EARLIER THIS MONTH, Pakistans state-run National Information Communications Technology Research and Development Fund put out a “requests for proposal” for a massive, centralised, internet censorship system for the country.
Explaining that because “ISPs and backbone providers have expressed their inability to block millions of undesirable web sites using current manual blocking systems”, the ministry said that a “a national URL filtering and blocking system is therefore required”. The new system would need to handle “up to 50 million URLs”, and would operate across the entire Pakistani internet. The research fund intends the system to be designed and built within the country, “by companies, vendors, academia and/or research organisations with proven track record”.
Even if Pakistan was to develop such a system within its borders, there are many foreign firms who would be happy to consult or provide hardware for Pakistan’s national firewall. There are, currently, no sanctions against doing so by any government.
But perhaps there should be. The export of computer technology and expertise has long been the subject of international prohibitions and controls. In order to develop its nuclear deterrent, Pakistan had to dodge not only bans on nuclear hardware, but also the supercomputers believed to be necessary to run that hardware. Due to the increasing capabilities of modern computers, these bans eventually became somewhat ridiculous but they had their role. US officials once even attempted to ban the export of particular algorithms, though it has proved a little tricky to block ideas you can write on the back of an envelope (or keep in the back of your head).
Nonetheless, countries have, with some success, created export controls around landmines and armaments, criminalised the acceptance of bribes by western companies, and encouraged corporations to adopt human rights standards.
Do we need to do the same for the tools of internet censorship? Pakistan’s design would allow the country’s officials to spontaneously and secretly block large chunks of the internet, with no oversight and apparently no democratic controls. It’s the very model of what the West condemns in China and Iran.
And, yet, western companies are often the first approached to build or consult on such networks. The document states that the censorship machine should accept third-party databases of blocked web addresses. US companies such as McAfee sell blocking systems for corporate intranets with databases in excess of 25 million web addresses. Such databases have been repurposed for national firewalls in countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE for years.
They can say no. When Websense, a censorware provider, discovered in 2009 that Yemen was using its corporate blocklists for a national blocking system, it withdrew any future software updates. In 2011, the company made a public statement on the improper use of technology for the suppression of rights. Last year, they joined the Global Network Initiative, a group of internet companies and human rights groups which develop and enforce socially responsible business practices for high-tech corporations.
Will it do any good? Blocking 50 million URLs is not hard, technically speaking. Competitors from countries such as China might step in to fill the gap left by cautious western companies. More likely, Pakistan can go it alone – it has enough technical expertise to build all the censorware it needs.
But if it does so, its government should at least be aware that there are consequences. The request for proposal was written as though Pakistan assumed that censorship was a natural consequence of a maturing local internet. “Many countries have deployed web filtering and blocking systems at the internet backbones within their countries,” it states.
Its true, and many of them are far more secretive about their systems than the Pakistani ministries. Those countries include a voluntary blacklist in the UK, and mandatory censoring in Australia. If recent legislation controlling copyright-infringing sites passes, it could include Ireland too.
Such censoring infrastructure sets a bad example for Pakistan, and the world.
In censorship as in nuclear capability, it’s hard for one country to condemn another without being accused of hypocrisy.
Companies in the West should take the lead of Websense and refuse to let their technology be misused for global censorship. Uncensoring governments need to put pressure on the companies and governments that reject such controls. And western democracies need to put their own houses in order, and make public and transparent what they are hiding from their own citizens, before their own blacklists end up infecting and ghettoising the entire global internet.
