Islamabad, February 08, 2010: Bytes for All and its members in Pakistan vehemently condemn Government's block on YouTube and consider it yet another attack on civil liberties and free speech in the country.
The saga of this block goes back a few weeks to a public speech by Mr. Asif Ali Zardari, who though is a democratically elected President of Pakistan but an extremely unpopular politician in the country. While he was speaking in Urdu to a public rally, not many people were attentive to what he was saying. Resultantly, at some point loosing his calm, he yelled at them in English saying "shut up".
Various independent media channels picked this clip up, laughing about this royal shut up, some one also posted it on the YouTube. Dr. Adil Najam, renowned academician and scientist noted “Such behavior is embarrassing for any politician, but especially for the president of a country”.
No one would have noticed about this video if PTA and Pakistan Internet Exchange had not started blocking it in Pakistani Cyberspace. Suddenly blog posts, Facebook pages, twitter and other social networking sites were flooded with anger against governments attempt to block YouTube. All those links featuring this video on YouTube are still blocked and upon accessing replies as "restricted site".
While slowly and gradually situation is coming back to normal but we are extremely concerned about this internet blocking by the authorities. This act of the government clearly shows that current regime do not believe in free speech and wants to control what people want to see, say and listen. This is undemocratic and against the norms of civil liberties. Netizens in Pakistan, bloggers, civil rights activists, IT businesses have strongly condemned this.
It will be pertinent to mention here about draconian Prevention of Electronic Crimes Ordinance (PECO), which was first imposed by the military dictator but current regime is also continuing with it. PECO has the provisions, where sending an SMS against the President can lead the culprit to 14 years of rigorous imprisonment along with confiscation of property.
This was yet another attempt to block YouTube, so probably now Pakistan leads the list of countries, who have blocked Youtube numerous times. If such blocks continue to happen in future, Bytes for All and its members will take this issue to the Supreme Court of Pakistan.
To view the discussion threads on this block, access Pakistan ICT Policy Monitors List:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/pakistanictpolicy/
Here is one of the blocked URL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzuHD5x1fEU
To access the screen shot of "restricted site" here:
http://pakistanictpolicy.bytesforall.net/files/Zardari-Shutup-Blocked.jp...
Some more info about YouTube block:
http://teeth.com.pk/blog/2010/02/08/pta-blocks-zardaris-shut-up-video
