Pakistan is becoming more Orwellian by the week. The ban on YouTube has now been announced as “indefinite” as the government has been unable to find a way to block blasphemous content. For me the ban was inconvenient for around 10 minutes — the time it took to find a free Virtual Private Network (VPN) that spoofs my IP address, downloads and installs it. There are dozens of options for dodging around the ban and millions have gone this route. To the best of my knowledge nobody has been arrested or prosecuted for doing so, because so far as I am able to tell, no specific law is being broken.

In the wake of the YouTube ban, several locally-grown file sharing sites have been developed that use YouTube content but apply varying levels of filtering. A little experimentation reveals that searching for the English counties of Essex and Sussex is blocked on one site, as is a search for tracks by the 1970s punk band The Sex Pistols — but on a similar site neither is blocked.

Going in search of blasphemous content on these supposedly ‘clean’ sites quickly revealed that those who run them or set them up have very little knowledge or understanding of the world of stand-up comedy. Every religion under the sun comes in for a thrashing, and some of the content would make the publishers of Charlie Hebdo blink. All there at the click of a mouse, on sites that have the blessing of the government.

Moving on from the file-sharing sites, there is a vast mucky ocean of pornography out there as well, a lot of it free. Government agencies have blocked countless thousands of pornographic websites but once again the VPN workaround does the trick and pornographic content is available to anybody who wants to view it in Pakistan. This keeps the thriving pornographic CD/DVD industry in business, a multi-billion rupee cash cow that goes from strength to strength.

If your tastes veer towards the jihadi or the scummy waters of sectarianism, then there are websites in Arabic and English as well, I discovered, as French, German and Portuguese that were poisonously sectarian in their content. I also discovered that I did not need to use a VPN to view this material on all of the sites I found — the government was not blocking them and was presumably happy to allow them to propagate their messages of hatred and intolerance. Pornography may be deemed unfit for Pakistani consumption, but it is fine to advocate the killing of people who belong to certain sects or religious faiths.

Those who want to really dig into the darkest recesses of the internet can download a TOR browser for themselves and explore the Dark Net, a move I would not advise but there are many here that I know use TOR as their preferred workaround for government attempts to censor what they can or cannot see.

All of the above I was able to discover sitting at my desk over the space of a couple of hours. There is without a doubt a freedom of speech issue around the YouTube ban, and at least one NGO has fought it through the courts. But the internet is constantly evolving, and even the monolithic YouTube will one day disappear as will Facebook and Twitter as other platforms emerge and consumer tastes and needs change.

Before the ban, YouTube was a popular site for people in Pakistan who were plugged into distance-learning education programmes, and many universities were uploading material for student use. It was also the go-to site for local news material that the mainstream media could not or would not touch; it still is but only if you are using a proxy service.

As governments everywhere in the world have learned, the internet can be deeply inconvenient to say the very least. It can in some circumstances feed political instability and it is obviously a vehicle for terrorism — and it is ubiquitous. Blocking YouTube to satisfy the clerical establishment has done nothing but stimulate a workaround culture that now has its own ubiquity, rendering the ban meaningless. Censorship has generated a creative obverse, an unforeseen consequence of limiting freedoms.

Express Tribune

ISLAMABAD: The National Assembly was informed on Wednesday that the ongoing ban on video-sharing website YouTube could not be lifted without seeking directives from the Supreme Court.

Answering to question of Shazia Marri during the question hour, Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Shaikh Aftab Ahmed said the government had imposed ban on YouTube on the directives of the Supreme Court in 2012 after loading of objectionable content on it. He said the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) lacks the mechanism to block objectionable material on YouTube because it laid on http and there is no technology in the world to stop it.

He said to comply with the instructions of any state with regard to blocking any Universal Resource Indicator (URI) on YouTube, Google has the requirements of inking Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT). Countries like Saudi Arabia have signed MLAT with Google – resultantly Google has developed a local domain in the kingdom. The minister informed the house that six other Muslim countries, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Iran, Egypt and Sudan also blocked the YouTube in 2012 due to blasphemous contents.

After due discussion with Google, he said Pakistan has included the relevant sections in Cyber Crime Bill which is in process of enactment. Once the law is enacted giving third party indemnity to Goolge, the MLAT would be signed. After that the Google would be more comfortable in abiding by the instructions of Government of Pakistan for blocking of any objectionable material. The PTA was proactively identifying and continuously flagging/reporting the Universal Resource Indicators (URIs) of the blasphemous movie/clip to Google and in response they add interstitials screen/warning on those videos depending upon Google’s own policy, the minister concluded.

Responding to another question, Federal Parliamentary Affairs Minister Sheikh Aftab said using of sewerage/contaminated water for irrigation purposes in Tarlai area of Islamabad is serious threat to human lives. The minister said that the officers of Pakistan Environmental Protection Agency (Pak-EPA) have visited the area and found that the sewerage water is being used for agriculture purpose in some of the farms in Tarlai area. The Pak-EPA has conducted a detailed visit of Tarlai fruit and vegetable farms areas in Islamabad to identify the use of sewerage water for agriculture purpose.

Pak-EPA in collaboration with ICT administration and Capital Development Authority (CDA) is working on controlling sewage pollution in the catchment area of the Rawal Lake and Simly Dam which is source of drinking water, the minister maintained. The parliamentarians raised several questions over the CDA affairs, and said it is a corrupt department and totally failed to address even the problems of parliaments. Non-parliamentarians have occupied space in parliament lodges and the CDA failed to displace them.

Speaker NA Ayaz Sadiq informed the house that he was going to hold a meeting with CDA top management because there are several complaints of parliamentarians. “The CDA is doing nothing to address people problems”, he claimed. Federal Minister Sheikh Aftab told the House that the new CDA Chairman is a competent person and taking appropriate measure to improve performance of the civic body. However, he admitted that most of the people have complaint against the CDA.

Daily Times