Month: September 2013

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Right to information

The Right to Information (RTI) article 19-A was inserted in the constitution under the 18th amendment for the people of Pakistan to get all information in matters of public importance but subject to regulation and reasonable restrictions imposed by law. The Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa recently passed an ordinance “The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Right to Information Ordinance,2013″ (RTI) by the governor of the province and not by the provincial assembly and a launching ceremony was arranged for it to guide the legal fraternity, civil society, bureaucrats and politicians regarding this new law in a lavish hotel of the province.

Provincial Government claimed that this is the success of PTI to pass this law in the province which is recognized worldwide, however, the law passed by the governor has not yet been put on floor of the KPK Assembly. The law limited the ‘Right to Information’ for the citizen as now no court will interfere in the matters of information when an aggrieved person approaches them in either Constitutional Petition under article 199 or a civil suit as there exist an alternate remedy and proper forum created by the provincial government.

This will create number of complications for the petitioner and he has to wait long to collect the information from the public authorities.

Missing Persons is a very common issue these days and thousands of petitions are pending in the High Courts and Supreme Court of Pakistan. The people who are under suspicion of law enforcing agencies and are detained by them, after interrogation very few are set free; some remain missing for long period of time. RTI has now exempted the agencies to come up with the information regarding the persons who are confined with them as the disclosure will be harmful to the law enforcement agencies ( Section 16 can be referred). To sum up the argument, I would suggest that public body or department can be approached for information but the complaint/appeal should be left to the civil courts to lessen the burden on the public exchequer and the ordinance should be positively discussed on the floor of the assembly for constructive alteration and thereafter be passed as an act.

SAIFULLAH MUHIB,
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

The Nation

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PM’s approval sought to reopen YouTube

ISLAMABAD: In a bid to reopen social media website YouTube soon in Pakistan, the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication has dispatched a summary to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, seeking necessary approval prior to his departure to United States, The Nation learnt on Saturday.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is scheduled to visit New York on 23rd of this month to attend the UN General Assembly session and is due to fly to USA today (Sunday). During his weeklong stay in the US‚ the Prime Minister will address the UN General Assembly on 27th September in which he is set to highlight Pakistan’s point of view on various regional and international issues, besides domestic priorities.

Sources in telecom sector privy to the development told this scribe that YouTube is likely to reopen soon across the country as the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication has dispatched a summary to the Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. They said that ostensibly necessary measures and arrangements to point out and immediately block the unbearable material from the Internet has been completed. And, with this, the sacrilegious material would be blocked or filtered with the assistance of Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL). A committee constituted by the ministry has already given his green signal to go ahead and recommended to reload the website, they added.

Since the incumbent PML-N government has sworn in power, it has been seriously contemplating over the controversial matter very sensitively to reopen the YouTube. A research had also been initiated by the telecom ministry to determine the YouTube links, which contained the sacrilegious movie, and also for blocking mechanisms for other URLs and links on both the Http and the secure Https protocols to ensure the restraint of controversial content.

During the last week of August last, Minister of State for Information Technology and Telecommunication Anusha Rahman Khan while taking to the media persons also said that YouTube would open soon and a cell has been established in PTA to point out and immediately block the unbearable material from the Internet. She also said that a team comprising experts was working hard round the clock to block the sites containing blasphemous material and about 4000 such sites have already been blocked. She said that the government was working on the issue involving blockage of YouTube and a committee consisting of 14 members had deeply worked on the matter and had put forwarded some recommendations for consideration to resolve the matter permanently. The committee recommended the government to open the website, she added.

The minister also said that with the help of free of cost filters from Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) a trial was conducted and 4,000 URLs had been blocked successfully. She also informed the journalists that a response cell in PTA has also been established to monitor and immediately block the blasphemous material on the Internet following the refusal of the Google Inc. management to block those URL that contained unbearable material, she added.

The Google Inc had so far declined to cooperate with the government of Pakistan in removing unpleasant material from the websites and the honourable Supreme Court of Pakistan that found blasphemous material on the website ordered to suspend the YouTube in Pakistan. Moreover, the last government to quell simmering protests appeared after the release of anti-Islam amateur film “Innocence of Muslims”, had blocked YouTube in Pakistan in 2012. And, a decision to close YouTube in Pakistan was also taken by the Inter-Ministerial Committee. In accordance, the IT ministry ordered PTA to block the websites. Similarly, a policy directive was also issued by the ministry in May 2012 and advised the PTA to deploy a state of the art technical solution to proactively and independently block blasphemous and pornographic matters from the websites.

