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

It is tragic that while we see all hate preachers doing brisk business over the internet, sites of science and humanism have been axed

Together with countries like China, Iran and Turkmenistan, Pakistan happens to be a place where people cannot access YouTube because of an official ban by the government. The aforementioned countries are well known for human rights abuses. Why Pakistan is in that league is harder to understand.

When Jawed Karim posted Me at the zoo, a 20-second video, commenting upon trunks of elephants at the San Diego Zoo in 2005 on his newly created video-sharing site, few could have guessed that one day this novel idea of users-created video would attract more than one billion users watching over six billion hours of video each month. In terms of variety of content, YouTube serves as the world’s greatest superstore as it caters to the needs of almost all internet users. No wonder it was declared the best invention of the first decade of the 21st century by many analysts including Entertainment Weekly.

Of many sad legacies of the previous government the unjustifiable ban on YouTube a year ago must appear very high on the list along with bad governance and corruption. The government reacted as if Pakistan was the only Muslim country on this planet, as we did not see any other Muslim country so obsessed with causing self-inflicted wounds over religious issues for such a long duration. Condemning a tasteless and sloppy movie was a perfectly sane and appreciable act, both at individual and national level. But the unruly faithful began damaging national property and killing their own countrymen in order to prove how inflammable they were. If government acted irresponsibly, the judiciary also left much to be desired by failing to protect the freedoms of an ordinary internet user.

Banning a popular tool or website is the same as banning pen and paper. We need to understand the notion of literacy first in order to appreciate the issue. An illiterate person is one who is unable to communicate his knowledge through non-verbal means for storage purposes. In the era of printing, anyone who cannot read a book or write with a pen is considered illiterate. In ancient civilisations clay tablets were used, so those who were unable to communicate with their help were the illiterate of those times. In this internet-enabled communications era, the definition of literacy has also undergone transformation and anyone who is unable to communicate through electronic communication cannot be called a literate person. Google, YouTube, internet browsers and various social media have become standard media of literacy in the 21st century. Government and judiciary have done a great disservice to the young by depriving them of one of the most important literacy devices for more than a year.

On July 1, 1977, the weekly holiday was changed to Friday from Sunday by the then PPP government. It was left to the Nawaz Sharif government to take the pragmatic and bold decision of reverting to Sunday. Once again all eyes are on the pragmatic government to clear the mess created by its predecessor in its failed attempt to play Machiavelli with the rabble. The first public statement about banning Google by the lady cabinet member entrusted with information technology however poured cold water over my enthusiasm. Of late there are reports that suggest that YouTube might soon be restored to its millions of users and some sanity might return among our decision makers.

It is not just lifting the ban on YouTube that concerns me though. More worrying is the dictatorial and fascist way in which a few trigger-happy PTA officials decide what is appropriate for internet users. Even more worrying is the tendency of certain members of the judiciary to prove their faith credentials by wearing the mantle of the ‘defender of the faith’. Theological differences have long been debated by Muslim thinkers. We should stop dispensing certificates of true faith as we have a rich legacy of a rationalist past. Ibne Sina, Al Razi, Ibne Rushd and Sir Syed, to name a few, had challenged many dominant doctrines of their times. Faith should be facilitated to evolve, otherwise stagnation sets in. The internet facilitates this process in a non-intrusive manner. Unlike TV and newspapers, the material is not forced on the user. On the internet, we access any material of our own sweet choice as no one can force anything on us. As such, PTA and the courts should keep their interference in electronic material to the minimum. Only porn websites and material that glamourises and promotes violence, hatred and terrorism should be banned. But it is tragic that while we see all hate preachers doing brisk business over the internet, sites of science and humanism have been axed. For example, the famous site of the Oxford University’s science populist professor Richard Dawkins has been blocked for promoting scientific thinking and debunking irrational myths. Similarly a popular Facebook site ‘Roshni’ has been banned for Pakistani users as the site sensitises internet users over human rights abuses.

One hopes, along with lifting the ban on YouTube, the government would focus its energies on websites run by extremists, hatemongers and militants and not impose bans on websites that encourage progressive thinking and respect for human values. It is hoped sanity will now prevail and those in power will find better ways of playing to the gallery.

The writer teaches public policy in the UK and is the founding member of the Rationalist Society of Pakistan. He can be reached at hashah9@yahoo.com

Daily Times