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PTA’s Directive to block Internet Website Last Updated ( Monday, 24 March 2008 )

Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has directed all the country's Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block an internet Website YouTube - Broadcast Yourself., on account of showing highly blasphemous film.

The decision to the effect came after a meeting held at the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecom in Islamabad. Senior representatives from the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Religious Affairs, Cabinet Division, FIA and PTA attended the meeting. YouTube, a video sharing website has been found to be running highly provocative and blasphemous anti Islamic video.


PTA believes that the said footage absolutely stands against the values of religious tolerance and peaceful coexistence arousing deep anguish and distress across the Muslim world. Had not this highly profane and sacrilegious footage been banned, it has the potential to cause more unrest and possible loss of life and property across the country.

In view of the above, PTA as the sector’s Regulator has directed country’s ISPs to block the said website showing offensive visual footages. PTA will ensure blocking of the website keeping under consideration all the best practices and means so as to achieve the desired objectives without affecting the ones that are not concerned with the objectionable contents.

FOR: PTA

[Zubair]

SAN FRANCISCO — YouTube was back up two hours after Pakistan, in an act of information provincialism, inadvertently made the video-sharing site inaccessible to users around the world Sunday afternoon.

The blackout left network administrators and Internet activists wondering on Monday how Pakistan’s actions, meant to restrict only its own citizens from accessing YouTube, could have such widespread reverberations — and whether such a disruption could be reproduced by someone with more malicious intent.

The incident began Friday, according to reports, when the Pakistani government of Pervez Musharraf became worried that a video clip attacking Islam might generate widespread unrest among its Muslim population. The government asked the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, which oversees the country’s Internet providers, to cut off access to YouTube for the country’s estimated 8.2 million Internet users.

That action is not unusual. China, Morocco and Turkey have all reacted to potentially risky material posted to YouTube by blocking access to the site within their borders.

But two critical errors allowed Pakistan’s action to echo around the globe for at least a brief period on Sunday afternoon, according to Martin A. Brown, a data engineer at the Renesys Corporation, an Internet monitoring company, which posted a timeline of the incident on its Web site.

As part of its effort to block YouTube within the country, Pakistan Telecom created a dummy route that essentially discarded YouTube traffic, sending it into what Internet experts call a black hole.

Pakistan Telecom then made an error by announcing that dummy route to its own telecommunications partner, PCCW, based in Hong Kong, shortly before noon New York time on Sunday, according to Renesys

[Zubair]

PCCW then made a second error, accepting that dummy route for YouTube and relaying it to other Internet providers around the world.

Internet service providers now had two conflicting online “roads” leading to YouTube. But because an important online protocol called Border Gateway Protocol favors longer routing addresses — they are thought to be more specific — at least 97 major Internet providers and thousands of smaller ones chose the dummy route, Pakistan’s black hole.

About 1 p.m. Sunday, according to the Renesys timeline, YouTube began working to correct the error, in part by telling Internet service providers that they should direct traffic around Pakistan’s dummy route. YouTube has removed the video clip that had concerned Pakistani officials.

In a statement Monday morning, YouTube addressed the situation. “For about two hours, traffic to YouTube was routed according to erroneous Internet protocols, and many users around the world could not access our site,” said a YouTube spokesman, Ricardo Reyes. “We have determined that the source of these events was a network in Pakistan. We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again.”

Steven M. Bellovin, a professor of computer science at Columbia, said the same Internet routing flaw had been exploited in the past by spammers and other ne’er-do-wells, but he worried it could be more widely used now.

“If it’s a big site that’s affected, it will be spotted and dealt with within an hour or so, as happened this time,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “If it’s a small site, it might take a lot longer to find someone who would think to look at this.”

Professor Bellovin said that efforts to upgrade Border Gateway Protocol within Internet standards organizations were moving slowly and that he was not optimistic improvements could be made quickly unless such incidents became more common.

Craig Aaron, communications director at Free Press, an Internet rights organization based in Washington, said the organization was worried that the tactic could be used to stifle free speech online.

“Maybe this Pakistan instance was an anomaly,” he said, “but it certainly should be raising alarms that we should be paying a lot more attention to our international Internet security.”