On Friday afternoon in Delhi, I was at my daughter's school, waiting to pick her up and straining to eavesdrop on knots of parents and -- this being Delhi -- separate knots of household staff. Every tightly bunched group was absorbed by conversation on the only subject anyone in Delhi, and no doubt the rest of India, was talking about: are we going to war with Pakistan?

By Saturday afternoon, my assumption that India and Pakistan would find a way to step back from the brink because they had no other serious choice, seemed wildly optimistic. On the jingoistic, cacophonous, largely unwatchable Indian news channels, there were still reports of drones being shot down and air bases and military infrastructure being attacked. War seemed imminent. So imminent that India’s largest-selling weekly newsmagazine went with “War!” and a battalion of fighter jets on its cover. 

But by five pm on Saturday, Donald Trump announced a complete ceasefire. Before anyone from the Indian or Pakistani government had said anything. Entire nations were caught off guard. The screeching newsreaders, still foaming at the mouth, were outraged – “who moved my war?” 

And then the media swiveled on a dime (rather, a one-rupee coin). Spinning furiously, crazed hamsters on their wheels, the analysts and anchors insisted India had won. In Pakistan, their counterparts were doing much the same. The truth is, both countries had lost 

India and Pakistan had been locked in a clumsy, deadly two-step while the rest of the world looked away. It began on April 22, with a terrorist attack in Pahalgam, Kashmir, in which 26 men, almost all of them Hindu, and singled out for their religious affiliation, were killed. United States Vice President JD Vance, was in India on a “private trip” at the time, with his Indian-American wife and children.

The attack was a provocation that the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist government could not tolerate. Their supporters bayed for vengeance. And Modi, whose personal brand as the protector of the Hindu nation – boasting in campaign speeches about his 56-inch chest – is predicated on him being the leader of a newly vigorous, aggressive India, an emerging superpower, had to respond with overwhelming force.

It took two weeks -- during which India did not provide proof of the Pakistani state's involvement in the April 22 attack beyond an established history of Pakistan’s financing of terror. The country featured on the Financial Action Task Force's grey list between 2018 and 2022, though it insists it has since largely cleaned up its act. Indian retribution came in the form of the bombing of what India described as terrorist camps. This was, Indian officials said, a restrained, responsible response to Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. No military sites, for example, were hit.

Pakistan said civilians were killed and that mosques were bombed. They then retaliated to India's retaliation. And India retaliated to Pakistan’s retaliation against India’s retaliation. Inevitably, there was a retaliation to the retaliation to the retaliation against the retaliation. And so on, until Trump announced the ceasefire. As the bombings intensified, both India and Pakistan insisted they didn't want war and were taking responsible actions to de-escalate. In the warped logic of this fighting, the bombs being dropped actually signaled both countries' understanding that they could go so far and no further.

Initially, the United States, which has played a part in brokering peace in previous clashes between India and Pakistan, seemed content to let both countries duke it out. It’s “none of our business,” said Vance. While Donald Trump seemed to think the dispute over Kashmir was the latest episode of a show that dated back "1,000 years, probably longer." Later, he modified this assessment to mere centuries.

The truth is, this conflict is a product of British colonial rule, of the hastily conceived and disastrously executed partition of India in 1947. The Cliffs notes, with considerable nuance lost through inadequate summary, are as follows: Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state with a Hindu king, wanted to be independent of both India and Pakistan. But when Pakistani forces invaded Kashmir in October, 1947, the king asked India for help and signed an agreement binding Kashmir to the Indian union. 

It led to the first war between Pakistan and India, nations that were born just weeks earlier as the British departed. Under the terms of a United Nations-negotiated ceasefire, India gained control of about two-thirds of Kashmir. But this was temporary until a plebiscite to determine the future of Kashmir was held. This plebiscite never happened. As a result, both countries believe they have an inalienable right to the entirety of Kashmir: India because of the king's decision to sign the instrument of accession; Pakistan because Kashmir is a Muslim-majority state and Pakistan was created as a homeland for the subcontinent's Muslims. In 1965, both countries fought another inconclusive war. 

But as long as India continues to pretend there is a viable military solution to its disputes with Pakistan, the prospect of conflict, if not outright war, remains an ever-present Damoclean threat.

But since 1989, as the Soviet Union collapsed and there was a proliferation of US-funded mujahideen in the region, separatist sentiments in Kashmir spiraled into violent insurgency. India says these militants are a proxy, a tool of the Pakistani deep state. So Kashmir became a theater of both postcolonial and post-Cold War conflict.

Between 1999 and 2019, the U.S. reliably talked both countries off the ledge and leading international diplomatic efforts to get India and Pakistan to back off when overly aggressive gestures and posturing threatened to become kinetic. The U.S. has Cold War-era strategic and security ties with Pakistan but only recently has India become a close partner with an active role to play in containing China’s emerging dominance. India, Australia, Japan and the U.S. are part of the Quad, a loose grouping intended to counter China’s designs on the Indo-Pacific.

Modi and Trump have made several displays of personal friendship, each supporting the other’s election campaigns. But the Trump administration had declined to intervene in current tensions. It was a position of apathy, as if it had no stake in preventing war. For Modi, it must sting that carefully choreographed hugs with Western leaders had not resulted in more diplomatic support for his military action against Pakistan. 

Modi also received little support from institutions. For instance,  India had lobbied for the IMF to withhold funds from Pakistan. But the IMF chose to release $1 billion in loans to Islamabad, even as Pakistan was engaged in artillery exchanges with India. With the U.S. seemingly taking a back seat, Saudi Arabia and Iran had offered to mediate, as had Russia. Even China, which provides over 80% of the Pakistani army's weaponry and also administers part of Kashmir, said it would help broker peace. 

But it was the U.S. that swooped in over the weekend. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio both posted about the negotiations, with Trump even saying he had used trade as leverage to prevent a nuclear war. “Millions of people,” he said, “could have been killed.”

While Pakistan were happy to acknowledge the U.S. role in forcing a truce, Indian diplomats and politicians were either tight-lipped or disapproving. India has long resisted external interference in the Kashmir dispute, insisting that negotiations have to be strictly bilateral. Ultimately, neither India nor Pakistan can afford full-scale war. This is not asymmetrical combat. India may be much larger than Pakistan and conventionally more powerful. It may have a growing economy, while Pakistan is struggling to finance its debts. But, as one British analyst said, if this is a Goliath-David struggle, David has a nuclear weapon in his sling. 

The Trump-brokered ceasefire may only be temporary respite – so temporary, indeed, that barely hours after the agreement was announced, the chief minister of Indian-administered Kashmir posted on X that he had heard explosions in the state capital Srinagar. “What the hell,” he wrote, “just happened to the ceasefire?” But as long as India continues to pretend there is a viable military solution to its disputes with Pakistan, the prospect of conflict, if not outright war, remains an ever-present Damoclean threat.

As an Indian citizen and a parent, I find both governments' confidence that they can toe an invisible line more than a little disconcerting. But, judging by the political and media response to the prospect of war, only a few shared my scepticism. In India, since April 22, there have been very few calls for peace, very few questions about the need for a military response to a terrorist attack, even though bombing Pakistan has not deterred subsequent terrorism.

One of those calls for peace, though, came from Himanshi Narwal, whose husband of six days, an Indian navy officer, was shot in front of her. Narwal, who was photographed kneeling beside her husband's prone body, became a symbol of India's grief and outrage. 

That was before she spoke. Narwal told reporters that she only held the men who had murdered her husband responsible and not all Muslims or all Kashmiris. "We want peace," she said, "and only peace."

This sentiment made her a target of Hindu nationalist scorn on social media. Narwal was excoriated as a "woke secular" – a particularly Indian insult, mixing American right wing culture war tropes with the Indian use of the word "secular" to mock Indian liberals who supposedly kowtow to minorities, particularly Muslims.  

India's initial retaliation was given the code name "Operation Sindoor", a reference to the deep red powder some married Hindu women dab on the parting of their hair or on their foreheads. India's military action, in other words, was being taken on behalf of the women who had lost their husbands on April 22. Women like Himanshi Narwal. Though what she, and others like her, might think is apparently besides the point or even worthy of contempt. 

The contrast between Narwal's dignity and the absurd propaganda peddled by the mainstream Indian media would have been comical if it were not simultaneously so depressing. On Friday evening, a friend, an editor at a national magazine, sent me a collection of screen grabs of headlines in India, mostly from television news. Each claim was remarkable -- Pakistani planes being shot out of the sky, rebels from Balochistan capturing the city of Quetta, the Indian navy bombing Karachi, even reports of a coup -- and each claim was either knowingly false or entirely unverified. On Indian TV screens every night, since Wednesday night when India first bombed its targets in Pakistan, we've been exposed to a tale told by idiots.

 Was it too much to hope for some restraint? But the tone taken by the mainstream media, a mimicking of the abrasive arrogance of Hindu nationalist trolls on social media, was matched by the Indian government. I watched a spokesperson from the BJP, India's governing party, tell a British news channel about Modi's "3E policy -- evaporate, eradicate, eliminate... shameless Pakistan needs to be taught a lesson." Oy vey! 

And now, does the ceasefire mean that the so-called 3E policy has been abandoned? Would the Modi government – which had blocked the few critical, independent voices – have the courage to reimagine its response to Pakistan, to reevaluate the belligerence of its rhetoric, and to instead embrace the inherent strength in India’s secular, constitutional values and enter into constructive dialogue?

The signs are not encouraging. In a late bid to wrest the narrative momentum from Donald Trump, Indian politicians, journalists and commentators spread word of the country’s new approach to terrorism. Modi, having been silent through much of the fighting, elaborated on the “new normal,” in an address to the nation on Monday night. India, he said, would no longer distinguish “between the government sponsoring terrorism and the masterminds of terrorism.” The words were belligerent, the policies no kind of solution. 

Perhaps, India’s wounds are still too raw for self-reflection. But the question remains: Is India going to be held hostage to its own anger? Or will it acknowledge that talks, and people to people contact, must resume.

A version of this story was published in last week’s Sunday Read newsletter. Sign up here.

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Imran Khan is famous in Pakistan for his savvy use of social media. It was instrumental in shaping his political image in the early 2000s and in building the campaign that brought him to power in August 2018. Throughout his premiership, social media was a key tool for Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party. But today, with Khan at the center of a conflict between political and military powers in Pakistan, social media too has become a space of bitter contention.  

Earlier this month, Khan was arrested on corruption charges by the Pakistan Rangers, a paramilitary force, while he was at the Islamabad High Court for a hearing. His arrest, on May 9, triggered nationwide protests and violent clashes between his supporters and the police resulting in at least eight deaths and dozens of injuries. Khan’s supporters had launched an arguably unprecedented attack on the Pakistani army and its institutions. In the city of Lahore, supporters set a mansion belonging to a senior military officer on fire. Since its formation as an independent state in 1947, Pakistan has spent over three decades, at various times, under military rule. Even when civilian governments have been in charge, the military has loomed in the background. Open defiance of the military’s hold on Pakistan is exceedingly rare.

In his latest Twitter Space event, Khan urged his supporters, whom he described as his “social media heroes,” to continue to stay strong in the face of an ongoing crackdown against him and workers from his political party, thousands of whom have faced arrests, been detained or are on the run. Pakistan, Khan said, is being governed by the “law of the jungle.”

Technology has been central to Khan’s emergence as a leading politician. A decade after his PTI party formed in 1996, a group of tech-forward supporters built the party’s website — a first for any political party in Pakistan. At the time, PTI was derisively referred to as the “social media party,” and its leader was dubbed “Facebook Khan,” implying that the party lacked any real influence in a country dominated by the military and by warring political dynasties.

Strategic online campaigning, though, helped Khan’s PTI reach young people eager for change and for relief from the corrupt ruling elite. “Tabdeeli,” or change, trended on social media platforms across Pakistan. Inspired by Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, the PTI’s social media team were brimming with fresh, inventive ideas for how to leverage technology to market Khan. Soon, he was being referred to as Pakistan’s “Kaptaan,” Urdu for “captain,” a pointed reference to his glorious career as a cricket player.

By 2018, Khan’s social media machine was credited with delivering the party’s first victory in national elections. PTI’s digital politics marked a significant shift from the antiquated way in which Pakistan’s biggest parties conducted elections, from both the pre-poll targeting of voters to on-the-day mobilization of supporters.

It’s not only PTI that benefited from its strong online presence. The military strongly supported Khan. In fact, until Khan was removed from office in 2022, it was hard to distinguish between the online networks of the PTI and the Pakistani military. These digital warriors were easily distinguished by their use of the Pakistani flag to show their patriotism and by the manner in which they organized to promote positive news about Pakistan, highlight criticisms of India and counter Pakistanis they characterized as “traitors” because they dared to dissent from the state’s narrative.

Members of Imran Khan’s digital media team became participants in national security meetings with military advisers. Digital strategy was a key component of foreign policy discussions.

In a study published in August 2022, researchers found that the interests of PTI supporters and the Pakistani army converged. “Patterns of Twitter retweets and analysis of Facebook data provide important evidence,” the researchers wrote, “of a de facto coalition between the networks of the military and PTI.” Dissidents, they pointed out, “were largely drowned out by the mainstream political parties and military.”

Now, with the PTI in direct opposition to the Pakistani military, conflict between these institutions and their supporters is playing out actively online. When authorities blocked internet access amid protests earlier this month, it was an admission that it could not contain the outrage of PTI supporters.

After Khan’s arrest on May 9, the Pakistani government blocked access to broadband services and social media platforms for four days. Though the state regularly applies an internet kill switch to ostensibly quell unrest, this was the longest such shutdown in a country of 128 million internet users. The intent was to contain the outrage and perhaps to silence groups critical of the military’s role in Pakistani politics, which it entirely failed to do. 