Interestingly, the IT ministry had earlier also taken up the matters with the management of YouTube and Facebook for blocking the blasphemous content from websites. In response, Facebook had restricted the access and upload of the video on the website. But, the Google Inc did not remove the sacrilegious content by saying that YouTube complies with international laws that are subject to the laws of United States that, however, do not comply with Pakistan-specific content removal request.

The Nation

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YouTube case referred to LHC CJ for larger bench

YouTube ban

LAHORE: A judge dealing with the petition challenging ban on YouTube on Thursday referred the matter to Lahore High Court chief justice Umar Ata Bandial with recommendations to constitute a full bench to hear this matter.

The court during previous hearings had remarked that it was important to understand the nature of the problem. In today’s digital age, the court had observed, information on the Internet could not be blocked, it could be intelligently regulated. There were no borders or walls that could limit this information from flowing into Pakistan unless of course we shut down Internet completely and severed our links with the outside world.

It appears that a sustainable answer to the problem was self regulation at the individual and house-hold level. World Wide Web has all sorts of information ranging from ‘very useful’ to ‘out right offensive’.

The choice is ours, we can either draw upon the useful information for our national development or fall prey to the negative content and immerse ourselves into moral and cultural chaos, the judge said, adding that the choice was ours. He said that, in the end, the responsibility and the choice was of the individual to watch or not watch a controversial website as the same could not be effectively blocked according to the level of technology present in our country today.

The court was hearing the petition filed by an NGO. The petitioner submitted that any filtering and blocking on internet was counter productive and predatory.

The petitioner sought directions for the Ministry of IT and the PTA to reopen the functioning of YouTube. He said taking away YouTube’s access was the modern equivalent of taking away the scholar’s pen.

He appealed to the court to order the restoration of access to the YouTube in Pakistan.

The News

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YouTube and the pursuit of happiness

Pakistan enjoys nothing more than proving the wisdom behind the cliché ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’. It is entirely appropriate that the phrase can be traced back to a time in Europe when women would mutilate themselves in order to protect their ‘purity’, since all our most self-destructive actions involve misbegotten notions of honour and morality.

For an entire year now we have had to make do without one of modern civilisation’s most comforting creations – YouTube – just because some loser who is now languishing in jail put up a trailer for a movie that was never even made. We ended up punishing the estimated seven million Pakistanis who use YouTube just to ‘protect’ them from something they either would never have heard about or shown no interest in perusing. And we have continued doing so for 365 days! At this point our nose is so disfigured only rhinoplasty will restore it.

Nothing is more annoying than the smug self-satisfactory ignorance of those who support the ban. There are many, who obviously understand nothing of how YouTube, or indeed the internet, works who have gleefully explained how the ban in Pakistan is costing Google so much lost revenue. Such inconvenient facts, like YouTube not making any money from the country because it doesn’t have a country-specific site here or that it loses nearly half a billion dollars a year, do not matter to a mind that closes itself off to reason.

A recent online poll conducted about YouTube in Pakistan found that over 60 percent of people claim to use the video-sharing site for educational purposes. In an equally unscientific assertion, I would venture that more than 50 percent of those people were lying, unless education is defined as learning about the art of reverse swing from old clips of Wasim and Waqar. Those who want YouTube unblocked are already ceding a lot of ground when they try to defend the site as a tool for learning rather than what it really is: lots and lots of fun.

The one thing this country could use is people who stand up for having a good time. There are a lot of things that can’t be defended on the grounds of utility but still provide much joy to the world. Failing to acknowledge the pleasure principle is what has led to all those fun things still being illegal which were outlawed more than three decades ago in Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s last-gasp attempt to save his rule.

Since ZAB’s time there has unfortunately been a surge in the kind of people who HL Mencken described as harbouring the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.” Fighting back against that mindset on all fronts is mandatory if we don’t want censorship and a loss of liberty to continue for another three decades.

The YouTube ban, powerful though it is as a symbol of censorship since it most affects the wealthy who are only used to the freedoms of others being taken away, is only one example of the killjoys encroaching on our right to seek what the US Declaration of Independence called the “pursuit of happiness.”

In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa the MMA government became notorious for defacing and tearing down billboards and giving a good go at destroying Pakhtun cinema. Self-righteous thugs and charlatans have attacked theatres, enacted the harassment of innocent teen couples for the enjoyment of the moral police watching along on their TV screens and cast judgement on anyone who does not live their life the exact way they want them to. And all of us have been too scared to speak out for fear of being cast as irreligious or, horror of horrors, secular.

