Rudderless: Pakistan’s impossible attempt to block 400,000 porn sites continues
In January this year, the federal government kicked off one of the largest online censorship sprees Pakistan has witnessed in the last decade: the blocking of over 400,000 websites termed ‘offensive’.
The cue to initiate this mass blocking of sites came from a Supreme Court order for the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to: “take remedial steps to quantify the nefarious phenomenon of obscenity and pornography that has an imminent role to corrupt and vitiate the youth of Pakistan”.
The implementation of the ban is an ongoing process being carried out by upstream providers PTCL and Transworld – both carrying Pakistan’s internet traffic through undersea cables – and by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who have been ordered to enforce the ban by the PTA.
But the list of 429,343 websites, obtained by Dawn.com from an ISP source close to the ongoing process has been found to be flawed, as scores of sites with no pornographic content are included in the list.
Not ‘obscene’
A series of scans conducted by Dawn.com across only some parts of the exhaustive list uncovered hundreds of sites that contain no pornographic, ‘smut’, ‘obscene’ or ‘offensive’ content.
These sites (representing just the tip of the iceberg of safe sites listed to be blocked) vary in content from entertainment to education, medical services and hospitals, fashion sites, hotels, travel agencies, food stores and many more.
The list included innocuous links such as:
Disney cartoons site http://cinderella.com
London-based shoe company Michele Hartmann http://mhshoes.com/london/
Las-Vegas hotel The Mirage www.mirage.com
Microsoft’s webcams purchase page http://www.microsoft.com/accessories/en-us/webcams
Garis Agency PR company site http://nationalpublicist.com/
Spice Girls band unofficial blog http://spicegirls.com
Grocery store http://www.yummy.com/
miVIP Surgery Center http://www.mivipsurgery.com/
US-based Delamo Hospital http://delamohospital.com/
Indian international-shipping commerce site http://www.netcherries.com/
Power and engineering industry services site http://ktekintl.com/
Languages course website http://dialogue.com
In addition to these, Dawn.com found thousands of domains listed ‘to-be-banned’ host no content at all, but are simply available for purchase from domain registration companies.
In a third category, many sites are found to be serving a ‘404 Not Found Error’ i.e. the sites were not be found on the server, indicating that the owners had either removed or moved the sites in entirety.
Aside from these erroneous/redundant inclusions to the ban list, many sites have been blocked as per government orders, displaying the standard ban message.