While criticism of the military’s role in politics is not unprecedented, the scale of the recent wave of anti-military sentiment sparked by Khan’s arrest was extraordinary. And it was generated mostly through social media. After Khan was ousted from office last year, anti-army hashtags began to trend on social media platforms. The growing criticism and anger over the army’s role in removing Khan from office culminated in the violence earlier this month. The Pakistani civilian government, led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, has already declared that protestors who attacked military properties will be tried under army law — draconian legislation that is typically used to try enemies of the state.

The pressure on Khan’s supporters and particularly on members of his political party is taking its toll. In a high-profile departure, Khan’s former human rights minister Shireen Mazari quit the party on May 23. She had been arrested and then arrested again, even after she had been granted bail, an “ordeal,” she said, that “had an impact on my health.”

But silencing PTI is particularly challenging due to its global reach. Regardless of whether coverage of Khan’s public speeches and rallies are censored on mainstream media in Pakistan, PTI posts hourly updates and testimonials from PTI workers with English subtitles across social media platforms, often with the hashtag #ThisWasNotOnTV.

“The whole world is watching, politics is no longer restricted to streets,” said Jibran Ilyas, PTI’s social media lead and a cybersecurity expert based in Chicago. When mobile internet networks were down in Pakistan, Ilyas organized an online campaign to request that residents based in protest areas make their Wi-Fis public to help PTI members upload footage on social media and share updates with the rest of the team.

Though, according to Khan, 10,000 party workers and most of the PTI leadership are under arrest or on the run, PTI’s digital team is still online. Fearing imminent arrest and speaking from an undisclosed location, a PTI worker told me they didn’t sleep for several days after Khan was arrested. “One of our team members was shot in the leg during protests and underwent a six-hour surgery. Even then, they were still posting updates on social media,” said another member of the PTI social media team. On TikTok, in the four days between Khan’s arrest and bail hearing, the PTI’s official account reached over 100 million people and the team put out 164 videos, revealed a recent report.

With its digital support and global reach, can PTI’s online coalition be dismantled? “It is possible PTI can sustain its social media mobilization in the face of censorship, calibrated shutdowns and a general crackdown, which may intensify,” said Asfandyar Mir, an academic who published the 2022 paper noting the existence of  the “de facto coalition” between the army and PTI that led to Khan becoming prime minister. 

As for the military, the country is once again papered with pro-army posters. They have also been successful in coercing some PTI leaders to quit the party and pressuring supporters to issue forced apologies online. The Pakistan defense minister revealed that the government is considering banning the PTI because it has “attacked the very basis of the state.” And there is evidence that the state is shutting down internet services within a five-kilometer radius of Khan’s house in the city of Lahore to make it difficult for him to address his supporters online. “We are in uncharted territory for Pakistani politics and its intersection with digital mobilization,” Mir told me.

The future of Khan and his party is in the balance. But whether he, or his party, withstand the pressure, a key question remains unanswered: The people may be fearful of the state, but are they still respectful of its institutions?

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The post Imran Khan is fighting Pakistan’s army with Twitter appeared first on Coda Story.

Khan, who became prime minister in 2018, was a former superstar cricketer known for his dashing good looks and his complicated love life. He ran for office, though, as a religious conservative, eager to clean up corruption in Pakistan. He now faces corruption charges himself and was arrested for allegedly receiving free land as a bribe from a Pakistani real estate tycoon. 

Ousted from office in April 2022, Khan remained a powerful opposition figure with a large and fervent support base. In November, just months after he had lost a parliamentary vote of no-confidence, Khan was shot while leading a protest rally to the Pakistani capital Islamabad. 

He was in a wheelchair when he was arrested on May 9, 2023 by a paramilitary force on the steps of the Islamabad High Court, where he was appearing on a separate matter. After Khan’s release on bail, he blamed the Pakistani army chief for his arrest, claiming he had a personal vendetta against him. Khan’s supporters turned much of their fury, after his arrest, on the army. In Pakistan’s 75-year history as an independent nation, it is unlikely that the army, a venerated and feared institution, has ever been confronted with such a show of public disgust. One protester was interviewed holding peacocks he had taken from the lavish house of an army officer in the northeastern city of Lahore. Army officers, the protestor said, were living in grand style on the “people’s money.”

As videos of Khan’s arrest went viral, and in the face of growing violence nationwide, the Pakistani government chose to suspend mobile internet across the country for an “indefinite period” and ban access to sites such as Twitter, YouTube and much-used messaging services such as WhatsApp. At the time of writing, while the internet was largely restored, social media services were still being disrupted.

The economic impact of the internet shutdown on an already crumbling economy has been significant. P@sha, a trade association for Pakistan’s information technology industry, said the industry is losing $3 to 4 million every day that the internet is blocked. Pakistan’s central bank reserves currently cover barely a month’s worth of imports, and the crisis is so severe that the ratings agency Moody’s believes Pakistan could default on its debts without a bailout from the International Monetary Fund.

I spoke to Hija Kamran, a digital rights advocate from Pakistan who has been working to defend the rights of Pakistani citizens to access information online for almost 10 years. Hija strongly condemns the current internet shutdown and is concerned about the long-term damage it will inflict on the international investment climate in Pakistan and on the country’s once-exciting tech startups industry.

What has been the impact of the internet shutdown since May 9, when Imran Khan was arrested?

The shutdown has drastically impacted the ability of people to work, to earn money, and in this economy that is very concerning. Fiverr, a global hub for freelancers, has literally just barred Pakistanis from getting any jobs on the website due to the internet shutdown.

The banning of entire websites such as Twitter and YouTube is effectively censorship. We know from past experience that when YouTube is banned in Pakistan, industry is left behind, and it can take years to recover. Countries around us that were starting at the same point have now raced ahead of us. And we are never going to be able to compete because censorship and control over people’s access to the internet hinders tech companies and puts investors around the world off investing in Pakistan’s economy.

But is the internet shutdown necessary right now because of the internet’s potential use to incite violent protests? 

Internet shutdowns, either complete shutdowns or partial shutdowns, do not help Pakistan in any way whatsoever. Right now, the justification for the shutdown is national security, but there is no evidence we can point to anywhere in the world that shows that shutdowns help to restore security. In Pakistan, once the authorities shut down mobile internet services, did the protests stop? People were still killed, and public property was still destroyed. 

Are the authorities afraid of disinformation being spread if they do not shut down the internet?

Disinformation cannot be stopped through internet shutdowns. There have been multiple instances when there has been political unrest and the government resorted to internet shutdowns. What that has done is to promote even more disinformation. The internet is a way for people to access critical information, to fact-check information and to connect with each other. People still talk, still find ways to send WhatsApp messages, but now there is no way to provide credible information to large numbers of people. So shutdowns only promote disinformation and misinformation and, as a result, promote chaos.

How will this shutdown hurt Pakistan’s economy?

We can agree that there is a lot of money in the technology sector globally. Just across the border in India, Google has been making a lot of investments, and Apple has opened its first store. These are the kind of investments that Pakistan, too, could see in the future, but the atmosphere is too uncertain, too volatile.

Our technology startups have been doing very well over the past few years, but continual crackdowns on internet access and internet shutdowns are a major hurdle that prevent startups from raising any funding.

What is the way forward?

Immediately unban all platforms that have been banned and open up access to the internet. And that must be the only way forward. After Imran Khan’s release, you would expect that now the internet would be restored. But again, the internet shutdown was not about his arrest, it was about the protests. The shutdown ends up hurting ordinary people and the economy. Students use mobile data and wireless devices. So when you suspend the internet, you are also depriving children from attending class or accessing educational material. You also deprive people of their livelihoods. These are the hidden costs of internet shutdowns.

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The post Amid chaos, Pakistan shut down the internet to little effect appeared first on Coda Story.

Pakistan has been celebrated internationally for its wide-ranging centralized digital identification system. The National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) issues ID cards which control nearly all aspects of life in the country, including school enrollment, employment, bank accounts and phone plans. But millions, like the Imkaan gymnasts and their families, have fallen through the program’s cracks.

Now the team is fighting back, appealing to the Interior Ministry to grant them citizenship on the basis of birthright. If they win, their case will set a precedent for more than three million stateless people in the country.

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Being hauled into a police van and roughed up or asked for “chai pani” (bribe money) are everyday hazards when you don’t have a CNIC. Not that Ahmad has much cash to part with these days. Like his father, he used to make a living fishing on the open sea but, for the past five years, he has not been able to set foot on a trawler. Given Pakistan’s disputed maritime boundary with neighboring India, he is not allowed to sail without a valid ID. 

Ahmad says that his card — one of millions issued to Pakistani citizens by the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) — was suspended a decade or so ago. According to him, the country’s Intelligence Bureau decided that his CNIC and supporting documents, including a ration card dating back to the 1970s, were all fake. He has been fighting the decision ever since. 

To fully understand Ahmad’s case, it is necessary to grasp how NADRA makes such decisions. Every CNIC blocked by the organization falls into one of two categories. If an individual’s card is suspended because of irregularities in their family tree, they must appear before a regional board and present their documents for reverification. This is referred to  as a “routine” case.

The majority of blocked CNICs, however, are “complex” cases, in which cardholders are suspected of not being Pakistani in the first place. In these instances, district committees of bureaucrats, police and intelligence agents interrogate and investigate the individual in question, then deliver a verdict on their citizenship. According to NADRA, the process should not take more than 40 days, but some people have been waiting for years. 

Like many others in Machhar Colony, which is home to at least half a million people, Ahmad is an of Bengali ancestry. His Urdu is stilted, but when speaking his mother tongue, his words become swift and fluid. He was born in Pakistan, he says, but doesn’t have the paperwork to prove it. The documents he does have — once sufficient for him to be given an identity card — are now considered suspect. Still, he carries them everywhere, creased and dog-eared, but carefully wrapped in plastic.   

“Look, if you tell me my documents are fake, I’ll believe you,” he said plainly. “I’m not educated. I can’t read or write. But, if I was issued fake papers without my knowledge, then how is this my fault?” 

Ethnic Bengalis in Pakistan have long lived in legal limbo, subject to the whims of a paranoid state. Many lack the full set of documents required to apply for a CNIC. Others, like Ahmad, have had their cards retroactively cancelled or told they cannot be renewed. (Regular CNICs expire after five or 10 years.) Part of the reason is prejudice.

“In the authorities’ imagination, there are no Bengali-speaking Pakistanis,” said Hiba Thobani, a lawyer with Imkaan, an organization that represents undocumented communities in Karachi. “If you speak Bengali, you’re immediately deemed Bangladeshi.”    

In 1971, after the eastern wing of Pakistan broke away to become the newly independent nation of Bangladesh, the number of Bengalis remaining in Pakistan had dwindled to between 10,000 and 25,000. But, by the late 1990s, that figure had shot up to 1.5 million. Many migrated for economic reasons. In the 1980s, Pakistan’s economy was faring considerably better than that of Bangladesh. Some Bengali migrants crossed into Pakistan through India, either on foot or by boat. According to a number of testimonies, the only question asked to many of them by Pakistani border guards was whether they were Muslim. 

At the same time, however, the rising number of migrants alarmed Pakistani authorities, which feared that Bengalis could become the second-largest ethnic group in Karachi, upending the already delicate political equilibrium of Pakistan’s most populous city. 

In 1996, Afzal Ali Shigri, then head of a federal paramilitary force called the Frontier Constabulary, conducted a survey of undocumented migrants within the country. The Shigri Report, as it came to be known, warned of the supposed criminal tendencies of “new” immigrants from Bangladesh. To counter that perceived threat, the National Alien Registration Authority (NARA) was formed alongside NADRA in 2000, tasked with registering foreigners in Pakistan. 

NARA was subsumed by NADRA in 2015, but its actions continue to haunt the Bengali community. Under current policy, if an individual was ever issued a NARA card, they are ineligible for a CNIC. Many people who might otherwise have qualified for Pakistani citizenship — especially ethnic Bengalis and Pashtuns — report having been forcibly registered as foreigners under NARA. Ethnic profiling of minority groups continues in other forms, too. 

“Today, when Bengali speakers go to NADRA, it’s often forcibly written on their forms that they were born in Bangladesh, even if they have documents proving otherwise,” said Thobani. In her experience, NADRA’s data operators make little effort to communicate with her clients.

Like Ahmad, many of them speak heavily accented Urdu, and translators are rarely at hand. Often, applicants cannot read or write and can unwittingly sign off on forms containing inaccurate or false information. Bengalis also have an additional obstacle to clear. Once their data acquisition form has been filled at a NADRA center, it must be attested by a senior bureaucrat, usually the deputy commissioner. This decision is made at the discretion of the official in question and can take years.

As a result, bureaucracy — particularly that pertaining to identity documents — can be especially complicated and confusing for Bengalis. One young resident of Machhar Colony described how he and his friends visited NADRA as one big group. It felt momentous and fraught with risk, like crossing a border. Another described taking gifts of fish to the deputy commissioner’s office in the hope of persuading officials to sign off on her papers. 

Capitalizing on this desperation, brokers and middlemen dot the streets of Machhar Colony, promising to ease the pain of the process. Across Pakistan, in fact, there is a large underground market for NADRA data: forged documents and counterfeit family trees, using information leaked, according to one report, by low-level officials at banks that use NADRA-provided verification software.

 In Machhar Colony, according to one person I spoke to, the current rate for getting a CNIC made is between 10,000 and 12,000 rupees ($58-70). In more complicated cases, or if documents are missing, individuals may pay up to 20 times that amount.

