonging to the PPP ordered its shutdown over its failure to take down the “Innocence of Muslims” movie that sparked furious protests around the world.

Despite the removal of the contentious video and claims by the government, the video-sharing remains banned in the country.

DAWN

There are two sides to every picture: the sentence is simple, declarative and apparently does not seem to have hidden meanings. The problem is that the devil is in the details. An examination of the affairs of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan leads us to two possibilities: either we have started believing that the practice of using religion for personal, financial and political gains is in fact the most sacred religious duty conferred upon us, or we believe that we are the only Islamic state in the world. People living in other Islamic states are just pretending. Though the government of Turkey, our brother Islamic country, seems to follow in our footsteps, it is miles away from being a ‘pure’ Islamic nation, like us. Since 2012, the government of a nuclear Islamic nation is afraid of a website. Official reasons in Pakistan, we all know, are never the actual reasons. Our previous government told the nation that Youtube hosts blasphemous videos and proudly announced that the site is restricted in our pure country. Indeed, the government thought it was not the video rather Youtube itself that hurt the sacred feelings of pure Muslims. So it kicked the hornet’s nest and the PPP government became certain of its place in the VIP quarters of paradise. Once in opposition, however, it found another way to serve the nation as a humble student of reality. Shazia Marri, PPP parliamentarian, submitted a resolution to lift the ban on Youtube immediately saying that since the people were using the website through proxies there is no point in a ban. Here we see that her demand to remove the ban on Youtube was not based on principle, rather on the absurdity of the ban itself. Proxy websites are not an invention of today and information technology is developing at a faster rate than that of our politicians’ capacity to process the ongoing changes in internet life.

Had the PPP government realised this fact, it would not have banned the video sharing website but would have tried to find another solution to block access to the blasphemous video. Even if a ban was necessary, it should have been temporary, to cool down flared sentiments. The current government indeed could find other solutions to block access to the allegedly ‘blasphemous’ movie, but since taking power it has been operating on punishment mode. To make people believe that the government exists, something needed to be done, so it decided to continue the ban and establish its writ. The Taliban might issue a certificate saying that the PML-N leadership shall get the same VIP treatment in paradise as the PPP. Maybe the Sharif-led government thought that lifting the ban would make religious extremists furious and bring them out on the streets. They may have forgotten that once our pure Muslims brothers are on the roads and streets, they consider it their religious duty to loot shops. Any property that cannot be looted, they set on fire. It should have refused to be blackmailed and talked directly to their mysterious masters.

Banning Youtube in the name of Islam is no different from the practices of the Taliban, who mask their criminal activities with sharia. The ban on Youtube is, in fact, only to deprive people of their constitutional right to access information and express their opinion freely and independently. Mr Sharif has a proven tendency towards civil dictatorship and wishes to keep media and state institutions under his thumb. In his last tenure he unsuccessfully tried to crush a media group and the Supreme Court (SC) was attacked by his party’s hoodlums. After passing the so-called Protection of Pakistan bill in the National Assembly, he once again proves that everything changes except the nature of man. To keep the media on his side, he continues to reward journalists with offices and ambassadorships.

YouTube, on the other hand, is difficult to control but easy to block. Even if we believe just for a moment that the site is restricted due to a specific blasphemous video, if it was not in the interest of the government to chain Youtube, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) could block the video links. Now, assume again that the PTA technicians were not able to block the links and to completely chain the site was the only option. Even in this case, the government should have lifted the ban when Google removed the video under the orders of a US court. Or, at least when Shazia Marri submitted the resolution to lift the ban, the matter should not have been delayed. So we are left with nothing else to believe except that for some unknown reason our democratic governments feel threatened by the exercise of free expression in the country, as it is by the establishment of local government institutions. The local government system plays a vital role in strengthening democratic norms among people. It allows people to set their agenda and decide how to distribute economic resources. It empowers the masses. However, it also means that in the presence of local government institutions, politicians in Lahore and Islamabad will not receive development funds and new leadership will emerge from these institutions. Hence there are unlimited hurdles in the way of local government.

The internet has given people a new level of freedom and a higher degree of access to information. YouTube is not just a video sharing website, it is a platform. In addition to entertainment, it also offers a great deal of knowledge. If you wish to enhance your computer knowledge, it is there to help. If you wish to listen to Islamic scholars, you can do so. It is not just a website but a multimedia library. It has a great number of videos about computer programming, software development, current affairs, technology and other topics. Therefore, the ban is as illogical as Ishaq Dar’s statement that the mysterious arrival of $ 1.5 billion in the national treasury was a gift with no strings attached.

