After curbing the use of encryption on the internet and played with the idea of blocking and filtering SMS in their country, Pakistan is now floating its request for proposals for a filter and blockage of websites.

A human rights organization in the area, however, sees this as a plan for the upcoming elections in 2013 and a curtailment of internet freedom.

Bytes for All, Pakistan, a human rights organization focusing on internet freedom said that internet is always the casualty of political interests. Its coordinator, Shahzad Ahmad, said that their government had repeatedly expressed its obsession to lock up the cyberspace of the country at any given chance. He added that the government’s usual excuses on curbing SMS in the entire country are levelling up the war on terror, upholding national security and even religious morality. Some social networking sites like Facebook that is being used globally is on its way to be blocked in the said country. Its content according to the court orders is blasphemous.

Further, the proposed uniform resource locator (URL) Filtering and Blocking System is capable of block listing up to 50 million URLs with a processing delay of not more than one millisecond. Looking back, in November last year, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) instructed Telecommunications Company to filter SMS that include foul messages according to their own standards.  There were a lot of protests with this move however; they have defended their actions as a way to uphold moral values. According to the PTA, they are instructed by the law to block the transmission of indecent, immoral or foul messages. Because of the massive protest on the curtailment of civil rights, the Pakistan government delayed the implementation of the order. Recently, Ahmad said that blocking and filtering personal messages are rampant.

Moreover, Article 19, an anti-censorship group in London said that the government is using the Telecommunications Re-organization Act to justify unrighteous decrees that are blocking every individual’s freedom of expression and other human rights. The said act has been used in numerous ways by the Pakistan government as an excuse for its innumerable acts in violating the peoples’ rights to privacy by ordering mass surveillance on communication systems, freedom of expression and others by blocking websites and curbing SMS in coordination with several Telecommunications Companies. Despite these actions of the government to curtail several civil rights, it is still the people who can assert their rights and make an end to the government’s violations.