Bribery and fraud are not the only ways people lacking the required documents are able to obtain authentic ID cards. For all of NADRA’s  notorious inflexibility, decisions at its service centers are also often made on an ad-hoc basis. 

“Some people manage to get their CNICs made just with their father’s CNIC; others with just their mother’s. Women have been told to get their husbands’ CNICs made first,” even if they are eligible through their parents, said Thobani. “But the problem is, these come under scrutiny later. Applicants say, well you gave us a CNIC under these conditions but NADRA says it must be fraud, because we’d never have done that. It brings their own processes into question.”

It is often forgotten that there is another way of obtaining an identity card in Pakistan — one that doesn’t involve a desperate search for lost documents belonging to long-dead ancestors. Pakistani law grants birthright citizenship, meaning that if you can prove you were born in the country, the legal status of your parents should have no bearing on your right to a Pakistani identity.

The existing system doesn’t make it easy to apply for a CNIC on the basis of birthright, but there is a precedent. In 2017, 20-year-old Saeed Abdi Mehmood — born in Islamabad to Somali refugees — sued NADRA for refusing him an ID card on the grounds that his parents were not Pakistani. Even after winning his case, Mehmood first had to obtain approval from the Interior Ministry; a process so labyrinthine that, according to his lawyer, it appears that he still doesn’t have a CNIC. 

The hurdles aren’t just administrative, they are deeply political. Facilitating birthright citizenship has profound implications not just for the Bengali community but also for the nearly three million people of Afghan origin living in the country, many of whom were born in Pakistan. In fact, Mehmood’s lawyer, Umer Gilani, said that he first intended to fight the suit with an Afghan-origin plaintiff but decided against it, opting for a less politically divisive test case. 

At some point, Thobani believes, the Pakistani state will have to decide the fate of the generations of stateless people within its borders. 

“We often ask this question at hearings. You can’t deport them to Bangladesh because, for one, we don’t have extradition agreements with Bangladesh and, for another, they’re not Bangladeshi citizens, so Bangladesh won’t accept them anyway,” she said. “There’s no answer. This question is ignored.”

When he isn’t following up on his court appeal, Ahmad stays at home. No one in his family has a valid ID card. His sons work as day laborers, one of a dwindling number of jobs that don’t always require you to supply your CNIC. In encounters with the state  — a bored policeman on the street, a clerk in a government office — he is often asked, “When did you come here?” He may not be able to prove it, but he’s never known any other home.

Sohail Ahmad is a pseudonym.

Special Report: Biometric belonging in Pakistan

‘These ID cards have so much power.’ Meet the teen gymnasts fighting for an official identity

Katia Patin

Life in Pakistan without a digital ID

Alizeh Kohari

Pakistan’s biometric ID scheme is stripping citizenship from thousands of people

Alizeh Kohari

The post Marooned: Karachi’s stateless fishermen appeared first on Coda Story.

Sophia-Layla Afsar

Karachi

Sophia-Layla Afsar, 35, has been embroiled in disputes with Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) for most of her adult life. When she first applied for a computerized national identity card (CNIC), as an 18-year-old Pakistani living in Saudi Arabia, it was delayed for years. When she finally got her hands on it, her name was misspelt. Years later, a NADRA official alleged that there were two cards issued under her name and tried to get her to sign an affidavit admitting fraud. 

Afsar is trans. Her frustration with NADRA escalated this summer when she went back to have her gender changed in the system. Pakistani law allows for self-identification, and trans or non-binary people can have ID cards that say “X” instead of “M” or “F.”

“They tried every excuse in the world to turn me away,” said Afsar. “They tried to ask for my medical certificate, which they’re legally not allowed to do. They asked intrusive questions.” 

Afsar had travelled to her local NADRA office with an activist friend who has helped other trans women through the process. “She argued with the supervisor for an hour,” she recalled. “When we were finally allowed to proceed, the data operator had no idea how to process the gender change request. First, they made me tick an option that really didn’t apply to me, then they decided to just leave the gender section entirely blank.”

Wadud Khan

Islamabad

Both of Wadud Khan's grandfathers served in the British Indian Army, prior to Partition in 1947. His father was a member of the special forces unit of the Pakistan Army and fought in two wars against India in 1965 and 1971. All the men in his family have either been in the military or worked as government employees. Khan, who lives in Islamabad, works for Pakistani intelligence and two of his brothers are in the army. Despite this, his ID card was blocked without explanation in 2016. It took him four years to have it reinstated. 

“The most galling part is that there are Afghans in my neighborhood, who were never affected,” said Khan. “One of them even came up to me and asked how my card managed to get blocked, given my family’s service.” 

Khan was asked to present documents proving his family’s nationality to a NADRA panel. Individuals with blocked IDs are required to provide documentary evidence of having lived in Pakistan before 1978, the year the country amended its citizenship laws to account for East Pakistan becoming the new nation-state of Bangladesh. Those documents are not always accepted, though.

“When the verification board convened, I presented everything to them: records of my forefathers’ military service; a land record dating back to 1903. But they weren’t satisfied. They said they would have to independently verify everything. It’s all a lie, this business of presenting records prior to 1978. Whoever pays will get through.”

Muhammad Sher

Islamabad

Muhammad Sher runs a construction business based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he has lived for decades. Last year, before the onset of the pandemic, he received news that his father was ill, back home in Islamabad. He decided to fly back to look after him. He planned to stay for two weeks and to renew his passport, which was nearing expiration. 

But officials told him that his passport could not be renewed, because his CNIC had been suspended. Sher says that he has been shunted from one government office to another, in an ordeal that is still ongoing, trying to get his ID unblocked. Despite residing in Islamabad, officials instructed Sher to take his case to a NADRA branch in Mohmand — a district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province that  borders Afghanistan — where his ancestral village is. His lengthy stay in Pakistan means that his work visa to Saudi Arabia has now expired. He doesn’t know if he will ever be able to recover $30,000 owed to him by clients in Riyadh. 

“I’m still waiting for NADRA to call me for my interview before the verification board in Mohmand,” said Sher. “I have to bring along two village elders, who can vouch for me.” 

Sher’s interview has already been rescheduled twice. “Two months ago, I was summoned for an interview. I traveled all the way from Islamabad, spent thousands of rupees on logistics. We waited all day and were finally told we would have to come back another day. Last week, they summoned me again. The same thing happened. Now I’m waiting for them to call for a third time.”

Mansoora Begum

Machhar Colony, Karachi

Mansoora Begum’s CNIC was abruptly blocked in 2008. Her parents died when she was a young girl and she was raised by a neighbor, who married her off to her son as soon as she was of age. Mansoora was able to procure a card through her husband, but authorities are now refusing to issue her a new one, unless she can provide them with her parents’ citizenship papers. 

Mansoora’s father was born in what is now Bangladesh. All she has is a steamship ticket in his name, for a one-way passage from Chittagong to Karachi, dated 1963. At the time, Chittagong was part of Pakistan. NADRA officials have rejected that documentation as insufficient.  

“After giving me the runaround, they said, ‘You must be a border crosser.’ ‘Fine,’ I told them. ‘Handcuff me, put me away in jail. But my children were born here — give them cards at least. I begged them. I gifted them fish. One official told me I’d get my papers if I let him sleep with my daughter-in-law.”

Mera Khan

Mohmand

Mera Khan, a tribal elder from Mohmand, isn’t sure when his CNIC stopped working. All he knows is that when he went to purchase a new SIM card in 2016, the shopkeeper told him that it was suspended. Then, he went to the bank, where a teller told him the same thing. 

It took him four-and-a-half years and at least 70,000 rupees ($400) in travel expenses to his designated NADRA office to have the card unblocked. He is furious at having to prove that he is Pakistani, given that his ancestors have lived in Mohmand for centuries. His ties to the land predate the nation itself. When I met him, he posed a pertinent question: how would NADRA have dealt with the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, whose family originally hailed from the Indian state of Gujarat. 

“If NADRA asked Jinnah Sahab for papers, what would he have? A passport from 1947? I gave them documents from a hundred years ago.”

Special Report: Biometrics in Pakistan

‘These ID cards have so much power.’ Meet the teen gymnasts fighting for an official identity

Katia Patin

Marooned: Karachi’s stateless fishermen

Alizeh Kohari

Pakistan’s biometric ID scheme is stripping citizenship from thousands of people

Alizeh Kohari

The post Life in Pakistan without a digital ID appeared first on Coda Story.

Saturday, May 21, 2016. Balochistan, Pakistan. Akhtar Mansour, head of the Afghan Taliban, finished his lunch at a roadside cafe, and was en route to the provincial capital of Quetta when his white Toyota Corolla was reduced to a smoldering mass of twisted metal by two Hellfire missiles, fired by a U.S. military Reaper drone.

Mansour was killed in an instant, his death now a footnote to America’s 20-year misadventure in Afghanistan. But he was survived by a shiny piece of mint green plastic, retrieved from the car’s charred remains: an identity card issued by Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) that identified him as Muhammad Wali, a Pakistani citizen. 

For Pakistan’s government, the discovery that the leader of the Afghan Taliban had acquired this supposedly secure and unforgeable form of identification was a source of great embarrassment. In response, a nationwide identity “reverification” campaign was launched to root out foreigners posing as citizens, forcing 180 million people to prove that they were, in fact, Pakistani.

That was the summer when, with the War on Terror as a dramatic backdrop, a woman named Gulzar Bibi received a letter from NADRA informing her that her ID card had been blocked. She didn’t know it then, but the news would turn her life upside down and leave her living in fear for years to come. 

Fifty-three years old and a mother to nine children, with a voice prone to swelling indignantly when launching into a story, Gulzar has lived in an informal settlement in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad for the past 40 years. She spends the monsoon months muttering Quranic verses, praying that the water rising in the garbage-choked sewers nearby will not wash her home away. For the rest of the year, she fights off threats of eviction from Islamabad’s municipal authorities, staring down bulldozers dispatched to raze her house. 

Life is usually difficult for Gulzar, but NADRA’s decision to suspend her computerized national ID card (CNIC) made it impossible to do things most people take for granted. Her cell phone stopped working and she was unable to access welfare programs that provided food rations, state-subsidized medicines and free schooling for her children. Quickly, her eldest daughter realized that her ID card had been suspended as well. In official NADRA parlance, it had been “digitally impounded.” Then, all three of Gulzar’s sons followed, along with a brother in Lahore. Like dominos, the whole family fell.

The letter instructed Gulzar to visit a government office three miles away. A widow who barely makes ends meet by cleaning rich people’s houses, she grapples with a number of long-term health conditions. Years ago, she had been bitten by a pair of dogs. The infection festered, curdling into sepsis and debilitating her for life. “I walk two steps and I’m out of breath,” she told me. Still, she had to go. She could not survive without state support.  

Gulzar’s predicament wasn’t an aberration. In October 2016, NADRA revealed that it had been blocking an average of 225 CNICs every day since September 2013 — throwing, by that count, a grand total of nearly 660,000 lives into chaos. Many have been reinstated but, as of March 2020, more than 150,000 identities remained suspended. Over the past two decades, the CNIC has come to underpin all aspects of Pakistani life. Since it is also an official marker of citizenship, an impounded card renders its holder, to all intents and purposes, stateless. 

Established in 2000, NADRA has been internationally celebrated for designing and maintaining a national database that holds the personal and biometric information of 98% of the Pakistani population. The World Bank has referred to the organization as “the single source of truth for identification data” in the country. The authority — which falls under the jurisdiction of the interior ministry, but operates as an independent corporate body — has since helped to implement identity-related projects in Bangladesh, Kenya, Nigeria, Sri Lanka and South Sudan.

But, as thousands of Pakistanis can attest, NADRA is also a perfect example of the dangers of unchecked digitization, of how centralized databases can be wielded against people who don’t fit the state’s idea of a model citizen — to the particular detriment of women, working-class people and ethnic, sexual and religious minorities — and how such systems can push someone like Gulzar even further into the margins. The information collected by NADRA, staggering in its volume and increasing by the minute, is also maintained in the absence of legal safeguards, meaning that there is no way of knowing how it has been, will be, or could be used in the future.

Despite multiple requests, NADRA did not respond to the questions raised by this report.

Biometrics — deriving from the Greek “bios” (life) and“metron” (measure) — have formed part of identification systems for thousands of years. Evidence exists from Assyrian payment receipts to inky footprints on Chinese divorce records. In South Asia, however, the gathering and collation of this form of personal information has long been associated with ideas of criminality and state control. 

In 1858, near the Hooghly River in West Bengal, India, the English civil servant William James Herschel ordered a local contractor named Rajyadhar Konai to stamp his palmprint on a piece of paper, in order to make an agreement they had reached binding and indisputable. 

“I was only wishing to frighten Konai out of all thought of repudiating his signature hereafter,” Herschel later recalled. Herschel was struck by the unique yet highly reproducible nature of the human handprint and his decision marked its first modern use for official purposes. For administrators of the British Empire such as him, the native population of South Asia tended to blur together. Individual identity was, as one scholar put it, unfixed in the colonial gaze. Herschel believed that the uniqueness of a person’s biometric information could help colonial authorities to keep track of people on an individual level. 

The practice of fingerprinting, writes historian Chandak Sengoopta in his book “Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting was Born in Colonial India,” is a bit like curry powder: “Developed in India but not indigenous, British but not evolved in Britain itself… incorporated into British tradition and then gradually retransmitted to the world at large, blurring the simplistic distinction we often make between home and empire.” By 1897, the entire Bengal police force had taken up fingerprinting. Four years later, the London Metropolitan Police would begin using it in criminal investigations, too.