Pakistan has become a country where we are no longer to pursue what makes us happy, even if isn’t hurting anyone else. The professional scolds in society are no longer content to mind their own business despite being under no compunction to alter their lifestyle from the evil secularists. This is why those who denounce extremists on both sides are being so disingenuous. There is only one side that is giving the other marching orders and shoving their virtues down our throats. The other side would just like to be left alone and for everyone to be free to choose which lifestyle they prefer.

The debate – to the small extent that it exists – has been framed as one between virtue and sin rather than freedom and censorship. This is why nothing remotely positive will be written about anything that has been denounced by a small but extremely vocal minority. Everyone is simply too cowered by them, and the threat of violence implicit in their moral denunciations, to mount a challenge. The ban on YouTube was meant to stave off any potential violence that may have been caused by the offending trailer. Yet, we still had violence just a few days after the site was blocked. Now a year later the ban has become the norm and, in an inversion of the way things should be, we have to argue that the ban is illogical rather than forcing proponents of the ban to explain why it still continues.

Freedom in this country is nothing but a poetic truth trotted out around election time so that we can be proud of being a democracy. For true freedom to prevail – the kind where preening moralists and fearful governments cannot simply snatch away anything they don’t want us to enjoy – the ballot box is only the first rest stop in a long journey.

The writer is a journalist based in Karachi. Email: [email protected]

The News

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Pakistan’s internet censors seek help from Canadian company

ISLAMABAD: In a nondescript, creeper-draped building in the capital of Islamabad, a small team of men is purging Pakistan’s Internet.

Shadowy government officials are blocking thousands of pages deemed undesirable. But they are not fast enough. So the government is now testing Canadian software that can block millions of sites a second.

The censorship helps shape the views of 180 million Pakistanis on militancy, democracy and religion. Online debates dissect attacks by US drone aircraft, the uneasy alliance with the United States and prospects for peace with arch rival India.

But activists say liberal voices are increasingly silenced, while militants speak freely. They worry customised filters will only deepen that divide.“Secular, progressive and liberal voices are being increasingly targeted,” said Shahzad Ahmad, the founder of Bytes For All, which campaigns for internet freedoms from a small, crowded office.

“Anything can be banned without debate.”An internet provider who declined to be identified said the number of banned pages doubled in five years, partly a reaction to cartoons or films offensive to Muslims.

Citizen Lab, a research centre at the University of Toronto, published a report in June, showing the Pakistani government was testing filtering software supplied by Canadian firm Netsweeper.The Pakistani government and Netsweeper declined to comment.

In 2012, the government circulated a five-page document seeking filtering software. “Pakistani ISPs and backbone providers have expressed their inability to block millions of undesirable websites using current manual blocking systems,” the government said in the paper, a copy of which was seen by Reuters. It said it needed a system “able to handle a block list of up to 50 million URLs”.

Activists from Bolo Bhi, an internet freedom group whose name means “Speak Up”, said Pakistan wanted the strict online censorship practiced in its ally China.About 42 million Pakistanis can get online, the government says, and the Internet is one of the few places where they can speak freely, said Bolo Bhi director Farieha Aziz. Twitter helps voters reach leaders directly.

“Now Pakistanis can get direct access to politicians. Previously they were just on television, telling you stuff,” Aziz said.Bolo Bhi asked technology companies to refuse the bid and said US-based Websense, Cisco, Verizon, OpenDNS, and Canada’s Sandvine all agreed.

“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 said in an open letter seen by Reuters.

Instead, Netsweeper took the contract, Citizen Lab said. Netsweeper has categorised five billion URLs and offers customised blocking and blocking by keyword, it says on its website.Activists say tests run to install the filtering system led to the temporary blocking of sites like Twitter, Facebook and Tumbler. State lawyers have referred to the tests in a court case in which the government is being sued by free-speech activists.

Many sites on human rights, news and religion are already permanently blocked.“The internet Pakistan is seeing is not the same as the rest of the world is seeing,” said Ronald Deibert of Citizen Lab.Pakistani officials decline to discuss Netsweeper, even with their own legislators.

“They told us they’d shelved it,” said legislator Bushra Gohar, who raised the matter in the National Assembly. “There are violent groups operating openly in this country and they want to ban objectionable content?”

Officially, only sites that are blasphemous, pornographic or threaten national security are banned.But pages banned in recent months include a Facebook group wanting to end the death penalty for blasphemy, a band whose song mocked the military, a site tracking sectarian murders, and pages a cleric who has spoken against sectarian violence, according to an official list seen by Reuters.

