ISLAMABAD: Legislation that ensures cyber security for citizens and the provision of safe and secure internet facility to every person should be enacted and the ban on video sharing website YouTube should be lifted, Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed said on Thursday.

Addressing the Pakistan Cyberspace Conference, hosted by digital rights group Bytes For All, the chairman of the Senate Standing Committee on Defence said that issues of cyber warfare and cyber security are of immense importance, urging the government to devise an Internet governance policy. He criticised the government for not having a coherent Internet policy.

He said that the world’s most violent cyber war taking place in this region and according to reports, the three countries most spied upon by the west were Pakistan, Iran and China. He also observed that some of the world’s best hackers were from Pakistan and India. He called on hackers from both sides to conclude an agreement that they will not hack and attack each other’s websites, just as the two governments agreed in 1985 that they will not attack each other’s nuclear installations.

Citizen Lab Director Prof Ronald Deibert said that because of its filtering policy, in Pakistan, information about women rights and a number of other issues cannot be accessed through internet.

Foreign experts, local stakeholders discuss online privacy, surveillance and warfare at Cyberspace conference

“When Pakistan began the process to hire a company to filter websites, a campaign was launched to try and ensure that no country should provide such a service. When a company was finally engaged, I was sure that it would be Chinese or Iranian company. But I was shocked to know that the company was Canadian and its office was located just down the road from mine,” he said, referring to the firm Netsweeper, that was approached by the Ministry of Information Technology to develop a filtering system that would help block various pages on the Internet.

PTI MNA Arif Alvi said that individuals’ data should be secure and only government departments such as the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) should have access to it. However, individuals should be informed by the government that their data has been collected.

“People do not pay taxes, so the government should check the purchase of air tickers, property or anything where a CNIC is used,” he said.

ANP leader Bushra Gohar said that a number of people had complained that their phones were bugged.

“Even my phone is bugged. Those who listen to calls pass the information to party leaders out of context. We, as a society, like to control everything and the government also likes to do so too,” she said.

Speaking during a session on ‘Surveillance, Privacy and the State Security Narrative’, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) Director General Coordination Wasi Ullah Khan said that the PTA was mandated to implement the policies of the federal government and denied that they were mandated to conduct surveillance.

“Supreme Court ordered us to remove blasphemous material from YouTube, which was difficult. So the decision was made to ban the website. PTA has established a consumer protection directorate and case there are any complaints, we try to resolve the issues,” he said.

Advocate Yasir Latif Hamdani, who represented Bytes For All in the YouTube case before the Lahore High Court, said that a number of websites carried blasphemous material, but only YouTube was blocked.

“At the moment, our conversations, health reports, emails, search histories are all being monitored. In the current terrorism-charged environment, we don’t know that who is monitoring us and whether our data is in safe hands or not,” he said.

He suggested that data protection laws be developed to ensure that bank accounts details and other personal information is not misused.

Published in Dawn, February 27th, 2015

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