Milestones in biometric history

More than a century later, Gulzar stood in line at NADRA’s newly inaugurated “Mega Center” in Islamabad’s central business district to reinstate her card. She wasn’t aware of the murky history of identification on the Indian subcontinent, but she still couldn’t help feeling like a criminal. Not only does a blocked CNIC have immense material ramifications, it also takes a psychological toll. You can’t help but wonder, what did you do to provoke the blocking of your ID and what will the future consequences be? 

This anxiety is especially pronounced for Pashtun people like Gulzar. Pashtuns account for the majority of blocked CNICs — 63% in 2017 — despite accounting for just 15% of Pakistan’s population. The Pashtun community has historically lived in southern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan, an area long unsettled by war and displacement and once again making worldwide headlines for those same reasons. It is unclear what your legal rights are if NADRA blocks your card, but many Pakistani Pashtuns fear being categorized as Afghan refugees and forcibly sent across the border, to a country they have never lived in.

At the NADRA office, Gulzar learned why her card had been blocked. NADRA's database is organized as a network of family trees, with a man as the designated head of each registered household. One of her brothers had lost his CNIC and, when a stranger tried to pass it off as his own, the system flagged it and blocked all other linked IDs. 

The officials were far less helpful when it came to fixing the problem. Gulzar would have to provide some sort of evidence that her family had been resident in Pakistan before 1978, the year the country amended its citizenship laws to account for East Pakistan becoming the newly independent Bangladesh. And, no, copies of her long-deceased parents’ papers would not do. Perhaps some sort of land record? Maybe a tenancy agreement from 40-odd years ago?

Gulzar’s heart sank. Although she now lives in Islamabad, she grew up nearly 125 miles away, in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. “My parents, grandparents, uncles are all dead,” she told the person handling her case. “The only land to their name is the graves in which they’re buried.”

The NADRA official shrugged. If Gulzar wanted her CNIC to be reinstated, heading back to Peshawar was the only way.

Gulzar’s worries over her suspended identity were not just for herself. “I’m an old woman,” she shrugged. “I’ll die soon enough.” Her biggest concern was that if she didn’t scramble to sort the matter, her children would suffer. With that in mind, but no plan in place, she boarded a bus and set off in search of documentation that would prove she was from the country she had lived in all her life.

Rather than fading away, the colonial legacy of individual identification came to be seen as increasingly necessary in South Asia after Partition. The fall of the British Empire and the creation of an independent India and the new state of Pakistan in 1947 was a bloody and chaotic process. Nearly 10 million people scrambled across hastily drawn borders in what remains one of the largest migrations in human history. Who was Indian? Who was Pakistani? Who was a refugee, requiring state assistance? Governments on either side wanted to know.

In Pakistan, a citizenship law was enacted in 1951. People born there after that year, those who migrated there before 1952 and others with at least one Pakistani parent were deemed to be citizens. 

Similar questions arose in 1971, when Bangladesh declared its independence. Under then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who came to power on the socialist promise of “roti, kapra aur makaan” — food, clothing and shelter for all — a national registry began collecting data in 1973. In the absence of a “full statistical database of the people,” Bhutto declared, “this country is operating in utter darkness.”

Looking back, you can see the emergence of a fundamental tension. Did Pakistan’s government want to know who people were in order to provide them with welfare entitlements or did it just want to know who they weren’t: an Indian, a Bangladeshi, or a member of some other ostensibly undeserving group? Welfare and surveillance aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive motivations, but in the ensuing decades — especially the 1980s, when millions of refugees fled the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan for the relative safety of Pakistan — the gap between them widened.

Gulzar Bibi was a little girl in 1973, when Pakistan first began issuing photographic IDs. (The very first was issued to Bhutto himself.) She lived in Peshawar, in a house bursting at the seams with grandparents, uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews. The men worked as butchers, while the women stayed home. 

Her family had all moved out decades ago but, when Gulzar stepped off the bus from Islamabad, she went straight to her old house and knocked on the door. When the owners answered, she recited the names of her grandfather, father and uncles. Did they sound familiar and did the new residents remember buying the house from any of them? 

They did. Relieved beyond measure, Gulzar returned to the NADRA office in Islamabad, brandishing a land deed from the mid-1970s. The officials wrinkled their noses. The document needed to be attested by a senior police official from a local station, they said — someone who could vouch for its veracity and for Gulzar herself. So, back to Peshawar she went, another day’s wages lost. No one at the station would sign off on the document for her. “We don’t know you,” they shrugged, “so how can we vouch for you?”

As she stood there, ready to give up, a memory floated into her head: the name of a police officer who used to visit the family shop when she was a little girl. He had retired long ago, staff at the station said, but they knew where he lived. So off she went, knocked on his door and reeled off, once again, the names of her grandfather, father and uncles. Did he remember them?  

The old man squinted at her. 

“Of course I do. You used to throw rocks at me when I’d come to the shop. How you’ve grown!”

If you know how to read it, your CNIC card can reveal a lot about you.

A sequence of 13 numbers serves a similar purpose to a social security number in the U.S. Many of those individual digits signify particular personal details. The first indicates your province of birth; the second, the division within that province, and so on, all the way down to your specific union council, the smallest administrative unit in Pakistan. The last indicates your assigned gender. 

Your photograph appears on the right, in monochrome, and below it, your signature. On the left is an embedded microchip and, on the back, a QR code. Hold it up to the sun and a pair of ghost images will shimmer into view: a tiny silhouette of Pakistan and your own face. The card is printed in layers, each with its own security features — 36 in total, including microtext, holograms, guilloche patterns and rainbow printing. NADRA says that it is among the most secure digital identity cards in the world.

The data on the card is stored in its microchip, along with scans of your irises and all of your fingerprints. Along with the details of 180 million other citizens, this information is collected in a centralized database in Islamabad, which NADRA refers to as the Data Warehouse. According to a 2018 World Bank report, that database is linked to at least 336 public and private services. Three years on, the number is probably higher. 

If you go to a store in Pakistan to purchase a new SIM card for your cell phone, this is likely what will happen: the salesperson will ask you to place your CNIC into a card reader; the reader then authenticates itself to the card, after which the card will verify itself to the device. Following this exchange — think of it as an introductory handshake — the reader will ask for your thumb scan and match it with the print stored on the card. If, for some reason, the system can’t match your credentials, you can’t buy a SIM. Or access your bank account. Or collect social security. Or vote.

Broadly speaking, digital biometric identification is composed of three processes: enrollment, which establishes information about a person; authentication, which confirms their identity; and authorization, which determines what services can be accessed after authentication. Think of it as a series of questions:

1. Enrollment: What do we know about you? 
2. Authentication: How do we know it is you? 
3. Authorization: What are you entitled to? 

Proponents of biometric identification often invoke fraud prevention as a reason for its use, harking back to Herschel’s argument a century-and-a-half ago. There is, however, very little evidence to indicate that such systems do, in fact, curtail fraud in any meaningful way. As regards Pakistan, there is insufficient research to make an argument either way. Still, the idea has a remarkably firm grip on the popular imagination. 

“There’s a way of thinking — it probably has strong colonial origins and isn’t unique to Pakistan, necessarily — that permeates Pakistani society, beginning with the elite,” said Haris Gazdar, a researcher who has worked on government social protection programs. “And that thinking is that people are opportunistic, that they’re liars and thieves, unless you can control them.”

It’s a Hobbesian view with a South Asian twist: left to their own devices, not only do people tend towards brute self-interest — in this part of the world, they are wily and have a peculiar gift for finding workarounds for almost any system or situation. (The North Indian and Pakistani concept of “jugaad,” or makeshift innovation, presents a more positive spin on this perceived trait.) Therefore, “anything automated,” Gazdar said, “anything that reduces the discretion of a person to do mischief, is deemed better.”

Digitization may hold within it dreams of a more streamlined, secure and scrupulous world, but it rarely plays out that way. In fact, it can make everyday life significantly more fraught, especially when systems do not work as intended. Sometimes — or in the case of Pakistan, often — there is no electricity or internet, meaning that card readers cannot work. Chip-based cards like NADRA’s are relatively secure: your biometric data isn’t transferred over a network, so it can’t be intercepted in that manner. They are, however, vulnerable to what are known as “man-in-the-middle” attacks, in which a malign party inserts themselves between two points of a digital conversation, making the legitimate participants believe that they are talking privately and directly to one another, when the exchange is actually being controlled by the attacker. 

In addition, a significant number of people lack easily discernible fingerprints — most notably bricklayers and other manual laborers, but also some hairstylists, chemotherapy patients and older people — which complicates authentication.    

Facial recognition isn’t foolproof either. Sometimes automated systems can’t tell two people apart, especially if they happen to be Brown or Black. Currently, a Pakistani Bengali man in Karachi is embroiled in a bizarre seven-year standoff with NADRA, which deploys facial recognition technology at its service centers. When he applied for a CNIC in 2013, he was photographed. When the card was collected in 2014, another photograph was taken, and the system verified that both images were of the same person. Except, they were not. The case appeared before an ombudsman, but remains unresolved. Since the case is ongoing, the man chose to remain anonymous for this story.

 “The ombudsman was just as perplexed — he asked if this was a joke,” said Hiba Thobani, the man's lawyer. “To the naked eye, it is clear that these are two separate people, but NADRA officials refused to acknowledge that their technology could be flawed.” The man in question still doesn’t have a functioning ID card.

Across the world, proposals for identity schemes often meet with robust opposition. In 2006, the British parliament announced plans that proved so contentious that they were repealed within five years. In India, successive governments have expanded the use of a controversial identity system known as Aadhaar, which contains the biometrics and personal information of over a billion Indians, despite opposition from a broad cross-section of activists, lawyers, researchers and politicians. When NADRA was established in 2000, however, there was no concerted movement against it. 

One reason was that Pakistanis were familiar with the concept of a national ID card. Many had possessed a rudimentary paper version since 1973. Another was that NADRA, as a concept, absorbed people’s hopes and desires for Pakistan, even when they seemed contradictory. Some thought it would make the state more responsive to citizens, while others argued that it would deter criminals and other troublemakers. Some liked the idea of a more powerful state, others thought it would safeguard against state overreach, and everyone brightened at the thought of a more streamlined bureaucracy.

“At most, people said, ‘It’s an extra hassle,’” recalled Haris Gazdar. “Then they said, ‘OK, but at least it’s a one-window hassle.’”

The 2016 assassination of Akhtar Mansour and the discovery that he held a CNIC prompted the first widespread public scrutiny of NADRA’s processes. Farhatullah Babar was a senior member of the Pakistani senate at the time. “We raised this question in parliament: ‘Who issued this ID card and how? Was the state involved in any way?’” he said.

Mansour, an inquiry later revealed, had posed as a Pakistani since 2005. He had purchased property and flitted in and out of the country with ease. Was NADRA complicit or just incompetent? Would there be any real accountability? “We were told that NADRA had dismissed some lower-level functionaries,” Babar said. “The real issue, of course, was who greenlit his credentials, but the matter was not allowed to be pursued.”

Before the Mansour debacle, an underground market for NADRA data — including forged documents and counterfeit family trees — had proliferated across the country, reportedly in collusion with junior clerks at banks that used NADRA-provided verification software to steal people’s identities. It was only after Mansour’s death, Babar said, that there was any reckoning with the possibility of fraud actually being facilitated by NADRA or the use of its systems. 

“The suspicion arose that, if certain state institutions could manipulate the national identity card for their own ends, then private individuals could do it too,” he told me.

That summer, NADRA began sending text messages to the head of every registered household, asking them to confirm the individuals on their family tree and to report any so-called “intruders.” Failure to do so could result in their CNICs being blocked.

It was around that time that Gulzar’s ID card stopped working. If you ask her, though, she’ll invoke a name rather than a year. “It was the era of Chaudhry Nisar,” she said, referring to Pakistan’s interior minister between 2013 and 2017. Nisar is a controversial figure, with an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Bean and a similar proclivity for public gaffes. In those years, the securitization of Pakistan was in full swing, and the sight of barbed wire, body scanners and sandbags on streets had become the new normal.

But, as terrorist violence surged — the December 2014 Taliban massacre in Peshawar of 149 people, including 132 schoolchildren, marking a particularly gruesome apogee — Nisar’s statements became emblematic of the state’s hamfisted approach. At one point he proclaimed that buying too many rotis might indicate a person’s involvement with terrorist activity and that any instances of such behavior should be immediately reported to the police.

Nisar also stated that the reverification exercise that followed Mansour’s killing — the cost of which was passed on to the public, with NADRA charging each participating household 15 Pakistani rupees — would be completed within six months. After that, the national identity database would, once more, be secure. Instead, many Pakistanis found themselves locked out of NADRA’s systems and forced to prove that they belonged in their own country. One woman, whose CNIC was blocked early in the process, threw a party for her whole neighborhood when it was reinstated — a full five years later. Some are still waiting.

It took Gulzar Bibi just four months to get her family’s cards unblocked, but the process left her with a permanent sense of dread. A few months ago, she found her son and daughter, Reza Gul, whispering heatedly in a corner. Unknown to Gulzar, they had gone to the NADRA office to apply for a passport for Reza Gul. When an official quizzed Reza Gul about her mother’s place of birth, she gave the wrong answer, sparking terror that the family’s CNICs had been suspended all over again.

“When they told me this, I swear to Allah, my head whirled — the curses that flew from my mouth!” Gulzar recalled.“I grabbed all my documents, put them in a plastic bag and went straight to that NADRA officer. I threw all our cards at him. I said listen, if you don’t want to issue her a passport, don’t — but how dare you block our cards again? Open them up right now or I’ll break every chair in this office. He was so terrified by all my fuss that he began apologizing. ‘You’re like our mother,’ he pleaded.” Gulzar refused to let up until the man confirmed that their IDs were free and functioning.