Realistically speaking, it is nonsense to ban any website. There are proxy websites that are specially developed for people living in countries where the internet is censored. Smartphones are full of free applications that help unblock sites. Some are specially programmed for YouTube. Our government can learn from the example of Turkey where the government blocked Twitter and by the evening of the same day people found ways to continue tweeting. If a government cannot implement a decision, there is no point issuing the orders and becoming a laughing stock. However, even if our politicians and religious scholars are really concerned about the presence of blasphemous material in cyberspace, banning the sites and chaining the internet is illogical. Instead, with logic and argument, our scholars should talk and convince the global community, representatives of our government should raise the issue at the international forums like the United Nations and work with the world to discourage and control blasphemous material. However, since that requires lots of hard work and does not offer material gain neither our government nor our scholars will do anything in this regard. Let us hope that soon the day will come when the internet will truly be free and YouTube unchained.

Daily Times

The bill might take one or two more months to be presented in Parliament and then passed and implemented. But that is a basic requirement to convince any international website to launch a localised version in the country.

The ministry only reached this point after it realised filtration of sacrilegious content is a very expensive and difficult process.

Although during the previous days the ministry claimed having found some way to block blasphemous content on YouTube, it may be able to open the website when it would be fully confident about the achievement.

But it does not seem possible at this point in time, so the ministry is considering certain other options. Without assuring that blasphemous content could not be seen on the social-networking, re-opening it would not be possible for the government, as it might incite protests and riots across the country.

On the other hand, for a localised version of YouTube, it is a pre-requisite that legislation is done to provide shelter to the website from bad or unwanted posts.

As per the proposed law, the website cannot be sued in case something immoral and illegal is shared on it. But in response the website will be bound to remove that material or content from its localised domain. However this bar will not be applicable to its international website.

As per an official of the ministry, the developers of YouTube were contacted and asked to remove sacrilegious material. It has been two months. They are taking the plea that content blocking would be against its policy. They float the idea about a localised version of YouTube though.

At present many countries have their local versions of YouTube. These include India, Turkey, Malaysia, Algeria, Jordon, Morocco, Tunisia and Yemen. YouTube has also proposed localised versions for Saudi Arabia and some other countries.

For Saudi Arabia blasphemous content has been blocked without blocking the website. Pakistan does not have enough resources to get a similar thing done.

For India blasphemous content was blocked by YouTube on local version. China does not have a localised version but a very powerful filter to block unwanted content.

The Nation

On September 17, 2012 Islamabad blocked access to the popular video-sharing website after it aired a trailer for a low-budget American film deemed offensive to Islam.

Pakistan summoned the most senior US diplomat in the country to protest against the “Innocence of Muslims”, demanding that the film be removed and action taken against its producers.

A year later, the film is barely mentioned but YouTube, whose parent company is US multinational Google Inc, is still banned in Pakistan, as it is in China and Iran.

Pakistan is no stranger to censorship. Foreign television programmes deemed offensive are blocked. Films shown at cinemas are stripped of scenes considered too daring.

But the YouTube ban is in name only.

Internet users like Abdullah Raheem, a university student in Pakistan’s cultural capital Lahore, can easily access the site through a simple proxy or Virtual Private Network (VPN).

“Most people who go to school or university know how to access YouTube, but not the rest of the population,” says Abdullah. Only 10 percent of Pakistan’s estimated 180 million people have access to the Internet, one of the lowest rates in the world.

“This ban has no impact,” says Abdullah, who still feels bad about logging onto YouTube. “As a Muslim, I’m ashamed… because the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ defiled Islam.”

Pakistan blocked the site only after Google was unable to block access to the film because it has no antenna in the country.

Although Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt defended hosting the film, the company did have the technology to block access to it in countries such as Egypt, India and Saudi Arabia.

But the Pakistani government didn’t stop there. It then ordered that websites be monitored for “anti-Islam content”.

The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, which specialises in Internet censorship, says Pakistan has used Canadian company Netsweeper to filter websites relating to human rights, sensitive religious topics and independent media.

The researchers say that pornographic content and political websites from Balochistan, the southwestern province gripped by separatist insurgency, are among those blocked.

Shortly after Pakistan’s former military ruler Pervez Musharraf was arrested in April, Pakistan shut down access to a satirical song posted on YouTube’s rival Video that poked fun at the army.

But the song “Dhinak Dhinak” performed by the Beygairat Brigade, which is Urdu for Shameless Brigade, quickly went viral as Pakistani Internet users went through proxy VPNs to watch it.

“It is still creating waves. So I think they helped our popularity by banning that song,” said the Brigade’s lead singer Ali Aftab Saeed, 29.

