Hello Oonitarians,

Today, in collaboration with Bytes for All Pakistan, the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) published a research report examining internet censorship in Pakistan over the the last three years.

The report, titled "Internet Censorship in Pakistan: Findings from 2014-2017", is available here: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/pakistan-internet-censorship/

https://twitter.com/OpenObservatory/status/920588717508751360

This study includes an analysis of thousands of network measurements collected (through the use of OONI Probe) from 22 local vantage points in Pakistan over the last three years.

We confirm the blocking of 210 URLs in Pakistan. Explicit blockpages were served for many of those URLs, while others were blocked by means of DNS tampering.

In many cases, Pakistani ISPs appear to be applying "smart filters", selectively blocking access to specific webpages hosted on HTTP, rather than blocking access to entire domains. Overall, we only found ISPs to be blocking the HTTP version of sites, potentially enabling censorship circumvention over HTTPS (for sites that support encrypted HTTPS connections).

We found a wide range of different types of sites to be blocked, including LGBT sites, communication tools, and pornography, amongst others.

Notably, most of the blocked URLs include:
The blocking of sites related to "Draw Mohammed Day" is legally justified under Pakistan's Penal Code, which prohibits blasphemy. Similarly, the blocking of other sites (such as pornography and other sites promoting provocative attire) can be justified under Pakistan's laws and regulations.

However, we also found the sites of the Baluch and Hazara ethnic minority groups to be blocked as well. According to human rights groups, these minorities have experienced discrimination and abuse by authorities. These censorship events may be politically motivated.

On a positive note, we found popular communication tools, like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, to be accessible. Quite similarly, the Tor network was accessible in most networks throughout the testing period.

All data collected from Pakistan is publicly available here: https://api.ooni.io/files/by_country/PK

~ The OONI team.
-- 
Maria Xynou
Research and Partnerships Coordinator
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.torproject.org/
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