It's becoming something of a trend for Pakistan to ban and/or boycott things it doesn't like. It should be noted, of course, that different cultures have different levels of sensitivity about different subjects, but that doesn't mean we can't point out where we think they've got things wrong. Banning YouTube, for instance, is a head in the sand approach that just won't work. Getting into the business of monitoring all of your citizen's communications with foreigners and banning encryption is even more chilling. And it isn't just the Pakistani government getting into the act, either. Recall that one of their citizens called for the death penalty on the founders of Facebook due to some contest a Facebook user ran. So, while I'm all for cultural sensitivity, it shouldn't be expected in arenas where that sensitivity is not reciprocated.

Which is why I feel comfortable laughing hysterically as some Pakistani shopkeepers are boycotting two video games because they don't like how the fictional plot line portrays Pakistan.

Both Medal of Honor: Warfighter and Call of Duty: Black Ops II are first-person shooter games, where players take on the persona of an American special forces agent and feature ultra realistic graphics. Terrorism and the role of local security forces are hugely sensitive subjects in Pakistan, which has barely recovered from the shock of discovering that Osama bin Laden was hiding in plain sight, barely 30 miles from the capital Islamabad.

I'll leave the politics aside here, but it takes a special kind of awesome to be in nearly un-recoverable shock that bin Laden was hiding in your country when most of the world's media was suggesting as much for something like a decade. That he hid so easily near the nation's capital in a complex that was just begging to be investigated at the very least opens up the door for creative interpretations for how that might have happened. And that's exactly what the two games in question offer up as a fictional plotline. For example:

The latest installment of the Medal of Honor series opens with American Navy Seals coming ashore in Karachi docks on a mission to destroy a black market arms shipment. But when their detonation sets off a second, bigger explosion they realise they have stumbled on a much bigger terrorist plot, sparking a global manhunt. A chaotic car chase through the city follows amid warnings that the ISI - Pakistan's intelligence agency - is on the way.

Mr Memon added there was a danger children would be brainwashed into thinking foreign agents were at war inside Karachi, possibly leading them into the arms of militants.

In other words, the game has a plot that involves Pakistani intelligence cooperating with terrorists. That's a possibility about as shocking as, oh, say bin Laden hiding a paper airplane's throw away from Pakistan's capital. But the point is that it's a fictional plot. Fighting against it is silly. You might as well outlaw the Narnia books, because wardrobe-makers are insulted that any of their products could transport folks to witch-infested worlds ruled by multi-syllabic lions. What possible explanation could Mr. Memon have for this call to boycott?

"These games show a misleading idea of what is happening in the city. You don't get the CIA all the way through Grand Theft Auto," he said.

Quite true. On the other hand, no American stores in New York, Vegas, or L.A. are calling for a boycott of the GTA games because their cities are shown to be infested with shotgun wielding caricatures of Western culture. Because it's fiction.

Pakistan's love/hate relationship with the internet seems to be mostly "hate" these days. Over the past couple of years, the Pakistani government has done as much as it can to cripple local access to the web, including seeking a nationwide web filtering system that would block off access to 50 million websites.

More recently, it joined a variety of nations which imposed a Youtube ban (or at least complained loudly and violently) because of Google's refusal to block or remove the "Innocence of the Muslims" video. Reacting to violent protests, Pakistan cut off Youtube, much to the dismay of its estimated 25 million internet users.

After the protests switched from decrying the offending video to decrying the offending censorious government, Pakistan decided to lift the ban... only to put it back in less time than it takes to sing [insert viral pop tune title here]:

A ban on YouTube, which Pakistan imposed after an anti-Islam video caused riots in much of the Muslim world, was lifted Saturday, only to be reinstated — after three minutes — when it was discovered that blasphemous material was still available on the site.

Much to the censor's dismay, the offending video remained just where the uploader had left it. The government stated it had "taken steps" to block offending content, but somehow the very thing that had prompted the shutdown had eluded the blockade, putting Muhammed directly in the path of badly-dubbed criticism.

