• Population: 149,911,000
  • Internet users: 1,500,000 (2003)
  • Average charge for 20 hours of connection: 12 euros
  • DAI*: 0.24
  • Situation**: difficult

The Internet is a major concern for the authorities. The country is a centre of the fight against Al-Qaeda, which uses the Internet very effectively. President Pervez Musharraf has also cracked down on online pornography under pressure from Islamists.

Fighting pornography is one of the government's priorities. The Pakistan Telecommunication Company (PTCL) announced in April 2003 it was stepping up censorship of pornographic sites. But "anti-Islamic" and "blasphemous" sites were also censored, under pressure from religious conservatives, sparking protests, including hacker attacks on ISPs.

In early March 2004, the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) ordered ISPs to block access to all pornographic content. The ISPs said they did not have the technical capacity and said the PTCL should do it. The government then asked a Malaysian firm to provide a filtering system.

Fighting Al-Qaeda

The United States has given the Pakistani intelligence services much technological help to monitor online traffic and it has played a major role in arresting terrorists. Two Al-Qaeda suspects were picked up in a Peshawar cybercafé on 26 September 2003 and Pakistani officials said they were found by interception of their e-mail messages.

Investigative site blocked

The US-based investigative website South Asia Tribune (www.satribune.com) has been a concerted target of the authorities since it was founded in 2002 and campaigned for press freedom in Pakistan. It has revealed several corruption cases involving the government. Its founder, Shaheen Sehbai, has been charged with burglary supposedly committed before he left for the United States.

The government blocked the site on 30 May 2003 and it has since been inaccessible from most cities in the country. Sehbai said the move came after many articles openly criticising Musharraf's rule, including US military support for him. The paper launched new access to the website on 3 June through an anonymizer proxy site, began sending out its articles by e-mail on 1 May and plans to get a new Web address.

Links

* The DAI (Digital Access Index) has been devised by the International Telecommunications Union to measure the access of a country's inhabitants to information and communication technology. It ranges from 0 (none at all) to 1 (complete access).

** Assessment of the situation in each country (good, middling, difficult, serious) is based on murders, imprisonment or harassment of cyber-dissidents or journalists, censorship of news sites, existence of independent news sites, existence of independent ISPs and deliberately high connection charges.

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