Gulzar’s youngest child, Saba Gul, a lanky 10-year-old with tousled hair, is fond of clambering upon the rubble that forms the boundary of the family home and peeping, like a solemn little soldier, over a tattered orange tarpaulin, strung up to replace a wall demolished in the city’s latest eviction attempt. While her mother talked, Saba skipped idly around the yard, squatting among the hens, trailing her fingers along the clothes draped on the line. From time to time, Gulzar looked towards her with an expression peculiar to mothers everywhere: one of stern affection.

Gulzar cannot enroll Saba in a government school. NADRA officials, she said, were refusing to issue the necessary documents because she was born after the death of Gulzar’s husband. The database flagged this tragic and inescapable fact as a system error.

“I didn’t know how to tell them she was already in my stomach when my man died,” Gulzar told me, drawing her shawl tight around her. “This is a conversation strictly for women, you know.”

Like any software, NADRA’s identification system operates within the limitations built into it by human designers. Given the system's patrilineal structure, when a woman marries, her record moves from her father’s tree to her husband’s. When she renews her CNIC, her spouse’s name appears on the card, replacing the father’s. (NADRA has recently announced a relaxation in this policy but, either way, the records of Pakistani men require no such migration.)

Another rule, explained in a 2014 essay by Tariq Malik — head of NADRA at the time and chief architect of the organization's biometric services — requires that the age of a person be less than the duration of their parents’ marriage. That stipulation assumes no children are ever born out of wedlock in Pakistan. Such rules are often presented as fixed attributes of the system, but they stem from choices made by people, based on a sense of what they believe Pakistani society should look like, not what it can and does look like.

Across the world, researchers are discovering the complex and occasionally counterintuitive consequences of database design. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ digital identity system, for instance, is also family-based. Unlike NADRA, however, the first and oldest person to enroll is registered as the head of the household. Accordingly, they then have the right to receive benefits on behalf of the family. 

Emrys Schoemaker, a researcher whose work focuses on digital identities, explained that when families from South Sudan sought refuge in Uganda, women and children fled first. Designated as the official heads of their families, many women felt newly empowered. “They could make different financial decisions. They could invest in education,” Schoemaker said. “But their partners weren’t so happy about not being able to control household resources. Apparently, this was the biggest driver of domestic violence in refugee contexts.”

In the case of NADRA, a number of lawsuits illustrate how the messiness of real life collides with the constraints of an automated database. In 2013, the authority blocked the CNIC of Urooj Tabani, a young woman born in 1993. At the time of her birth, according to publicly available court documents, Tabani’s mother and father had been married for four years. A year later, another man surfaced, claiming to be her mother’s husband, alleging that they had married before then and never divorced. In turn, Tabani’s father filed for an annulment. Years later, in 2011, when Tabani turned 18 and got a CNIC of her own, he complained to NADRA and asked for her to be removed from his family tree. The authority complied, even though Tabani’s parentage was never in dispute. Under the logic of the rules governing NADRA’s database, the marriage had been voided, so Tabani couldn’t even exist.

Tabani sued NADRA in Islamabad High Court in 2019 and won. The court ordered NADRA and her father to each pay her half a million rupees ($2,886) in damages. But, in 2018, 22-year-old Tatheer Fatima had less luck. Fatima was making an opposite demand, petitioning the Supreme Court to remove her father’s name from her identity documents. As he had abandoned her at birth, stopped paying child support when she was a toddler and refused to facilitate her application for a CNIC or a passport, why should her identity be linked to his? Instead, she wanted to be known as “bint-e-Pakistan” — a daughter of Pakistan.

Over the years, NADRA has made accommodations for certain groups that do not fit its traditional notion of family. In 2014, following a three-year court struggle, it relaxed the definition of “parent” for orphans, allowing the head of an orphanage to become a child’s legal guardian. In 2017, with its hand once again forced by legal proceedings, NADRA clarified its policy regarding the “khwaja sirah” (trans or third gender) community. It would allow community leaders, or “gurus,” to appear in place of a parent on a khwaja sirah’s CNIC. A few years earlier, the community had locked horns with the authority, winning the right for its members to self-identify as a third gender on their CNICs and shutting down the authority’s initial recommendation that applicants wishing to be identified in that manner undergo a medical examination to prove that they were biologically intersex.

In Fatima’s case, however, the court took a proscriptively conservative approach. After hearing arguments from NADRA, which protested that it could not skip the father’s section in the database without installing new software, the court dismissed her petition altogether. The removal of her father’s name, it decreed, would be against both shariah and the constitution of Pakistan. In doing so, though, it sidestepped a fundamental question: why is paternity integral to citizenship? 

And what if there is no father at all? In the late 2000s, a British-Pakistani woman moved to Islamabad with her five-year-old daughter. The child had been conceived in the U.K. via a sperm donor: a process not currently legal in Pakistan. When the woman sought to apply for the child’s Form B, NADRA officials were flummoxed. The system could not compute — literally — the existence of an essentially fatherless child. The woman, whose daughter is now 12 years old, had no desire to wade into a legal minefield, so she chose to rely on visa extensions to keep her child in Pakistan. It helped that her relatively affluent status meant that she could rely on private alternatives to government services and that she and her daughter had British citizenship to fall back on. For them, the CNIC problem simply became a vague annoyance to work around, like a missing step in a staircase.

Citizenship is an elusive concept in Pakistan. “So slippery in fact that,” in Urdu, “there is no word that adequately describes it,” says Aysha Siddiqi, a development and postcolonial geographer at Cambridge University. Colloquially, the word “shehri” — closer in meaning to “city-dweller” — is used. In 2012, Siddiqi began studying the aftermath of unprecedented floods in Pakistan. In the previous two years, heavy monsoons had caused the Indus River to burst its banks, inundating a full fifth of the country’s landmass. Nearly 2,000 people died. Another 20 million lost their homes and livelihoods.

This time, Pakistan, long dependent on international aid, had to rely on its own social protection mechanisms. Though the U.N. referred to the floods as the greatest humanitarian crisis in recent history, the global response was muted.

NADRA stepped in to help by using its biometric database to identify and assist those affected. The authority set up registration sites across flooded areas and used vans fitted with equipment to retake the fingerprints of individuals whose ID cards had been washed away. Some 700,000 CNICs were reissued, and 77 billion Pakistani rupees ($452 million) was distributed to nearly three million families. Many had never opened a bank account, so NADRA issued them with ATM cards to withdraw cash from temporary ones, opened by the government on their behalf.

Siddiqi describes what she saw as an example of “disaster citizenship.” A strengthening of the social contract between state and citizens in the aftermath of a crisis. “This was really the first time in most people’s living memory that they got a particular entitlement from the state, simply for being citizens — not because they had access to patronage or anything like that,” she told me. “The state reached out to them on this very universal platform in a very bureaucratized manner. The people I was spending time with wanted to be seen by the state and, in some ways, the NADRA card was giving them that.”

Slowly, and at least partly through schemes implemented by NADRA, citizenship was solidifying from an abstract notion to one with material benefits. According to Siddiqui, “to discount the borderline revolutionary potential of that would be disingenuous.” When an earthquake killed at least 800 people in southern Balochistan in 2013, NADRA officials served as first responders, simply because they had offices and vehicles in the region. For some Pakistanis, living in districts that had no other trace of the government — not even a post office or police station — their first encounter with the state, other than perhaps the military, was through NADRA.

The shimmering promise of NADRA as a great equalizer can be seen in a recent promotional video. A woman walks into a service center and sits across from a NADRA official. She looks into a lens, then presses her fingertips, one by one, on a biometric device. Walking away, with registration form in hand, her chin lifts slightly and she smiles. “I’ll have my own national identity card,” sings a voice in the background, “I’ll take every step with pride.” Other women appear on the screen: mothers, wives and widows, trans women, women in wheelchairs. “This card will be my honor.” They visit banks and hospitals, enroll in college, line up to vote and flash inky thumbs, beaming all the while. “We must fulfill our national responsibility and acquire a national identity card.”

The researcher Haris Gazdar understands that people often do not want to live “off the grid,” separated from the safeguards and benefits of citizenship. “Most people actually want to be on the grid, they want stuff from the grid. They would like to vote, they would like their children to go to proper schools, they would like to have bank accounts and phones and all of those things. And everything required to be on the grid — such as, say, a national identity card — they want access to that, too.”

Gazdar thinks of NADRA as an inevitability, something that the market would have created, had the state not. His concern is how it can become more inclusive and closer to the benevolent technological utopia of the promotional video. “Now that we have an instrument that is so important and powerful, how are we actually using it? And why are so many people out of it?” he said. “How is it that a lot of people have disputed claims? Why are we making life so difficult for people when errors occur?”

Most horror stories about ordinary people locked out of NADRA are part of an older, global narrative of bureaucracy as a brick wall. The difference is that, in most other encounters with the state, individuals do, at least, have some recourse. “The police have the power to arrest me and I have the right to contest that,” Gazdar said. “The procedures are laid out, even if they are frequently violated. With NADRA, the problem is that it’s grown so quickly and expanded into so many areas, because of the way that we use technology, that this conversation was never had.”

When digital rights advocate Nighat Dad moves through Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city, she always notices the CCTV cameras mounted above the streets, recording its inhabitants. “It’s pretty jarring, actually,” she said. “They flash abruptly when capturing an image. If you’re driving, it can be a safety hazard. People often complain about that flash, but I’ve never heard anyone ask exactly what is being recorded, where the data is being processed, who has access to it, when it will be destroyed. Those questions come to my mind, but an ordinary person won’t think that way. They’ve always been told that this system has been put in place to make us safer.”

The CCTV cameras — numbering at least 10,000 in 2,000 locations across the city, although nearly half reportedly do not work — are part of the Lahore Safe City project, one of several such initiatives linked to NADRA’s database being rolled out in urban areas across Pakistan. Most have been installed in partnership with the Chinese technology firm Huawei. (According to research from the Washington D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, Pakistan has signed more agreements of this nature with Huawei than any other country in the world.) The Safe City project first attracted scrutiny in 2019 when intimate images of couples in cars, captured by CCTV cameras, were leaked on social media, with license plates clearly visible.

Earlier this year, a California-based firm subcontracted to develop technology for the Lahore project sued Huawei in U.S federal court, alleging that Huawei had pressured it to build in a “back door” that would grant access to sensitive Pakistani data, including national identity records. Huawei denies the allegations.

In 2012, a Turkish hacker claimed to have accessed NADRA’s servers by creating backdoors to them. In 2015, intelligence reports warned of data leaks resulting from the government’s reliance on third-party technology, much of which is sourced from companies based in countries including France, Germany, Sweden and China. Last winter, the names, addresses and CNIC numbers of over 100 million Pakistanis were available for sale online, but both the interior ministry and NADRA denied responsibility for the breach.

Explaining the implications of compromised data to ordinary people is frequently challenging for digital activists. The threats often seem abstract and improbable. But, in Pakistan, the dangers are real and concrete. In late 2020, a 15-year-old girl went with her mother to a government welfare office to collect relief payments. An employee used the phone number on her records to harass her, then turned up at her house and raped her. A few months later, in a separate incident, a NADRA employee was arrested for harassing a woman over the telephone. He had retrieved her number from the NADRA database.

In the summer of 2021, as the Taliban reclaimed power in neighboring Afghanistan, it seized control of everything left behind by departing American forces, including military biometric devices and U.S.-funded Afghan government databases. Anxieties in Pakistan took a new turn. What if Pakistani data falls into the wrong hands at some point in the future?

“If the U.S. didn’t think about how that technology could be weaponized against Afghan citizens, do you really think we’ve thought about that?” asked Dad. When new technologies are introduced, she argues, they are always presented in a positive light, as crucial to national security and economic development. “But we’re never permitted to discuss its possible side effects. If you don’t give space to that discourse, then you’ll never consider the possibility of misuse. And you won’t have prepared for it.”  

Dad then paused. Over the years, so much ground has been lost to technological evangelists that the comparatively small number of people with contrary views have been forced to reconfigure their positions. “Earlier, we were very outspoken in our opposition to a biometric database,” she said. “But now, so deep into the digital era, you sort of surrender yourself to its inevitability. We’ve come to the point where we’re like, ‘OK, biometric data is fine — but where’s the protection mechanism?’”

She is quick to point out that Pakistan still has no data protection law. A bill is currently under review. In its first iteration, government bodies were exempt from the stipulations contained within it. “Without a law, there’s just no way of holding anyone accountable,” said Dad. “We currently have no legal recourse, no way of holding to account Safe City administrators, telecoms companies, internet service providers — any public or private body that is handling our data, really.”

In 2016, Pakistan passed the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, a controversial law that ostensibly aimed to counter online harassment and terrorist activity. Instead, it has severely curtailed free speech and privacy. Journalists and bloggers critical of the state are frequently charged under the law and state agencies are authorized to collect and record their data in real time, without a prior warrant.

“We’re the only country in the world to pass such a law and, yet, we have no data protection measures in place,” said former senator Farhatullah Babar. “The result is that state agencies can play havoc with your data with absolute impunity.”

One example is a court order from 2017. While hearing a case on the proliferation of allegedly blasphemous content on the internet, a High Court judge ordered NADRA to maintain a database of individuals belonging to the Ahmadi community, a persecuted minority sect constitutionally barred from identifying as Muslim in Pakistan. The explicit purpose of the database was to ensure that Ahmadis do not hold public office. The court also ordered NADRA to provide details of people who officially changed their faith from Islam to other religions — a potentially life-threatening taboo in Pakistan — even though the country has no formal laws against apostasy. 

