Minister of State for Information Technology Anusha Rehman told the Senate on Friday that the Supreme Court had ordered the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to block offending material on YouTube or any other website. She said the matter was reviewed several times, but the situation was effectively still the same. Technical experts, she insisted, also agreed that there was no solution which could guarantee 100 per cent blockage of objectionable content on YouTube.

However, the minister’s remarks seemingly contradict the gist of a Lahore High Court (LHC) order from May 13, 2014 in the matter of Bytes For All VS the Federation of Pakistan – commonly known as the YouTube case. In the final order, a copy of which is available with Dawn, LHC judges Justice Mansoor Ali Shah and Atir Mehmood noted that the minister was directed to hold a meeting of information technology (IT) experts and the PTA technical team to evolve a strategy to block controversial material from YouTube.

While the minister told the court even then that no known technical solution is available to ensure 100 per cent blocking of such content, the committee of IT experts proposed three options: blocking all access to YouTube (the status quo); barring YouTube access on secure HTTPS protocols and shifting it to HTTP, which will allow for blocking access to individual videos; and, the display of ‘interstitial warnings’ on pages that contain objectionable content.

The court concluded that the third option seemed most feasible, observing that in this manner, “a person will have to consciously and deliberately ignore the warning page and make an effort to obtain access to [the] controversial site”.

However, the Supreme Court order of Sept 17, 2012, which was also cited by the minister on the floor of the Senate, still remains the major stumbling block.

Yasser Latif Hamdani, the counsel representing Bytes For All in the YouTube case, told Dawn that the government was trying to sidestep the real issue by not seeking clarification on the Supreme Court order. “The question really is whether, even today, the objectionable materials are 100 per cent blocked. Is YouTube not accessible through various other methods,” he asked, rhetorically.

“By the logic the government is applying in this case, they should block the entire Internet because ultimately that is what this erroneous interpretation of the order means. What the government should do is seek a clarification of the SC order, which it doesn’t want to,” he said.

In a written reply to the Senate question, submitted on behalf of the minister in-charge of the Cabinet Division, it was stated, “As an alternative measure, the government of Pakistan is in process of providing intermediary liability protection for internet content providers through the Prevention of Electronic Crime Bill 2014, which will then be a consideration for localisation of YouTube in Pakistan subject to it being a business case for Google. This, in itself, will not guarantee access to YouTube in Pakistan.”

However, Bytes For All Country Director Shahzad Ahmed told Dawn that the localisation of YouTube was not a solution, because that would make the site subject to censor and scrutiny under local laws, allowing the government to filter any content which they don’t want to see online.

“Such measures are very problematic in the context of local laws, which are vague in their terminology and conflict with the constitution’s chapters on fundamental rights,” he said.

The government, he said, looks at the Internet from security-tinted lenses. “They do not see the educational, developmental or social value of the Internet and unless their perspective changes, we will continue to see more filtering, blocking and persecution of individuals online,” he said.

Dawn

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

Why is absence of YouTube such a big deal; some people ask. Well, YouTube is the world’s most-diverse and vast marketplace of free video content. In fact, YouTube is the Google of audiovisual content, with its dynamic interface entertaining and educating global citizens.

If YouTube is so important but inaccessible, why not use proxies; others suggest. Well, the countless virus-infested proxies do not come close to the original streaming experience. Other video-hosting sites simply do not have the features, usage-base, and most-importantly, the content and ecosystem that YouTube has. It’s just not the same.

Government does not want to restore YouTube-–it seems that way. That’s essentially a decision. But the government must also recognise the consequences as well. And there are many.

The government’s Vision 2025 talks about making Pakistan a Knowledge Economy by 2025. Lots of enablers, both offline and online, would be needed for that.

A continuous YouTube ban will deprive Pakistan’s large illiterate and semi-literate populations–who are gradually gaining broadband access-–of the immense and free audiovisual learning (e.g. ‘how to’ video tutorials) on a variety of subjects and fields.

The ban is also a setback for academics, artists, and small businesses that relied on this platform for a wider audience. Home-based entrepreneurs are now devoid of a low-cost advertising/promotion avenue. The ban is a bane for creativity and field-convergence. Aspiring musicians can no more upload their covers or originals; dramatists and directors suffer the same fate; no more videos going viral.

YouTube is a formidable, opens-source platform for creating and sharing both local and localised video content. Pakistan’s mobile broadband segment-–which is currently in nascence following the 3G/4G license award in May 2014-–could be helped by imaginative, user-friendly, and solution-centric local content. The jury is out on the data adoption rates in the initial phase, but a prolonged YouTube ban is surely adoption-negative.