Hate speech denouncing religious minorities like Shias, who make up about 20 percent of Pakistan’s population, is freely available online. So are pages maintained by militant groups the Pakistani government has banned.

Lawyer Yasser Latif Hamdani, who is suing the government on behalf of internet freedom activists, said while some of the hundreds of web pages he had found blocked were pornographic, most were secular or sites belonging to religious minorities.

“I can’t think of any religious extremist group that has been blocked,” he said.“They are not blocking the guys who are going to come on the road and start burning things, they are not blocking the people who are inciting violence against religious minorities.”

Last year, at least 325 Shias were killed, including children shot on their way to school. About 200 more were killed in twin bombings this year.

The government does not release statistics, but the Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan said about 4,500 URLs were banned, including some websites like YouTube.

The Google-owned, video-sharing channel was blocked a year ago after clerics organised violent protests against an anti-Islam film posted on the site. Thousands of protesters armed with sticks and stones battled riot police in major cities.

Officials have said they hope the filters will help Pakistan to re-open YouTube, by blocking links to specific material and allowing the rest.

In the meantime, censorship is theoretically decided by the Inter-Ministerial Committee (IMC), a secretive body comprising members of the security forces, religious leaders and chaired by a secretary from the Ministry of Information Technology.

The secretary declined requests for an interview.But the committee only meets a couple of times a year, and the authorities are directing hundreds of pages to be banned each month, an industry official said.

Sometimes the IMC retroactively approved bans from the Ministry of IT- headquartered on the fourth floor of the nondescript brick building, said a government official who was not authorised to speak to the media. He could not say who added sites to the blocked list in the first place.

The News

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Freedom of Information Act

IN Pakistan, whenever our bureaucracies draft any law or document, it always seems ambiguous and controversial.

The Punjab Freedom of Information Act is a good example, as it is a very confused act.

This Act is drafted by bureaucracy without consulting stakeholders, while media and civil society representatives are available for technical guidance.

In this Act, it seems many sections are not allowing freedom for information for the sake of national interest and privacy interest.

The Act is without clarification regarding implementation mechanisms, feedback and complaints management system. The Act is basically hiding information and protecting bureaucratic matters.

RANA TASSAWAR ALI
Islamabad

DAWN

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YouTube ban: One year and counting

We have now completed a full year with the YouTube ban in place, forcing some to do without one of the most popular internet sites in the world, many others to resort to proxies of various kinds, putting up with the nuisances these ‘by-pass’ mechanisms cause. So, what has the ban, slapped on after an offensive film was loaded on the site, actually achieved? It has simply denied people of a right to information, protected under the law, and also held back students, teachers and others accessing the vast amount of educational material available on YouTube. The channel is, of course, used by leading educational sites, such as the award-winning Khan Academy, to host their material. And it has also prevented families and friends from sharing segments of their lives and staying attached across oceans and continents as many try and do.

Technology had, of course, made these tasks simpler. Through its action to block it, the government has denied its people of all this. We can only wonder what logic guides them in continuing with the ban. The matter has been taken before the court but progress in restoring the site remains painfully slow. Even now there is no indication the familiar message from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority telling us the site is not available will be vanishing any time soon. Tens of thousands of irritated internet users have lashed out against the government each time that message flashes up on screens.

A year after YouTube vanished, there is still no indication of when it may make a comeback. There is no concrete news on this, a ludicrous ban enters its second year and it seems our leaders are bent on driving the country further into darkness by snatching away tools that can help progress and expand knowledge. Surely someone, somewhere in authority, must realise how foolish this is and how much harm it is inflicting on people everywhere for no sensible reason at all.

Express Tribune

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Dangerous times

Four months after the US-led attack on Afghanistan, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was abducted in Karachi and beheaded. That was only the first of a large number of murders of journalists we were to see in the coming years.

Till a few years ago, no one in the Pakistani media could believe that a journalist’s handcuffed and tortured body would be found one day. But Fata journalist Hayatullah Khan’s body was found in just that condition in 2005, almost five months after his disappearance.

The families of journalists have also come under attack. Hayatullah’s wife was not only attacked – after she identified the alleged kidnappers of her husband in her testimony before a judicial commission – but killed. What followed was a string of killings of journalists in Fata and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Once it would have been hard to believe that a journalist would be picked up from Islamabad, our most protected city, and his body would be found in a Punjab town. But that happened to Saleem Shahzad, who was under threat for his bold writing and sensitive disclosures.

Once it was impossible for anyone to believe that a journalist would be found dead just 30 minutes after giving a live beeper on TV.