Earlier this year, an anti-terrorism court ordered the authority to block the CNICs of the Pashtun civil rights leaders Manzoor Pashteen and Mohsin Dawar, the latter a sitting member of parliament. Pashteen and Dawar, who were charged with inciting sedition while addressing a rally in Karachi, were declared to have absconded when they failed to appear before the court in February. In response, a judge ordered that their ID cards be blocked. The order alarmed Dad, Babar and other observers. Unlike other instances of suspended CNICs, which could be argued away as technical or administrative errors, here was a clear example of the system being used against specific individuals in a pointedly punitive manner.

For the past two years, Hafiz Hamdullah, a former senator from Balochistan, has been contesting his blocked CNIC in court. NADRA said it digitally impounded Hamdullah’s card because intelligence agencies claimed that he was of Afghan origin, despite a long trail of Pakistani documents marking the milestones of his life. The Islamabad High Court noted that there was no proof he had not been born in the country. That alone, it said, made him a citizen under Pakistani law. In a detailed 29-page verdict, the court ruled that NADRA does not have the authority to decide citizenship. Its function is solely to furnish identity documents to eligible individuals. The process deployed by NADRA over the past decade — blocking CNICs while reviewing cases, leaving people in limbo for years — the document unambiguously stated, was illegal.

And yet, Dawar’s CNIC remains blocked, and the Hamdullah ruling can still be overturned by the Supreme Court. For the time being, at least, the system remains fraught with baffling contradictions.

There is a distinct sense of deja vu about Pakistan in 2021. Tariq Malik, the man who vastly expanded NADRA’s powers and influence as its chairperson between 2012 and 2014, is back in charge of the authority after a stint as chief technical advisor to the United Nations Development Program. One of his first moves upon reinstatement was to fire 47 NADRA employees for facilitating fraudulent ID cards. As of August 2021, amid allegations of four million fraudulent IDs circulating in the country, a new identity reverification campaign is now underway, with NADRA urging people to check for intruders lurking in their family records.

As the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan prompts an exodus of refugees, an old debate is also being reignited: what are Pakistan’s responsibilities towards its Afghan-origin communities, many of whom have known no other home? There are plans for a new ID for foreign residents in Pakistan, which will allow them to open bank accounts and do business. At the same time, though, Pakistan has drastically impeded people’s ability to move back and forth across the Afghan border.

Gulzar Bibi’s son-in-law is Afghan, a child of refugees. He makes his living driving a taxi in Islamabad. One year into the marriage, he and his family visited relatives in Afghanistan. His wife, Reza Gul, went too. “I warned them not to take her,” Gulzar said. “I only agreed to the marriage on the condition that she stays here, near me.”

The Durand Line — the boundary between Pakistan and Afghanistan — has historically been extremely porous, allowing Pashtun families, traders and fighters to freely move across it. But during their visit, in June 2016, Pakistan introduced a new policy: all Afghans wanting to cross into Pakistan would now require a valid passport and visa. Reza Gul wasn’t Afghan, but she had no way of proving she was Pakistani either: a legal minor, she didn’t have any official documentation, let alone a Pakistan identity card. 

“She got stuck. She’d cry there. I’d cry here. I cried so much,” Gulzar recalled.

Eventually, the couple made it back to Pakistan. The first thing Gulzar did was march her daughter over to a NADRA office to sort out her documents.

On an overcast Sunday afternoon, Gulzar Bibi jiggled her foot on her bed, still seething. It had taken her all afternoon to recount her multiple run-ins with NADRA’s labyrinthine bureaucracy. In the yard, a rooster crowed repeatedly, as if in indignant agreement with her. 

“At one point, I was ready to set fire to myself in front of the NADRA office,” she said. “This card, Allah, they treat it like some sort of national treasure, like gold.” She leaned forward. “Tell me, will we need an ID card to enter heaven now?”

Special Report: Biometric belonging in Pakistan

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Katia Patin

Marooned: Karachi’s stateless fishermen

Alizeh Kohari

Life in Pakistan without a digital ID

Alizeh Kohari

The post Pakistan’s biometric ID scheme is stripping citizenship from thousands of people appeared first on Coda Story.

“With clapping hands and cheering crowds, with beating hearts and smiling faces, international cricket is back in Pakistan,” said a man, dressed in a cricket jersey, to camera. The three-minute video was uploaded to the Facebook account of a news organization called CJ Post, which has 316,000 followers, and was posted hundreds of times on Twitter.

There was only one problem: CJ Post is not a real news outlet and the presenter is not a journalist, but an actor.

“Andrew Hamilton,'' who has appeared in multiple videos shared by CJ Post, is a fictional newsreader played by a Cuban-born American man hired on the freelance platform, Fiverr.com. 

Hamilton, whose profile gives only his first name, Luis, has a 5/5 rating on Fiverr, based on nearly 2,000 reviews. He offers script-reading and voiceover services for prices starting at around $25 per appearance and has also appeared as a news presenter in a number of U.S. TV shows, including “NCIS New Orleans” and “From Dusk Till Dawn.”

The video was exposed as being part of a soft power disinformation campaign on June 3, after Facebook removed a network of 40 profiles, 25 pages, six groups and 28 Instagram accounts for violating its policy on “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Some of the pages — including Pakistan Media Check, Islamabad Press and Asal Baat (Real Talk) — posed as international news organizations and often featured professional script readers acting as news presenters. The majority of pages, which were followed by 800,000 Facebook accounts, were created in 2020 but some had operated since 2011.

“This network appeared to be active across multiple internet services and posted about news and current events in the region, including the ongoing global pandemic; criticism of India and its treatment of Muslims, particularly in the Kashmir region; and also supportive commentary about Pakistan,” read a Facebook report on the network.

The network of pages has been investigated by the U.S.-based social media analysis firm Graphika in a detailed new report. The research reveals that the purported news media outlets published video and text stories about Pakistani politics and current affairs in English, Arabic, Pashto, Urdu, German, French and Russian. 

According to Graphika, many of the stories shared by at least half the fake media outlets were uploaded by employees of an Islamabad-based digital marketing firm, Alpha Pro. The company hired actors and voice-over artists to push a positive image of Pakistan, highlight criticism of India and promote the government-backed China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) investment project. 

According to Jack Stubbs, director of investigations at Graphika, such practices help PR companies to further their client agendas while preserving some degree of anonymity. “Outsourcing the work is often easier and safer for political actors who want to remain one step removed from the hands-on-keyboard operation.” 

“All this shows how political groups can trade on the values of a free press to covertly advance their own interests,” he added.

AlphaPro’s clients include the Pakistan military’s media wing, Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), state-owned Chinese infrastructure firms, NGOs, universities and other government agencies. Following the report’s release, the PR firm removed ISPR from its list of client roster.

Graphika also identified at least four former and current AlphaPro employees who worked for ISPR before joining the company. 

According to local media reports, AlphaPro has described allegations of running an influence campaign “baseless.” 

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one of the freelancers hired from Fiverr for a news outlet run by AlphaPro told me that she was “not aware” that her face had been used in a propaganda exercise. 

Responding to a request for comment for this story, a Fiverr spokesperson provided an email statement that read, “It is against our terms of service and community standards to allow anyone to create and/or promote intentionally misleading information or propaganda that is developed and presented as authentic news.”

The findings about the fake news network come in a turbulent period for the media in Pakistan. Earlier this month, freelance journalist Asad Ali Toor was assaulted in his home in Islamabad by unidentified assailants. Toor is known for his criticism of Pakistan’s powerful military. In a related incident, journalist Hamid Mir was taken off air by the privately owned satellite channel Geo News after he made critical remarks about the military at a press freedom protest over Toor’s assault. 

Digital rights activists believe the soft power campaign is only the latest example pointing to a worsening climate for journalists in Pakistan. “This influence operation is a tactic that seeks to fulfil the government's desire of ‘positive coverage’ when the role of the press is to hold the state accountable,” said Usama Khilji, director of Bolo Bhi, a Pakistan based digital rights organization. 

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The CWIJ, an international nonprofit, has been documenting cases of online harassment against Pakistani journalists — particularly women — since 2017.

The letter focused on a spokesperson and special assistant to Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan. It stated that “Mr. Shahbaz Gill routinely attacks journalists and thus starts a trend of online trolling against them. CFWIJ condemns this intimidation and bullying of female journalists from a government official. We urge the government authorities to step in and hold Mr. Shahbaz accountable for his misconduct.” 

“Journalists who are critical of the government are increasingly faced with vicious trolling peppered with hacking attempts in the name of ‘fact-checking’,” said Khalid, during a telephone conversation. 

Khalid said she found herself facing a storm of online abuse within a few hours of posting the open letter, and that multiple attempts were made to hack her Twitter account.

In Pakistan, government officials such as Gill often use their social media presence to cast reporters critical of the ruling party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, as peddlers of fake news. In one instance, Gill, shared on Twitter a screenshot of Benazir Shah’s coverage of the government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis for the satellite news channel Geo News, accusing her of having an agenda against Khan’s administration. 

“Such lifafay (bribe takers) are the real enemies of the country. We should boycott her,” read one reply. 

“I have never experienced this severity of trolling and online abuse in my career. Such relentless coordinated attacks to denigrate and discredit my work on social media from senior government officials are aimed at stopping you from reporting and asking questions,” Shah said, via WhatsApp. “These accusations of spreading ‘fake news’ take a mental toll on you. You start doubting yourself and as a reporter it is very challenging if government officials start refusing requests for comment due to such labeling,” she added. 

Discrediting legitimate media reports as “fake news” has become a key tactic of Pakistan’s ruling party. Soon after coming to power in 2018, Khan’s administration launched the @FakeNews_Buster Twitter account, in order to “counter fake and negative” reports. @FakeNews_Buster, which now has over 63,000 followers, features posts in Urdu and English and is managed by Pakistan’s Ministry of Information & Broadcasting. 

In its three years of existence, it has aggressively targeted stories by some of Pakistan’s most popular broadcasters and publishers — including Dawn, Jang and Geo News — and published government denials of their content. 

Rebuttals posted on the account often show a bold red “fake news” label stamped on screenshots of reports or tweets, with little explanation why. 

“Disseminating #FakeNews is not only unethical and illegal but it is also a disservice to the nation,” reads a post by the account, referring to a Dawn report about a minister’s speech asking people to “turn their black money into white” by investing in the construction industry. The account did not expand on what it deemed “fake news” in the report, which was based on a direct quote from the minister’s press conference.

When asked to comment for this story, the information ministry declined to specify the criteria it uses to establish whether or not a given story is deemed to be “fake news.” 

Since 2018, the media has come under more comprehensive censorship in Pakistan. In 2020, the country was ranked 145th on the World Press Freedom Index and a number of journalists faced arrest over social media posts viewed to be critical of state institutions. State regulators have also fined and penalized media organizations for printing or airing “objectionable” content. This heavy hand has extended to tech platforms, with authorities banning apps, including Tinder and TikTok.

In April, the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority advised satellite news channels to exercise caution while reporting on cabinet decisions and, in order to avoid the airing of “fake or speculative news,” to rely only on briefings by cabinet members.

Government-run fact-checking accounts are not new – similar systems exist elsewhere. As in India and Turkey, in Pakistan, the state is also being aided in its policing of the media by a vast network of volunteer supporters. Their tweets are regularly shared and promoted by cabinet ministers and PTI officials. The account holders are generally young, educated professionals, most of whom have returned to Pakistan from abroad. 

Musa Virk, who relocated to Islamabad after graduating in information systems from Victoria University in Melbourne last year, is among the Twitter users most actively mimicking and amplifying government positions. In April, Khan invited Virk and a number of other social media supporters to discuss the PTI’s’s economic policies. 

“I verify news from publicly available data from government or other official websites. Sometimes I contact the relevant ministers or officials, if I don't have the information myself,” Virk told me, via WhatsApp. 

He added that he usually concentrates his efforts on journalists covering finance and economy. In a recently published blog post, Virk accused Khurram Hussain, business editor for the national newspaper Dawn, of twisting facts in his columns to “disparage the prime minister and his economic team.” 

The post was circulated by the PTI on Twitter, accusing Hussain of writing “factually incorrect” articles. Replies urged the government to take legal action against Hussain for peddling fake news. 

“The ruling party is encouraging call out culture,” said Karachi-based Hussain, by telephone. “It has become a norm on Twitter. Tweets from official accounts discrediting a journalist’s profile lead to relentless mentions and heckling by their volunteer base,” he explained. 

Government officials say volunteers who are experts in specialized fields like the economy or public health can be effective fact-checkers. “Journalists are usually not area experts and their questioning is more on political turf, focused on spice and getting headlines. These volunteers are area experts so their questioning is more technical and specific, which brings more to the table than just political rhetoric,” said Arslan Khalid, the prime minister’s spokesperson on digital media.

Public condemnation by the PTI is not limited to domestic media. In November last year, the party’s official Twitter account helped pushed the hashtag “#ShameonBBC”. The British national broadcaster was targeted for publishing a “non-factual” story about opposition parties forming an alliance to oppose Khan and his government. 

Using a short video, a PTI Twitter post refuted the story and described BBC journalist Mohammad Ilyas Khan as “biased” and “anti-government.” The tweets prompted numerous online attacks on him. 

Last year, Pakistan approved a set of new guidelines for governing social media. According to the rules, “online content that contains any fake or false information that threatens public order, public health and public safety” will be removed.

In an online ecosystem rife with conflict and skepticism, media experts warn that every baseless accusation of fake news erodes faith in the press and pushes Pakistan closer to becoming a place where only the state’s narratives count.