Video streaming is universally popular and thus eats up a major slice of global data consumption pie. And YouTube is the foremost video streaming platform available. Mobile broadband adoption rates in Pakistan can be faster if YouTube is around. While the 3G operators may save on their bandwidth costs (video being a bandwidth-guzzler), their business case may suffer in the long run.

List of negatives is long. The ban has also exposed a deep fissure in Pakistani society. When it comes to freedom of expression, it seems that some expressions are more equal than others. Government’s response to YouTube-sparked religious outrage in September 2012 was to ban the platform altogether.

In the aftermath, lives of sections of population (big or small is not the issue here) continue to suffer in a variety of ways, artistic and academic, cultural and commercial, personal and professional.

The appeasement is discomforting. Shouldn’t there be fairness and balance here? Shouldn’t the government move quickly to find that balance? Are some sentiments more equal than others?

It has been almost five month since the National Assembly unanimously passed a resolution to restore YouTube.

There has been no word from the government since, other than the committee-committee refrain. Parliament represents people’s collective wisdom, but where is its legislative writ; some wonder. One finds hard to answer that these days…

Business Recorder

The ban had been imposed on September 17, 2012 by then prime minister Raja Pervez Ashraf following national outrage over a sacrilegious video clip. The video had sparked outrage across the Muslim world and prompted temporary bans on the website in Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Sudan. Threat of bans in Saudi Arabia prompted YouTube to selectively curb access in that country and it took a court order to censor it in Brazil.

But even after a US court ordered YouTube to take down versions of the video following a suit filed by one of the actors appearing in the clip, the site remains inaccessible in Pakistan. The refrain, that the clip hurts religious sentiments of the people, is obscene or hurts national security has acted as an effective screen for a process which is less than transparent and has gone on to impact services and content beyond just pornography and blasphemous videos.

“We should understand that our government has realised the power of online media and is afraid of political dissent which finds space on the Internet,” says Nighat Dad of the Digital Rights Foundation.

“We have witnessed in the past that Ministry of Information Technology (MoIT) has been trying to curb political dissent and we have examples like taking down Asif Zaradari shut up video and Laal musical band’s Facebook page.”

The extent of blocking by the government through the Inter-Ministerial Committee has gone on to affect satirical videos, news articles and news websites by elements the state has a less than favourable view of.

The non-governmental organisation Bytes For All had taken the government to court over the blocking of YouTube. After 20 court hearings and a document of consensus reached by several different stakeholders including petitioner (Bytes for All), the MoIT, the PTA and technical experts from the IT and Telecom industries, it was concluded that filtering the Internet was futile owing to technological reasons.

Justice Mansoor Ali Shah of the Lahore High Court observed that banning YouTube because of one undesirable video is like shutting down of an entire library because of an offensive book on its shelves. The LHC refrained from issuing an order, though. Instead it directed the litigants to approach the Supreme Court for an interpretation of the September 17, 2012 order which instituted the blanket ban on YouTube.

However, the hurdles that the NGO members had to face during the litigation process offer a glimpse on how closely does the state wish to keep its ‘weapon’ of censorship hidden away from the prying eyes of the very people it impacts.

An emailed response from Bytes For All detailed how baseless accusations were levelled against them and a defamation campaign was run against them by the government and pro-censorship lawyers.

“There were articles written in some pro-government publications in which Bytes for All was accused of being the agents of west and working against the national interest. We were labelled as ‘Followers of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ during one of the hearing, which was amusing and sad at the same time.”

Dad questioned the legality of the Inter-Ministerial Committee. “This committee should be renamed as the ‘Mysterious committee’ which decides for 184.4 million of what to see on internet and what not. “

She further complained how politicians, who championed the cause of freedom prior to being elected, performed near volte-face once acquiring office.

“[Minister for IT] Anusha Rehman was once a champion for online freedom before coming into the government. She had promised in her election campaign that unblocking YouTube will be the first thing she does once she assumes office. Two years on there are no developments.”

It is odd how in their annual list of achievements, Rehman lists the auction of 3/4G licenses. Yet, sites and services continue to be blocked without a coherent reason or as much as a public announcement.

“Nothing should be blocked on internet. Let people decide what they want to see and what not. Government shouldn’t decide on our behalf,” says Dad.

Express Tribune

A division bench headed by Justice Irfan Saadat Khan was seized with the hearing of the petition jointly filed by as many as 24 citizens, including students, teachers, and bankers.

