BY its very nature, democracy carries within it a promise of openness, a celebration of diversity. But democratic Pakistan, on the contrary, is becoming more Orwellian by the day. A report on internet surveillance called Freedom on the Net 2013, conducted by the Digital Rights Foundation Pakistan and Freedom House, assessed cyberspace freedom in 60 countries. Scoring 67 out of 100, Pakistan received a status of ‘not free’, while Iceland topped the table with a score of six.
The violation of the right to information by limiting content has been under way for some time with scores of websites seen as anti-military, anti-state or anti-Islam getting blocked. There has also been, it seems, an expansion in surveillance activities by government authorities, particularly intelligence agencies. However, the uploading of the anti-Islam movie trailer on YouTube last year and the Fair Trial Act passed earlier this year to aid terrorism investigations seem to have engendered a perfect storm of censorship and moral policing by government authorities. Not only has the ban on YouTube not been lifted, and more sites been blocked on grounds of ‘immorality’, PTA is in the process of acquiring more advanced surveillance software than it possesses at present that will make it possible, among other things, to track internet traffic on websites of interest, and trawl through personal chats and email accounts more thoroughly. Although this invasive category of software is ostensibly for the purpose of aiding terrorism investigations, the loose phrasing of the Fair Trial Act 2012 could allow a much broader application of this technology to curb views on politics, religion, morality, etc that may be deemed unacceptable. The right to freedom of speech is already much circumscribed in Pakistan through a combination of society’s vigilantism and draconian laws such as those dealing with blasphemy. Given the myriad problems that we are beset with, many of which can be traced to intolerance and bigotry, the last thing the government should be doing is playing Big Brother.