Saeed believes that the authorities are bent on a wider campaign of Internet censorship, not just restricting access to items considered blasphemous in the nation.

“We thought that they would try to ban just the link to that particular video (‘Innocence of Muslims’) but they instead banned the whole website (YouTube) and then they extended it to satire and people who discuss the role of military groups. So yes, it is a worrying situation,” he told AFP.

Shahzad Ahmad, director of Internet rights campaign group, Bytes For All, also says that online censorship serves a wider political agenda than just shutting down blasphemous content.

“The government is trying to curtail, limit and curb citizen freedom of expression,” Ahmad told AFP.

He says citizens are waging a “cyberwar” against Pakistani institutions who are blocking and filtering the Internet.

“There is a very clear defiance from users, particularly from the youth on government filtering,” he told AFP.

Bytes For All has gone to court in Lahore, demanding an end to “illegal and illegitimate” censorship of the Internet.

The fight is vital to stop the government developing tools of censorship that threaten “the security and private live” of individuals, says Farieha Aziz, a member of the Bolo Bhi advocacy group that is closely following the case, which encompasses the YouTube ban. Software surveillance FinFisher, developed by British company Gamma and able to access content on personal computers, has been detected recently on Pakistani servers.

Although it is unclear whether it has been deployed by Pakistan’s own intelligence agencies or foreigners, the NSA scandal in the United States has heightened suspicions. In Pakistan, the cyberwar has only just begun.

Daily Times

KARACHI: The government’s ban on video-sharing website YouTube has been protested on Twitter and Facebook time and again by everyone from ordinary citizens to journalists and musicians in the past four months.

While most have tried to live a life without YouTube — either by using Vimeo and Dailymotion — or around it by using proxies, the Pakistani music industry has suffered largely in silence. One group of artists has realised the importance of such a video-sharing platform, and has come up with a unique way to protest the ban — YouTube Aloud, a collaborative effort between Omran Shafique (Momo) from Mauj, Hamza Jaafri from CoVEN and Pakistan’s child prodigy Usman Riaz.

“YouTube Aloud is a social media page where we [and the Facebook community] express our thoughts about how this ban is having a negative effect on society,” Riaz tells The Express Tribune.

“Everything that I have learnt and achieved is a direct result of having a close connection to the online realm,” says Riaz. “YouTube can be the reason I became a TED Fellow. I would have never had a chance to speak on the TED stage or perform with Preston Reed — the man whose videos I used to watch on YouTube when I first picked up the guitar — if I didn’t have access to YouTube.”

As a representative of the group, Riaz raises the question: “Does it make sense to burn down an entire library just because you don’t agree with the contents of one of its books?”

In December, Riaz had posted a message on his Facebook page, asking other artists such as Adil Omar, Natasha Humera Ejaz and Mole if they would be interested in holding a marathon concert in support of YouTube. He wrote: “It will do two things. (1) It can be the press conference that Hamza Jaafri had in mind to discuss the negative aspects of this ban on the artistic community (which I am sure we all whole-heartedly agree with) and (2) it can result in a lot of artists coming together to perform and show content.”

“Hear! Hear! We are all with you on this one!” posted Meesha Shafi, in response to Riaz’s post. Others reacted in the same spirit, but so far, the concert has not taken place.

Musicians Zohaib Kazi and Zoe Viccaji recently wrote an open letter requesting Interior Minister Rehman Malik to restore the site. A line from the letter reads: “YouTube is a medium that provides a platform for both. It is a library of today and an archive for tomorrow — an archive from which we will be missing”.

Even Junaid Jamshed, the former Vital Signs member turned entrepreneur, feels YouTube should be restored. According to Jamshed, YouTube is a source of research and information. “I think we have already made our point by banning it — now it should be restored immediately,” he says.

“It is a free medium of information for people and plays a pivotal role in religious education because a large number of people go on YouTube to read the Quran and other religious texts,” explains Jamshed. “We are a Muslim nation and will not tolerate or watch anything blasphemous, even if it is present on YouTube. As a Muslim Ummah, we know what is right or wrong for us.”

However, not everyone agrees that the YouTube ban is impacting our music industry in a negative way. Senior musician Asad Ahmed, who has been in the music scene for three decades, says, “[YouTube] should be restored but I don’t think it is harming the music industry.”

“It’s funny that [people are] saying that,” he chuckles. “Around 50% of Coke Studio’s viewership is outside Pakistan and the real YouTube fans in Pakistan already have Spotflux or hotspot shield working for them.”

Pakistan Press Foundation