> Internet users in Pakistan have been reacting strongly to a tweet by the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority, where it was notified that “public and private

> Internet users in Pakistan have been reacting strongly to a tweet by the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority, where it was notified that “public and private sector organisations, foreign missions and freelancers, who desire to use VPN for their legitimate purpose, must register their VPN by 31st October 2022” on the PTA website “to avoid disruption”. > The Pakistani state itself has the capacity for surveillance of unencrypted internet traffic, using the Web Monitoring System (WMS) which was purchased for a whopping $18 million form Canadian firm Sandvine in December 2018. > This was bought under the garb of grey traffic reduction and paid for by internet service providers and telecom companies under the Monitoring and Reconciliation Telephony Traffic Regulations, 2010. However, deep packet inspection — which is the technology bought from Sandvine for WMS — is a dual use technology that is also effective in surveillance and censorship of the internet. > There are strong reasons to believe the blocking of YouTube twice in the past month were done through the WMS as Internet Service providers (ISPs) did not receive instructions from the PTA to block the video sharing platform. The WMS, meanwhile, does enable the PTA to block websites and applications at the internet gateway level without the cooperation of ISPs. > The censorship of websites in Pakistan has also been a major issue of contention. The PTA claims it only blocks websites with “objectionable content” such as pornography and blasphemous content. However, what we have seen over the past few years is that a lot of political content gets blocked by the authority without prior intimation.