Samuel Maier, a student-attorney at the George Washington University Law School, who recently authored a document outlining a code of ethics for public officials in Pakistan, said government officials should refrain from personally fact-checking online content. “Regardless of whether or not the accusation is true, the ability of an individual official to begin dismantling the legitimacy of the free press breaks down one of the strongest weapons that the public has against corruption and abuse of power,” he said.

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Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan approved the new law on November 26. The measure was included in a draft of new legislation in response to public outcry over sexual assaults following the brutal gang-rape of a woman in front of her children on a motorway near Lahore on September 9.

Pakistan has seen a rise in the number of rape cases reported across the country in recent years. According to government statistics, just 5% of the 5,000 rape cases reported annually to police result in conviction. Rights groups say most rapes are never reported in the first place.

Chemical castration — not to be confused with surgical castration, in which the testes are removed — is a procedure by which testosterone levels are reduced by hormone injections, with the aim of reducing sex drive. The treatment can last three to five years in duration.

Why it matters: 

Pakistani human rights advocates and feminists say forced chemical castration is a misguided and inhumane approach to tackling the pervasive issue of rape.

Harris Khalique, secretary-general of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, told me in an email that “chemical castration as a punishment for rape is neither a solution nor a means of redressal for what is undeniably a heinous crime. It is not the gravity but certainty of punishment that deters crime.”

Tooba Syed, media secretary of the Women’s Democratic Front, a Pakistani socialist feminist organization, characterized the approval of chemical castration as a means for the government to avoid dealing with the root causes of its sexual assault crisis.

“Sexual violence cannot be eliminated from the society by stricter punitive punishments,” wrote Syed in an email. “It’s an issue of not recognizing women’s bodily autonomy, their right to say no and their agency. Chemical castration does not address the social norms and practices which allows patriarchal and sexual violence to prevail in a society.”

The big picture: 

Pakistan is one of a small but growing number of countries to authorize chemical castration as a punishment for sex offenders, including Indonesia, South Korea, Ukraine, the Czech Republic. Similar laws have also been passed in a handful of U.S. states. In 2019, laws authorizing forcible chemical castration for child sex offenders were passed in Alabama and Ukraine; Indonesia’s equivalent law was enacted in 2016. Pakistan’s bill goes further than most in approving the procedure for sex offenses which do not involve children.

Health experts say using this procedure as a punishment in a criminal justice context is an unscientific approach to what can be a useful medical tool.

Fred Berlin, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University and a leading expert on the treatment of sexual disorders, told me the treatment is effective when performed in the context of a psychiatric evaluation and with the patient’s consent. He said in a phone interview that he often receives requests for such treatments from people with pedophilic and other urges, who cannot afford or access the costly procedure.

But “to use a medical intervention in a punitive way, particularly when it doesn't even make sense medically, is not the way in which I think things ought to be done,” said Berlin.

Berlin also cast doubt on its effectiveness in preventing repeat offenses. “There are some people who rape because they're responding to abnormal repeated sexual cravings to engage in a course of action; that is a subgroup of rapists for whom this might be useful. There are other people, however, who rape because they lack a sense of conscience and moral responsibility. There's no medication or surgery that's going to instill those values,” he said.

The post Why Imran Khan’s chemical castration law won’t solve Pakistan’s sexual violence crisis appeared first on Coda Story.

“Being Ismaili is a huge influence on my social life. It is difficult to find a girl outside my community who is willing to date. This is why I joined Tinder. I feel apps don’t discriminate,” he says.

Tinder — which was downloaded more than 440,000 times in Pakistan in the past year — has long been popular among young people, who make up 63% of the country’s population. 

But, on September 1, the government announced an abrupt ban on all dating applications, blaming them for the spread of “immoral content.” Authorities regularly police online spaces in keeping with conservative and religious concerns. As the world’s second largest Muslim-majority country, extra-marital relationships and homosexuality are illegal in Pakistan.

The move, which also includes other applications such as Grindr, Tagged and SayHi, comes at a time of renewed government efforts to align tech platforms with local laws, particularly over content deemed damaging to the country’s moral fabric.

The crackdown on dating apps was quickly followed by the banning of another leading social media platform. On October 9, the Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA) blocked access to TikTok, which had 20 million active monthly users in the country. The ban came after a “final warning,” issued in July, ordering it to filter any obscene content. 

The national communications regulator said that ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, was given “considerable time” to respond to its concerns, but had failed to “fully comply.”

ByteDance responded that it was committed to following the law and in regular contact with Pakistani regulators. “We are hopeful to reach a conclusion that helps us serve the country’s vibrant and creative community online,” it said in a statement.

The policing of digital spaces in Pakistan is now being tightened. According to guidelines issued last week, the PTA will be able to restrict social media content for a number of reasons, including insults to Islam, and content that violates security, public order, decency and morality.

Social media companies, including Facebook and Twitter will be obliged to publish community guidelines warning users not to post content in breach of a number of conditions relating to copyright, blasphemy, defamation or to share material that offends the “religious, cultural and ethical sensitivities of Pakistan.”

Platforms will have 24 hours to comply with government requests for the removal of content, except in cases of emergency, where the PTA can demand removal within six hours.

Both sets of rules follow previous measures to regulate the online sphere. In February this year, Pakistan approved regulations to levy penalties against social media platforms that fail to comply with government requests to remove content it deems unlawful. These include hefty fines, potential bans and disruption to services in the country. 

Critics say that Pakistan is using such laws to curb free expression and stifle criticism of the government and military. “No other country has announced such a sweeping set of rules,” wrote the Asia Internet Coalition, an industry association that represents leading global digital companies on matters of public policy, in a letter to Prime Minister Imran Khan.

Following the introduction of the February guidelines, companies including Facebook, Twitter and Google responded, warning that the Citizens Protection (Against Online Harm) Rules 2020 would make it “extremely difficult” for them to continue operations in the country.

The backlash from tech companies and rights groups prompted the government to reconsider the rules and initiate a “broad-based” consultation on content regulation. After separate consultation meetings with media and tech firms — which were boycotted by 100 human rights organizations and individuals who want the rules revoked — the government is expected to release revised guidelines later this month.

In anticipation of the revised legislation, the Asia Internet Coalition earlier this month wrote to Khan, expressing its reservations. “The lack of transparency on the consultation, an abbreviated consultation process, and strict local office requirements for online platforms are very concerning,” AIC managing director Jeff Paine stated. “The consultation process therefore appears to have lost credibility.” 

The rules announced in February also require any company with more than half a million users in Pakistan to establish a registered office in Pakistan, with a physical address, preferably in the capital city of Islamabad. They will also be required to appoint representatives based in Pakistan to engage with the government.

Social media companies are also required to record and store their data on servers in Pakistan and provide details, including “subscriber information, traffic data, content data and any other information or data” in “decrypted, readable and comprehensible format or plain version” as and when required by the authorities.

Similar measures came into force in Turkey earlier this year, requiring social media platforms with more than one million daily users to open offices in the country. The legislation also includes penalties for companies that fail to take down contentious posts on request from relevant authorities.

“Poorly designed rules risk stifling free expression, slowing innovation and making people less safe,” Andy O’Connell, director for content policy at Facebook, wrote to me in an email.

For people like Karim, the government’s policing of online spaces creates additional hazards. 

“When everyone is going digital, we are going offline in Pakistan. There were already few options for minorities like us to connect safely with people. With such bans and restrictions, things will only become harder,” he told me.

Blocking and banning

In recent months, the Pakistan Telecom Authority has made repeated requests that YouTube immediately block content deemed “vulgar, indecent, immoral” or containing “nudity and hate speech” to viewers in the country. The renewed push to limit the influence of social media is backed by Pakistan’s top court. In July, while hearing a case in which a man was accused of writing blasphemous content, a Supreme Court judge hinted at a ban on the Google-owned video-sharing site.

Pakistan only ended a previous three-year ban of YouTube in 2016, when the platform launched a local version that allows the government to demand removal of material it considers offensive.

While companies such as Facebook and Amazon have independently contributed to the government’s consultation on content management, Pakistan’s authorities have expressed their frustration over repeated fruitless attempts to engage with Twitter.

“Senior management of Twitter has been approached multiple times through emails/letters on different issues like blasphemy, defamation, and fake content. Meetings were also proposed but they did not attend or respond at all,” PTA chairman Amir Azeem Bajwa wrote in an emailed response to questions for this article.

Despite a relatively small user base of just over three million users in Pakistan, the government’s standoff with Twitter stems from the PTA’s desire to force the platform to engage more efficiently with official takedown requests, including alleged political and religious disinformation.

According to Twitter’s latest transparency report, the company recorded a 35.2% compliance rate to more than 200 requests from Pakistan authorities to remove content or suspend accounts in the second half of 2019. 

Regulators believe Twitter should moderate its content in line with Pakistan’s laws. “Twitter moderates most content in accordance with its own community standards and less based on Pakistan’s local laws,” wrote Bajwa. 

The PTA cites blasphemous content as a particular problem on the platform, highlighting both the offence it causes and the potential implications for law and order. It also believes that Twitter has acted inappropriately on matters of special concern to Pakistan, such as the disputed region of Kashmir. 

“There are several important and sensitive issues such as illegal blocking of accounts highlighting atrocities of Indian forces in occupied Jammu and Kashmir,” Bajwa added.

In September last year, the regulator reported 333 accounts to Twitter that had been “suspended for posting about Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir”. The PTA claims the only 67 of them were restored by Twitter. The issue was repeatedly brought to the attention of Twitter’s management but “no action taken in this regard”, according to Bajwa.

In an email, a Twitter spokesperson declined to comment on questions about the company’s dealings with authorities in Pakistan. 

Examples of the type of content reported to Twitter, provided for this story by the PTA, show that posts considered to be Islamophobic are the most frequently flagged.

The government is also increasingly pointing out defamatory content to Twitter for removal. Of 2,157 tweets reported, only 641 have been removed by Twitter.

By way of example, the PTA highlighted two tweets about Prime Minister Imran Khan’s wife:

Following the recent ban of TikTok and multiple dating apps, the official frustration with Twitter has prompted fears of a potential shutdown of the service in the country.

In May, Twitter and its video-streaming service Periscope were temporarily inaccessible in Pakistan. In a subsequent analysis of network data by the internet freedom monitor Netblocks and Pakistan’s Digital Rights Foundation, the disruption was found to be localized to Pakistan. 

Twitter says it has yet to identify the cause. 

When asked for an explanation on the matter, the regulatory authority told me it had “not issued any instruction regarding blocking of Twitter in the recent past.”

But it did not deny the possibility of an outright ban if Twitter does not fall in line. 

According to PTA chairman Amir Azeem Bajwa, the regulator “has been given a mandate to block/remove unlawful online content which will be fulfilled.”

The post Pakistan’s Tinder ban signals coming showdowns with YouTube and Twitter appeared first on Coda Story.

Our story examined a host of potential privacy concerns related to the country’s newly launched Covid-19 tracking technology, including the government’s use of a system originally developed to combat terrorism. Authorities are also using a national biometric data center that has, in the past, been subject to several major digital breaches.

Digital rights experts warned that the data collected from millions of Pakistanis was not securely protected. Days after our story was published, the personal details of thousands of Covid-19 volunteers was leaked online. 

One month later, many of the concerns highlighted by our story remain unaddressed. “Unfortunately, given the lack of data protection laws and in the absence of a privacy commission, there has been no investigation into these leaks,” wrote Nighat Dad, director of the Digital Rights Foundation. 

“There have not been any reported cases of harassment or individuals being targeted, but experience tells us that data leaks often lead to private companies using leaked personal data for profit through targeted advertisements and selling that data to others.”

Dad also expressed concerns that the rollout of the new technology included no sunset clauses from the government about when user data might be deleted. 

“We have seen no measures taken on their end that would boost our confidence in the retention and processing of personal data, the level of intrusiveness the state seems to exert in our lives,” she added. 

When Ramsha wrote her story about the pandemic in Pakistan in early May, the country had reported nearly 15,000 cases of coronavirus and at least 32 deaths. According to current data, figures now stand at 82,000 confirmed cases and 1,717 deaths. 

The post Pakistan lacks data protection during the Covid-19 pandemic appeared first on Coda Story.

Yahyah Jaffery eventually recovered and wrote a newspaper column about his experience. “My photo was all over social media and I became a pariah,” he said. Over the next few days, the pattern was repeated with dozens of other patients.

In the months since, medical staff infected with Covid-19 have also had their personal details published online. According to a health department spokesperson, 20 doctors have been targeted in Sindh province alone.

The leaks indicate the challenges in maintaining privacy and protecting public data in an under-resourced country that has reported nearly 15,000 cases of coronavirus and at least 32 deaths since early March. Pakistan is now confirming close to 1,000 new Covid-19 cases a day; experts say the numbers reflect the small group of people being tested each day, about 8,000.

To contain the spread of the virus among 220 million citizens, many of whom have access to only threadbare medical assistance, the government has looked to mass data collection and contact tracing to gather information on those infected with Covid-19.

Last week, Prime Minister Imran Khan announced that the government was using a tracking system originally developed by the country’s powerful security apparatus to combat terrorism. “The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has given us a great system for track and trace,” he said on a live TV telethon. “It was originally used against terrorism, but now it is has come in useful against coronavirus.”

Contact tracing has been a central plank of coronavirus strategy for governments around the world, including Italy and Germany. However, alarms have been raised in Pakistan, where a lack of transparency and digital privacy standards risks undermining how the public is protected. 

While Pakistan currently has no data protection laws, the Ministry of Information Technology & Telecommunication announced a call for consultation on a draft bill earlier this month.  