This three-minute unbanning prompted another round of government-aimed criticism, this time with a bit more of a sarcastic edge, as a Pakistani journalist compared interior minister Rehman Malik to a kid playing with the light switch and pointed out that the same government that couldn't handle a website wants to be entrusted with stopping terrorism.

Unfortunately, part of the collateral damage of the Youtube ban is one of Pakistan's own -- Mohammed Shahid Nazir, a fishmonger whose song "One Pound Fish" has gone viral on the video service, racking up over eight million views.

The Nation’s report gave a sense of how famous Mr. Nazir managed to become, despite the ban on the video-sharing site in his home country: “Around 250 people, including local politicians met him at the airport, showering him with rose petals and chanting ‘Long Live One Pound Fish!’ while TV networks interrupted coverage of the fifth anniversary of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s assassination to show his return live.”

Of course, that's the danger of blocking or taking down content viewed as dangerous, blasphemous, heretical or just plain infringing -- very often, legitimate, non-dangerous, non-offensive content gets caught in the sticky webs of overreaching entities.

I suppose the government has to be grateful that this past weekend's up-and-down action managed to leave the rest of the internet intact. It has to be tough living down a surreptitious Youtube blockade that manages to kill your own country's internet service while blocking the Youtube connection of a handful of unrelated (except by ISP) countries. 

You may remember that, a year ago, Pakistan announced they were banning encryption online. Not that any such ban would likely to be effective, but it seems to fit in with the claim that the government has told PTCL, the Pakistani telco, that within 90 days it must monitor basically all communications that go across the Pakistani border:

All emails, telephone calls and other communications with the rest of the world will begin to be monitored within 90 days at a cost of million of dollars, according to a deadline given by the government to operators including PTCL.

The government has assigned PTCL and other operators to install monitoring equipment by the end of this year for checking voice and email communications from abroad and the services of the country’s spy agency will be used basically to check and curb blasphemous and obscene websites on the Internet.

Yeah, sure, just to "curb blasphemous and obscene websites." I'm sure all that monitoring won't be abused otherwise at all... right? Somehow, despite that earlier ban, I'm guessing that encryption technologies just became a lot more popular in Pakistan.

Google has continued to update its big "Transparency Report" with new data on specific content takedown requests from government agencies. With this latest update, Google has put out a blog post warning people that governments -- including those not normally associated with censorship -- are increasingly seeking to shut down speech for what appear to be politically motivated reasons:

We noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it’s not.

This is the fifth data set that we’ve released. And just like every other time before, we’ve been asked to take down political speech. It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect—Western democracies not typically associated with censorship.

For example, in the second half of last year, Spanish regulators asked us to remove 270 search results that linked to blogs and articles in newspapers referencing individuals and public figures, including mayors and public prosecutors. In Poland, we received a request from a public institution to remove links to a site that criticized it. We didn’t comply with either of these requests.

There are some interesting, if odd, specific examples, like the following:

Brazil: In December, we received an electoral court order that resulted in the removal of four orkut profiles for content related to political campaigns.

Canada: We received a request from the Passport Canada office to remove a YouTube video of a Canadian citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet. We did not comply with this request.

Pakistan: We received a request from the Government of Pakistan's Ministry of Information Technology to remove six YouTube videos that satirized the Pakistan Army and senior politicians. We did not comply with this request.

Poland: We received a request from the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development to remove a search result that criticized the agency as well as eight more that linked to it. We did not comply with this request.

Spain: We received 14 requests from the Spanish Data Protection Authority to remove 270 search results that linked to blogs and sites referencing individuals and public figures. The Spanish Data Protection Authority also ordered the removal of three blogs published on Blogger and three videos hosted on YouTube. We did not comply with these requests.

United States: We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove a blog because of a post that allegedly defamed a law enforcement official in a personal capacity. We did not comply with this request, which we have categorized in this Report as a defamation request.

