Re: [Pakistan] Access to news website blocked?

["Irfan Khan" <khania2@super.net.pk>]

Ardeshir Cowasjee writes a weekly column in Dawn. on 8 June 2003, he 
wrote about the blocking of South Asia Tribune. excerpts:


[In 2000] the Pakistan Telecommunications Company Limited (PTCL) 
established two National Access Points (NAPs) in Karachi and 
Islamabad intended to block Internet telephony and pornographic 
websites. The aim of these NAPs was to direct all Internet traffic in 
and out of the country through two PTCL-controlled gateways, 
fundamentally faulty and with the potential to cause catastrophic 
damage to the information infrastructure of the country. The NAPs 
have of late been replaced by the Pakistan Internet Exchange (PIE), a 
subsidiary of the PTCL, and PIE is now the Internet backbone provider 
for Pakistan with their three gateways at Islamabad, Lahore and 
Karachi.

In October 2002, PIE banned Internet telephoning and voice chat 
websites. In January this year it started trying to block 
pornographic and 'other objectionable' websites. It then moved on to 
block the South Asia Tribune website of Shaheen Sehbai from 
Washington. As of May 30, the website is just not accessible in 
Pakistan. As it is impossible for it to have disappeared on its own, 
the only possible blocker is the government of Pakistan, though the 
honourable minister in charge of information technology, Awais Ahmad 
Khan Leghari, and the even more honourable minister in charge of 
information, Sheikh Rasheed, - both honourable graduates - have 
strenuously denied that they have anything to do with any blocking of 
anything.

Now this is stupid in the extreme, and serves absolutely no purpose 
other than to make the blocker, look ridiculous and to arouse even 
more interest in the contentious website. According to my IT wizard, 
you may well block a website, but what is posted on that website can 
be freely made available to all those in Pakistan who are interested 
in three simple ways. The simplest way to disseminate all offending 
columns or articles is by e-mail. All that is needed is that the 
South Asia Tribune editors send them off as text to their large 
mailing list, with the request that it be forwarded to anyone else to 
whom it may be of equal interest.

Then there are mirror sites on which the SA Tribune can simply 
replicate their text. Blocking such sites would be extremely 
difficult for the government, particularly if they are carried by 
such popular services as google.com, geocities.com, or yahoo. I 
myself have accessed Tribune's articles on google and downloaded them 
just to see what all the fuss and bother is about. It all amounts to 
nothing that could possibly endanger either the nebulous national 
interest, the non-existent ideology, or the wobbly morals of this 
nation.

There are also anonymizer sites which allow anonymous surfing, and 
PIE can have no clue as to who is accessing which site. There are 
scores of such sites, which can be used to access any site being 
blocked either by PIE or by a particular server who has received and 
obeyed instructions from wherever.

They may deny and deny, but our IT wizards all know, and have 
irrefutable evidence, that it is PIE that has shut off South Asia 
Tribune's website, having received, as they coyly put it, 'orders 
from above', from 'on high', making the 'on high' seem rather 
ridiculous, and in the process render a nondescript notorious - which 
is exactly what the man wants.



source: http://www.dawn.com/weekly/cowas/cowas.htm