They asked the court to declare the censorship and arbitrary ban on certain websites such as YouTube in Pakistan a blatant violation of the fundamental rights as enshrined in the Constitution.

The petitioners said that it was the duty of the government to safeguard the internet, a medium of expression, the print and electronic media, from censorship and ensure open and free access to it.

They said that censorship of video-sharing platforms like YouTube had a disastrous impact on Pakistani students, teachers, entrepreneurs and other professionals using YouTube for educational, religious, commercial or entertainment purposes. The PTA could ban specific web addresses instead of placing a blanket ban on YouTube, they added.

They submitted that while many countries, including India and those with a Muslim majority such as Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, the Maldives had banned the web addresses of an anti-Islam film, only Pakistan persisted with a blanket ban on YouTube to the detriment of its citizens and their fundamental rights.

They said that the government had also curbed citizens right to privacy as protected under Article 14 of the Constitution by blocking proxy websites.

They requested the court to direct the PTA to desist from any further violation of these fundamental rights and to immediately lift all such bans and censorship detrimental to the fundamental rights of all citizens of Pakistan.

During the hearing on Wednesday, federal law officer Aslam Butt sought time to file comments of the federal government.

The court adjourned the hearing till May 7 and directed the petitioners to place before it a list containing names of the websites which were informative and had blocked.

Probe ordered

Another SHC bench headed by Justice Sajjad Ali Shah on Wednesday ordered the city police chief to appoint an honest police officer to conduct an inquiry into the allegations of holding some citizens for ransom against a suspended police officer, Inspector Shafiq Tanoli.

The bench also directed the city police chief to supervise the inquiry and submit a report by May 6.

It directed that the SSPs concerned and SHOs of the Mochko and Mauripur police stations be examined during the inquiry and asked them to be present at the next hearing.

The bench gave these directions while hearing a set of petitions in missing persons case.

One petition was filed by Kifayatullah who told the court that the police had taken away his brother, Ghulamullah, and other relatives from Masroor Colony on Feb 19.

In another petition, it was alleged that Tanoli released six persons — Ghulamullah, Rafiullah, Saeedur Rehman, Aftab, Khawaja Alam and Faridullah — after taking Rs550,000, the bench had noted.

The bench cited another case, observing that a man and his two sons were arrested by Tanoli, who released one son after subjecting his father to torture. The second son, Mairaj, who was booked in a case, was released when no incriminating material was found against him in that case.—PPI

DAWN

ISLAMABAD: There is no foolproof way to block access to a video that resulted in the ban on YouTube in Pakistan, according to Pakistan Telecommunication Authority Chairman Dr Ismail Shah. Dr Shah’s statement on Monday came a day before the Lahore High Court hears a petition seeking the court’s directive to the government to allow access to YouTube, blocked since September 2012.

The court will hear a petition filed by Bytes for All, a non-government organisation. The petitioner submitted that any filtering and blocking of information online is counter-productive and predatory. Dr Shah and officials from the ministry of information and technology will appear in court today to give a policy statement on whether the offending video – entitled The Innocence of Muslims – can be blocked.

“The PTA has tried to find a technical solution to block the video while keeping YouTube open, but it is next to impossible and this is what I will inform the court,” said Dr Shah, while addressing the first national 3G/4G seminar, held in Islamabad. The PTA can create a warning page that opens prior to the video, he suggested.

Shah said the video was uploaded on hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPs) – a communication protocol over a computer network which cannot be removed except by blocking the website. Shah will inform the court that the PTA cannot remove the video because of technical obstacles. At the end of the day, he said, the government and court will have to make a decision.

“We have looked into practices in other Muslim countries as well and found that they too could not block the video,” he said. He explained that the video is accessible in Qatar, preceded by a warning, a system that Pakistan could replicate. “Even if it is not available on YouTube, it will be available on other websites,” the chairman said. According to the PTA’s findings, there are 48,000 copies of the video accessible online currently. He explained that the Pakistani government had contacted Google Inc in order to remove the offending video, but was refused.

Dr Shah added that religious scholars had advised him that the government’s current strategy was wrong, prescribing that messages and videos spreading a positive message of Islam should be uploaded to counter negative portrayals.

3G Auction

While bidding for the auction of 3G and 4G licences will take part next month, Dr Shah said he was not confident of any new entrants taking part in the process. He said new entrants were requesting conditions such as a period of one year in which existing bidders should be barred from rolling out 3G services in the market, aimed at allowing new entrants time to gain a foothold in the market. “My assessment is that it will be difficult for a new player to enter the process,” he said.