We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove 1,400 YouTube videos for alleged harassment. We did not comply with this request. Separately, we received a request from a different local law enforcement agency to remove five user accounts that allegedly contained threatening and/or harassing content. We terminated four of the accounts, which resulted in the removal of approximately 300 videos, but did not remove the remaining account with 54 videos.

We received a court order to remove 218 search results that linked to allegedly defamatory websites. We removed 25% of the results cited in the request.

This expansion of governments seeking to censor speech via Google takedowns is clearly worrisome, though it's good to see that Google at least investigates the details before taking down the content.

We recently wrote about Pakistan's attempts to build its own internet censorship regime, capable of blocking 50 million sites that the government doesn't like. However, a petition by civil rights groups has apparently resulted in a court ruling saying that such censorship is unconstitutional under the Pakistani constitution. Of course, from the writeup linked above (from Reporters Without Borders), it appears that there is at least some skepticism that the Pakistani government will obey its own court:

The high court’s ruling, if respected, would make it impossible for the government to introduce any nationwide website filtering system.

While welcoming the ruling, which penalizes the lack of transparency in the PTA’s past website blocking, Reporters Without Borders calls for vigilance because the PTA could try to circumvent it by devising a constitutional procedure based on the anti-blasphemy law and national security provisions.

Still, it's good to see courts around the globe pushing back on this desire to censor the internet.

A few months back we noted that Pakistan was trying to ban encryption for surfing the internet. Now that they've tackled letting the government spy on everyone, they're tackling the other side of the equation, by very publicly putting out a request for proposal on a system to censor up to 50 million websites. Apparently, when Pakistan wants to censor the internet, it goes big. Even more ridiculous is that this is coming from an organization who claims its mandate is "to transform Pakistan's economy into a knowledge based economy." Yeah, mass censorship of the internet is not how you do that.

The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority has taken a bold new step in the censorship arena, compiling a list of words and phrases deemed "inappropriate" for texting. This list has been forwarded to the nation's mobile operators, making a brief appearance as a publicly-available Google doc. Although the public permission has been rescinded, a version of the list appears here (very probably NSFW, especially if someone is reading over your shoulder or if you tend to read everything aloud).

According to a mobile operator representative:

"There are more than 1,600 words in the list including indecent language, expletives, swear words, slang etc, which have to be filtered. The filtering is not good for the system and may degrade the quality of network services-plus it would be a great inconvenience to our subscribers if their SMS was not delivered due to the wrong choice of words"

To give you the gist of the forbidden texts, imagine George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV," attach nearly any other imaginable word to those seven, add a couple hundred euphemisms for masturbation, some drug slang and a slew of misspellings and you'll be in the general neighborhood. It's what's lying on the outskirts of this neighborhood where things get weird.

Athletes Foot. Defecate. Deposit. (Yes, I know, but I would imagine some Pakistanis still use a banking system.) Do Me is thwarted by removing a space, leaving Pakistanis with no word for "enclosed arena." G Unit. God Damed Motha Fucka. I'm saddened to see "sexwhore" is no longer permissible, as it has become my go-to texting phrase, especially when contacting immediate family members.

Famous STD gonorrhea narrowly avoids the ban, thanks to an apparent lack of reference material ("gonorrehea"). Of course, infection tends to lead to a burning sensation that also makes the "no-go" list: "smagma."

Got Jesus. (It's cool, though. "Satan" is banned as well.) Hobo. Hoser. Idiot and "idoit." Juggalo. Kmart. Kotex. Lotion.

Inveterate masturbators will be thrilled to learn that many variations have been banned (mastabater, masterbate, mastrabator) but the original, correctly spelled version lives on. Sadly, inveterate jokesters will have to make do without their precious, um, "pun tang."

Neon Deon. Rae Carruth. (Apparently, the Pakistani government has something against flashy/homicidal football players, not to mention the defunct XFL ("he hate me/hehateme")).

"Tongue" gets twisted as well, appearing on the list as "tonge," "toung" and "tounge." #1072-1074 are apparently intentionally left blank.

