There has been increasing evidence of the active role that many governments and states across the world are taking in internet censorship. Over the last few days the Pakistan Government have been facing a dilemma which is affecting many countries. This issue relates to a page started up on Facebook which invited users to draw pictures and cartoons in a page called – “Everyone Draw Mohammed Day”. The response to this page in Pakistan and other Islamic countries was extremely swift. The Lahore High Court ordered the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to ensure that the Facebook site was blocked and inaccessible in Pakistan.
The ban then seemed to gather momentum under pressure from Islamic Lawyers, the Pakistani cabinet ended up extending their ban to other sites which contained “blasphemous material”. This ban was soon extended to include hundreds of Youtube pages which were supposedly hosting offensive material. There seems to be some division within the Pakistani Government about how to deal with material that is deemed offensive. Hard liners are seeking to extend filtering across the main internet sites, where as the Interior Minister Rehman Malik as urged caution in blocking access to whole web sites as opposed to individual pages.
Jim Rjindael from the popular blog – Anonymous Internet Surfing made this comment:
“The problem is that there is only one effective way to censor the internet feed being supplied to a country and that is to allow web sites individually not by blocking them. Blocking individual pages and web sites is completely ineffective due to the many available ways to circumvent these blocks. Current internet filtering techniques are ineffective and almost always degrade overall network access to internet.
“The other issue is that content is distributed so widely that when such a ban is implemented is soon accessible from thousands of sites. The internet feeds off news and banning content is almost certain to ensure that more people see the offensive content as it goes viral across the web.”
Many users in Pakistan and other countries however were completely unaffected by the restrictions due to the increasing use of anonymising software and VPN technology used to bypass such restrictions. Many UK Expats for instance use such technology to enable them to watch UK Tv abroad, however these systems also mostly bypass most available internet filtering technologies.
Whatever the future holds for the use of the internet in these countries it is becoming increasingly apparent that many governments are not comfortable with allowing free access to the world wide web. The number of countries restricting access and filtering internet web sites increases almost daily, increasingly creating multi-tiered societies online. Sadly there are already huge differences in the information available to you online depending on where you happen to live.