Express Tribune

Classical ballet has always been popular with our daughter. She will watch it for hours, imitating the dancers with a developing confidence and awareness of the storylines of the more popular ballets, with Swan Lake being the long-time favourite. For the umpteenth time, we watched the finale and compared different ballet companies’ versions of the choreography. All very innocent and culturally uplifting –– but possibly dangerous.

We watched Swan Lake on YouTube, an internet source currently blocked by the government. We watched via a proxy –– that I will not name here –– that masked the IP address of my computer and created a spoof address, thus fooling its way around the government ban and giving me and Miss N the chance to enjoy the thrill of seeing the Sorcerer vanquished once again. She is also quite partial to dinosaurs doing extremely unpleasant things to other dinosaurs, flatulent babies and cats up to all manner of tricks.

For my own part, I have used YouTube as a research tool in my daily work, accessing news clips globally, checked out some paint schemes on a model airplane I am building and caught up with the latest clips from the Berlin Philharmonic. Hardly the cutting edge of subversion, is it? Nor is it illegal.

So far as I can determine, I am not breaking any law by finding a workaround for the YouTube ban, and the only law I just might have broken was a presidential ordinance that expired in 2007. The government does not appear to have invoked any piece of legislation beyond some vague references to the blasphemy laws, and the ban is based upon the entirely subjective whim of the government of the day.

It was ordered in the wake of the rumpus about the YouTube posting of a blasphemous video clip. Whilst undoubtedly blasphemous and abhorrent, but no less abhorrent than the beheadings filmed by assorted militant groups and then posted to YouTube.

It must be noted that the beheadings videos predated the posting of the blasphemous clip, yet the government of the day saw no reason to block YouTube on the grounds that it was promoting hatred.
The internet is awash with blasphemy and hate speech, and after some extensive checking in the last few days, it seems that YouTube is one of many offenders in this respect.

The offensive clip has been removed from YouTube as the result of a case brought by an actress who appeared in it –– who maintained that her performance had been misused and dialogues –– that she did not say –– dubbed into her mouth. Google, the parent company of YouTube, says it will fight the ban on the grounds that it is an impediment to freedom of speech and there are going to be lawyers rubbing their hands together at the possibility of a long-running and complex case.

So where have we got to in Pakistan? The government is slowly picking off the proxy sites that enable the workaround, despite which many millions of people simply find a proxy that is working and carry on YouTube-ing as before. So far as I am aware, there has been no attempt to prosecute anybody doing this, and it would be on very shaky legal grounds if such an attempt were to be made. Government agencies are said to harass some of those who circumvent the ban (no… not me… not yet) and there are persistent rumours that sites such as Skype are to be interdicted. Skype connections are all encrypted and thus difficult for the government to monitor traffic or listen in on.

The YouTube ban has achieved nothing more than the appeasement of some particularly excitable extremists. That it persists now makes it sinister rather than pointless. Right… back to Swan Lake. Tootle-pip.

Express Tribune

EVOLVING situations require constantly evolving regulatory mechanisms, and one area where Pakistan is lacking is in terms of internet safety — even though the World Wide Web and its benefits can hardly be said to be new realities. Last year, the Federal Investigation Agency received more than 1,000 complaints regarding cyber crime, particularly malicious stalking, the hijacking of social media accounts and faked identities or impersonation, but the country does not have laws that can be invoked in such situations. This forces the FIA to either redirect the complainant to the Ministry of Information Technology, or to the police, or in a few cases, invoke old laws that are insufficient.

Obviously, this glaring gap in the country’s legislative framework needs to be addressed. Yet whether the state has the stomach to do the needful in the wake of the technological revolution is a moot point. Consider, after all, the fact that it has been over a year since access to YouTube was cut off in the country. The piece of offensiveness that led to this is long forgotten, yet the state has not managed to come up with ways to put itself in a position where it can ask parent companies — Google, in the case of YouTube — for the removal of web content through doing the requisite inter-country paperwork, or find a method to filter content while leaving the sites in general accessible. Whether or not the state should even interfere in civil liberties by indulging in censorship is itself debatable. But even if there are extreme cases where this is deemed necessary, after consultation in parliament and with the public, the means to do so legally, transparently and with the least inconvenience must be devised. After the initial furore, those who have the know-how have found ways to circumvent the blockade; those who don’t have had to learn to do without. Legislators and politicians, otherwise so vocal about their commitment to citizens’ rights, have utterly failed to raise the matter again for redressal.

DAWN

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: nadir.hassan@gmail.com

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