All in all, a very dirty and plentiful list. One can almost imagine the censoring group giggling childishly long into the night while coming (I KNOW) up with this list.

Many Pakistanis have taken to the internet to express their displeasure with having their constitutional free speech rights violated. Of course, officials are quick to point out that this censorship is "for the children."

Mohammad Younis, a PTA spokesman claims the ban was a "result of numerous meetings and consultations with stakeholders," and went on to point out that "nobody would like this happening to their young boy or girl."

(Oddly enough, "Wuutang Clan" is forbidden, despite the fact that they are sporting an additional "u" and are distinctly "for the children.")

The spokesman also points out that they never thought they'd get caught:

Mr. Younis also added that the list was never intended to be distributed publicly and was only intended to be used for testing purposes.

Supposedly the final version will be much shorter, leaving Pakistani texters only "partially censored" which is better than "completely censored" but still much, much worse than enjoying their right to free speech. Citing Pakistani court precedent, the Pakistani government representative helpfully pointed out that, like many "unlimited" data plans, constitutionally-protected free speech isn't "without restrictions."

All in all, this move sounds like a nanny-state circle****, presided over by officious ***hats with too much free time and way too much power.

This was rumored about a month ago, but now reports are coming out that the Pakistani government has issued orders to all ISPs in the country, telling them to block any user from using any "technology that would allow them to privately browse the internet." The notice to ISPs specifically calls out VPNs, saying that they are illegal because they make it impossible to monitor. The Pakistani government insists that they really only mean that militants should be blocked, but that does not appear to be clear at all in the statement to ISPs. The report also notes that the Pakistani government has become more aggressive at blocking websites, including blocking all of Rolling Stone, because someone in Pakistan didn't like a Matt Taibii article, and they're so clueless they can't figure out how to just block a URL.

In the meantime, we're wondering how various companies that rely on encrypted information, such as banks, will deal with the order, which pretty clearly says that the government has "prohibited usage of all such mechanisms including encrypted virtual private networks (EVPNs) which conceal communication to the extent that prohibits monitoring." Do they just ignore it? And will users give up their VPNs just because the government hates such security?

As various governments have tried to clamp down, censor and/or filter the internet, all it's really done is increase interest and usage of encryption tools such as VPNs. Every so often we have commenters who insist that outlawing encryption is the obvious next step for governments, though that suggests an ignorance of the practical impossibility of truly banning encryption -- which, after all, is really just a form of speech. The US, of course, famously toyed with trying to block the export of PGP in the 90s, but finally realized that it would likely lose big time in a court battle. While I could certainly see some politicians here trying to ban certain forms of encryption, I couldn't see any such effort being successful long term.

In other countries, however, they seem ready to make a go of it. Privacy International is reporting that Pakistan is trying to ban the use of encryption, including for VPNs, as part of the implementation of a new telco law (pdf) which requires telcos to spy on their customers. Obviously, encryption makes that tougher, so the response is just to ban it entirely.

But here's the big question: can any such ban really be effective? I mean, if you and I agree on using a simple cipher between us, that's "encryption," but is indistinguishable from "speech" in most contexts. That means any such ban on encryption is effectively and practically useless the moment it goes into effect. There will always be incredibly simple ways around it. Trying to ban encryption is like trying to ban language. You can't reasonably do it.

Last year, we reported on an attempt to ban Facebook throughout all of Pakistan, due to a group on the site that some Muslims found offensive (the group was supporting an "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!" following a controversy on that subject). It seemed positively silly to ban an entire site based on how one small group of people used that site, but we've seen it happen in a number of countries. Apparently there was a ruling on this that was made back in February, but was just released, which, while sympathetic to the idea of banning Facebook, decided not to issue the ban. Of course, the EFF report on this also notes that a new petition to ban Facebook is going to be heard later this week anyway, so there will be yet another chance to completely block the site due to how a few folks used it. That original post from last year got a bunch of comments from Pakistan defending the idea of blocking Facebook, but I'm still at a loss to see how it makes sense to block an entire site over a single particular use.