Source: business.financialpost.com

The Pakistani government is relying on a Canadian-based tech firm to create a censorship firewall around all the Internet content in that country, despite initially backing down from the plan following pressure from human rights groups, says a new report from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.

According to a brochure no longer accessible on its website, Guelph, Ont.-based Netsweeper Inc.’s technology can be used to block inappropriate content “to meet government rules and regulations — based on social, religious, or political ideals.”

Netsweeper submitted a bid for the South Asian country’s proposed national web filtering system last year, which called for the ability to block websites, IP address ranges, and filter for specific files and file types — a bid that, according to Citizen Lab’s findings, was apparently successful.

Research by the OpenNet Initiative — a group to which the Citizen Lab belongs and which monitors Internet surveillance — uncovered evidence that Pakistan was using the Canadian technology to filter “blasphemous and anti-Islamic” content as well as websites associated with secessionist and nationalist movements of Pakistan’s Balochi, Sindhi and Pashtun ethnic groups.

Access to Facebook and Twitter has also been blocked on a number of occasions, while YouTube remains blocked to this day.

“The main finding here is not really Pakistan, and not even the extent to which [traffic is] filtered on the backbone level… continue reading @ business.financialpost.com