But this too happened with Musa Khankhel, a correspondent for Geo News in Swat, who was killed soon after he reported on the procession of Sufi Mohammad, the head of the Tehreek-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi.

Another journalist, Mohammad Ibrahim, was shot dead along with his camera man after interviewing the head of an outlawed group in Fata.

Once it would have been unthinkable that a columnist would be killed simply because of a misleading headline. But Dr Chishty Mujahid was. A group claimed responsibility, signalling the beginning of dangerous times ahead for journalists in Balochistan, once the safest province for journalists.

Dozens of journalists have been killed there since then. The latest case was of the kidnapping and murder of Abdul Razzaq Baloch. His family was not able to get justice despite a petition filed in March after his disappearance.

In Karachi, journalists are threatened and killed by ethnic and political groups. Wali Khan Babar’s case still haunts journalists in Karachi. In that case, all the witnesses – including investigating officers – were killed.

What is common in all these cases is the state’s failure to protect journalists. Many journalists have migrated from Fata and Balochistan to safe houses in other cities.

Journalists in Fata find it most difficult to report on the ongoing conflict and anything relating to the Taliban or army operations.

With the massive rise in the number of militant groups – whether ethnic, sectarian, jihadi, political or with underworld connections, as well as state intelligence agencies – a journalist’s work has become more and more hazardous in Pakistan.

The failure of the state to provide safety and the failure of media houses to provide training have led to huge risks and Pakistan has come to be ranked among the three most dangerous countries in the world for journalists.

Pakistani journalists and the media must keep in mind that more difficult days may lie ahead.

No training or protection can give you 100 percent guarantee of safety, but proper training can certainly give reporters the strength to cover a story with courage if they get insurance cover and appropriate equipment to protect themselves.

The writer is a senior journalist. Email: [email protected]

The News

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Civic agencies urged to share information with public

Transparency Access

KARACHI: Civic agencies should appoint a senior official as a focal person responsible for providing information to the general public, and provision of information be made a rule rather than an exception, said an activist of an NGO working on civic issues.

As a rule, the civic agency officials like most of their colleagues in the officialdom, were not very forthcoming in providing information and showed extreme reluctance to let go of information on issues of public interest, said Dr Raza Gardezi, activist of Shehri.

He was speaking at the launching of a study titled “proactive disclosure of information by city district government Karachi or Karachi Municipal Corporation” here on Saturday.

It was, therefore, necessary that people were made abreast of the various laws that existed though rarely implemented which could be used to glean information from the taciturn officials, he said.

He said the KMC websites were good and provided a lot of information on many things the civic agency was doing but the most vital information was not displayed on them.

For instance, the websites did not have any information on invitation of public objections to levy of various taxes, charges, fees, etc by the KMC, he said.

The website was silent on the issue of charged parking and provided no answer to the question under which law the KMC had imposed the parking fee and whether the laid down procedure had been followed before imposing the fee, he asked.

Dr Gardezi said that the civic agency was asked to provide information on the subject. When it failed to come up with an answer then the NGO approached Sindh ombudsman who called the officials concerned and asked for the information but they themselves expressed ignorance of the issue, he said.

The ombudsman had fixed a date in October when the officials would inform him under which law the fee was being charged, and if and when public objections were invited on the fee before its imposition, and if the laid down procedure had been followed before formulating new laws relating to imposition of new fees and taxes, he said.

He suggested that a law be made giving a timeframe for the officials to come up with required information and provide it to general public when asked. It should also be made clear in the law how many times, at a maximum, a person had to visit the civic agency office to get the required information, he said.

The law must say, he said, if the information was not provided within the prescribed timeframe and number of visits then to whom a complainant should turn to for the redressal of grievances.

He proposed formation of an appellate or complaints hearing body, which should be independent and armed with punitive powers that could be used against the official concerned who failed to provide the information requested by general public.

He said the civic agency should give its information in Urdu, Sindhi and English languages. The detailed budgetary allocations should be made public and the agency should accept online requests for information under the freedom of information laws and online and mobile tracking of requests for information be made available, said Dr Gardezi.

Citing an example he said that an extensive public participation exercise was carried out in 2002 when the Sindh building control laws were being made.

But later, a number of amendments were made to the law without involving public in the process, resulting in the amendment section getting thicker and bulkier than the original law itself, he said.

He said that if public actively participated in the process of lawmaking and the government exercised transparency in its functioning there would be less corruption.

Among others, Sameer Dodhi, Mehfoozun Nabi Khan, Zahid Farooq and Manzoor Badayuni also participated in the discussion which was followed by presentation.

DAWN