To lead the tracing and quarantine strategy, the government has established a new data hub at the Covid-19 national command center in Islamabad. The center will collect information from the ISI’s tracking system and share details about coronavirus cases with Pakistan’s four provincial governments, information technology institutions, and civil and military organizations. 

While specific details of how the tracking system functions remain unclear, the country’s national telecommunications regulator, Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA), has confirmed that it is assisting the government by using cell tower tracking to locate the mobile phones of infected individuals and send text messages advising them to self-isolate. According to PTA, around 560,000 at-risk people have been sent “CoronaAlert” text messages to date. 

In Pakistan, licensed telecom providers such as cell phone companies are required to provide customer data to government agencies for national security purposes or when directed by PTA. 

The text message initiative was launched in March by the prime minister’s Digital Pakistan unit, which is led by Tania Aidrus, a former head of Google’s Next Billion Users team, which makes products with emerging markets in mind.

In an interview, Aidrus said the authorities were using “multiple data points” for contact tracing. “The aim is to expand home testing and assessment in Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands people have used the various chatbots we have launched with the help of Facebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp to raise awareness and allow self-assessment.”

Aidrus also said the authorities are trying to find family information about Covid-19 patients by working with the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra), the citizen biometric data center with personal information of all 220 million Pakistani nationals.

Nadra has been subject to several major digital breaches in the past, including one incident in 2018 which saw the private data of individuals hacked and sold on Facebook and WhatsApp. Digital rights groups have called for more secure protection of the private data of Pakistani citizens. In a 2018 report on Nadra, Pakistan’s Digital Rights Foundation stated “The potential for misuse or problematic leaks here is substantial and is only exacerbated by the lack of data protection legislation in the country.”

While acknowledging the lack of data protection policies in Pakistan, Aidrus said she was “incredibly confident” about the responsible use of any public data collected during the current crisis.

However, privacy advocates warn that many countries using technology to limit the spread of Covid-19 are failing to provide adequate transparency. 

“The scale and sophistication of surveillance technologies being rolled out in response to Covid-19 around the world could fundamentally threaten human rights in the future,” said Samuel Woodhams, who is tracking global Covid-19 surveillance  measures for the website Top10VPN.

“Health authorities and governments should ensure they implement these initiatives with transparency, adequate sunset clauses and provide scope for public and political scrutiny. In countries that do not have well-defined personal privacy and human rights legislation, these concerns are considerably more acute.”

Data from volunteers

The government is also heavily reliant on data provided by volunteers helping to tackle the pandemic. Almost a million Pakistanis have joined the Corona Tigers Relief Force by filling in a form on a digital portal that asks for details including their national identity number, age, location, telephone number and social media IDs.

The Corona Tiger Relief Force is a government-led initiative, which enlists young people across the country to distribute aid to marginalized communities. A Relief Force app informs users that their data is both secure and encrypted. “We are only collecting the required information that will be used during the working of the youngsters in their specific areas,” it says.

But Pakistani digital and human rights groups are concerned by the scale of data being captured by the government. Organizations including the Pakistan Press Foundation and the Indus Public Lawyers Front issued a joint statement earlier this month, warning of the “excessive usage of digital surveillance measures.” 

“Pakistani citizens should not be asked to choose between privacy and healthcare. The government must ensure that all personal data that is being collected and processed is stored under guidelines that ensure data protection, and access to it is limited to authorised individuals only,” it read.

Besides contact tracing, the government has also launched opt-in mobile apps that use GPS to map how far individuals are from others who have been infected with Covid-19. The Covid-19 Gov PK Android app requests that users allow it to access their mobile location data in order to provide them with an alert if there is a Covid-19 patient within a radius of 32 yards. 

The app’s privacy policy comprises only two paragraphs and offers no details about how it adheres to "social, moral, ethical values, and privacy." 

To date, over 500,000 people have downloaded it.

The post “I became a pariah.” Coronavirus victims’ data is leaked on social media in Pakistan appeared first on Coda Story.

This week, I’m following up on a story we published a few months ago about how plans for a web monitoring system could give the government considerable power over digital content without due process.

After our story was published, the country’s national telecommunications regulator, Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA), was initially quick to respond:

Our story was widely followed up by leading news media outlets in Pakistan, including Dawn and Geo English. You can read their coverage here, here, here and here. 

Earlier this week, PTA told Coda Story the web monitoring system is now fully operational across Pakistan.

Human rights groups and free speech organizations have long expressed concerns about the lack of transparency in how Pakistan monitors digital content. In Transparency International’s 2019 Corruption Perception Index, Pakistan ranked 120th out of 180 countries, dropping three places from 2018. 

Pakistan’s government has also approved new rules for regulating online content. Social media companies will be obliged to help law enforcement agencies access user data and remove online content deemed unlawful.

The post Pakistan launches nationwide web-monitoring system — Coda Follows Up appeared first on Coda Story.

Sandvine is expected to provide equipment for monitoring and analyzing all incoming and outgoing internet traffic from Pakistan.

The agreement raises serious concerns about privacy and civil liberties in Pakistan, where government critics have sometimes seen digital retribution from officials and other powerful groups.

According to the agreement — a copy of which was exclusively shared with Coda — the contract is worth $18.5 million and dated December 12, 2018. The “web monitoring system” will use Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to monitor communications, measure and record traffic and call data on behalf of the country’s national telecommunications regulator, Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA).

The contract was signed by a number of parties, including Pakistan firm Inbox Business Technologies Ltd, which is acting as a local partner for Sandvine and Pakistan Telecommunication Company for “procurement of hardware, software and provision of related services for web monitoring system.”

The new system is the result of a controversial 2010 law that mandates the monitoring and blocking of any traffic to and from Pakistan.

Deep Packet Inspection is often used by authoritarian governments to surveil its citizens and censor content that is deemed unlawful. According to WIRED, DPI is “a type of data processing that looks in detail at the contents of the data being sent and re-routes it accordingly.” To simplify, it’s the “equivalent of opening up letters in a postal depot and reading the contents.”

Asad Baig, who co-founded Media Matters For Democracy, said he feared the ‘web monitoring system’ “will give full autonomy to [the Pakistan Telecom Authority]  to do what they please with digital content without due process, and as is evident from their history of content regulation, that will not bode well for anyone.”

“With a web monitoring system, the state will have the ability to surveil citizens' digital activity almost constantly,” said Baig. “Simply knowing that a monitoring system is in place can have a chilling effect on journalists, activists and political dissidents who are increasingly paranoid of state surveillance for speaking up online.”  

A source working at Inbox Business Technologies, which appears to have been licensed to install Sandvine’s equipment, said the system was not yet operational.

When asked if PTA had contracted the services of Sandvine or Inbox Business Technologies, the regulator said that the authority was not in “any agreement or contract with Inbox or Sandvine at present or in the past.”

However, the regulator pointed out that these companies “may have been” providing technology to the country’s telecom industry.

Sandvine has come under criticism in the past for selling technology to authoritarian regimes. The company came under fire last year after an investigation by the Canada-based Citizen Lab revealed Sandvine DPI was being used in Turkey, Egypt and Syria to redirect users to download legitimate programs "bundled with spyware." 

Citizen Lab also found out that the Sandvine DPI equipment was being used to “block political, journalistic, and human rights content.”

Sandvine did not respond to several requests for comment for this story.

Lack of transparency

Despite PTA’s denials, there is more evidence that the government intended to acquire Sandvine’s services. In May this year, reports surfaced that PTA had directed the telecom industry to deploy a suitable technical solution for monitoring, analyzing and curbing “grey traffic” — which includes Voice over Internet Protocol and Virtual Private Networks. 

Pakistan’s Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, Azam Khan Swati, told the country’s Senate that the PTA had asked Inbox Business Technologies and Sandvine Inc, to provide equipment for monitoring grey traffic. At the same time, he maintained that PTA was not involved with either of the companies and no public funds had been spent on the project.

However, a March 2018 tender available on PTA’s website invited bids for the web monitoring system “at national level, for identifying and blocking access to any on-line content classified as unlawful under Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016.”

The content listed as unlawful in the tender included material that might be considered “blasphemous,” “indecent” or “immoral” and ''anti-state.”

Just over a third of Pakistan’s population, around 72 million people, are online. Around 70 million use 3G or 4G data plans for their internet access. As digital penetration has grown, the government has tightened its grip on digital spaces. Pakistan has a history of arbitrarily blocking websites over content that is deemed “anti-state" — a well-known euphemism for material that is critical of Pakistan’s powerful military. 

The control of the internet in Pakistan comes at a crucial time for digital access in the region. In nearby Indian-administered Kashmir, the Delhi government imposed a mobile phone and internet blackout in August as part of a security clampdown to enforce its annulment of Kashmir's constitutionally guaranteed autonomy. Authorities restored some phone connections earlier this month. 

In Pakistan, more than 925,000 websites have been blocked in Pakistan, according to PTA. Around 33,339 websites reportedly contained content deemed “anti-state, anti- judiciary, defamation, disinformation, sectarian, hate-speech.” The regulator has also blocked over 10,000 proxies from access to internet users in Pakistan. 

In 2018, Pakistan blocked Voice of America after critical coverage of a Pashtun rights movement, and the government has used internet shutdowns to deal with ethnic tensions. Pakistan has also banned YouTube several times in the past, until it was restored in 2016 after a localized version was launched. In 2018, Pakistan blocked the website of the Awami Workers Party, a democratic socialist group.

The digital crackdown has also been extended to journalists. Last week, Pakistan blacklisted and expelled the Asia coordinator of global press freedom group the Committee to Protect Journalists. Steven Butler was refused entry after landing at an airport in Lahore. He was returned to the U.S. after being told he was on “a stop list of the Interior Ministry.” Butler had been due to attend a human rights conference.

Citizen Lab reported in 2013 that Pakistan was using technology supplied by a Canadian company called Netsweeper to filter and block websites on a national scale.

In a report earlier this year, the independent democracy watchdog Freedom House expressed concerns over PTA’s “unchecked powers to censor material on the internet.” It added that there was evidence for “widespread state surveillance of social media and internet activity.” Freedom House downgraded Pakistan’s internet rating from 71 out of 100 in 2017 to 73 in 2018. 

Human rights groups have also expressed concerns over Pakistan’s deteriorating overall freedoms. According to Reporters Without Borders, Pakistan’s 2019 press freedom ranking was down three points to 142. Amnesty International said in a statement earlier this year that there has been a “noticeable increase in attacks on the right to freedom of expression in Pakistan.”

A recent Pakistan plan to launch special media courts also came under fire from the free speech groups. The Committee to Protect Journalists, in a statement, expressed concerns, saying “Pakistan needs to strengthen the nation’s democracy by freeing newspapers and broadcasters from the intense official pressures they already face.”

In addition to the forthcoming launch of Sandvine’s monitoring system, PTA has ordered network operators to pay the government security deposits to install the system. 

Digital rights groups in Pakistan have highlighted the lack of publicly available information on the so-called web monitoring system. Usama Khilji, who works for Bolo Bhi, an internet advocacy firm, said his organization was planning on submitting a Right to Information (RTI) request in an effort to find out more about the system. 

Although PTA maintains the system would be used to only curb grey traffic, Khilji fears it could be open to authoritarian abuse. “Grey traffic is just an excuse,” he said. “We fear the system could be used for large scale surveillance.”

“This includes crackdown on political and human rights activists, especially those who challenge official security-centered narratives that often trample on rights,” Khilji said. 

Sandvine’s role in web monitoring in Pakistan has received attention in previous years. In 2012, when Pakistan’s government first called for proposals for the building of an internet filtering system, Sandvine was among the companies that responded to human rights concerns and said it would not bid for the project. At the time, Pakistani rights groups thanked Sandvine, Verizon and Cisco for not working with the government to filter the internet access.

However, according to two sources at Inbox Business Technologies, Sandvine was already providing solutions to Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) — the main company responsible for distributing internet bandwidth in Pakistan.

According to one former employee who worked as a team lead for one of the Sandvine projects, the company was already providing solutions back in 2014 — only two years after publicly committing it did not intend to work with the government of Pakistan. A tender notice available on the website of PTCL also confirmed that Sandvine was indeed providing its services in Pakistan going back at least 2016. 

When asked for confirmation regarding the current and previous projects involving Sandvine, a PTCL spokesperson refused to comment on the matter and directed Coda to speak to PTA instead.

Unchecked access to data

The Inbox contract mentions the company will take steps to ensure that any customer data it acquires through web monitoring must not infringe upon citizens’ rights protected under various laws and the constitution of Pakistan.

However, telecom operators in Pakistan remain skeptical. “How will they find out if there is a breach when the data is completely at Inbox’s disposal?” asked Luqman Kamil, an advisor to telecom operators. “The investment is ours, but the contract gives overt control to Sandvine,” he said.

Meanwhile, Usama Khilji fears the unchecked access to the customers’ data could prove catastrophic for human rights and privacy. “We fear that through Sandvine equipment, the government would be able to access, and even spy on the secure means of communication,” he said. 

The post Pakistan moves to install nationwide ‘web monitoring system’ appeared first on Coda Story.

Mubashir Zaidi, a senior Pakistani broadcast journalist, quoted the minister’s tweet and asked what had happened to the investigation of another murder: Tahir Dawar, a police officer who was abducted from Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, last October. Dawar’s dead body was later found in Afghanistan and bore marks of torture. Zaidi commented that Abidi’s murder, like that of Dawar’s and several others, would remain unsolved.

Only a week after sending his tweet, Zaidi received an email from Twitter’s legal department. He was informed that his tweet was in violation of Pakistan’s laws.

“Twitter has not taken any action on the reported content at this time. We are only writing to inform you that content posted to your account has been mentioned in a complaint,” said the email, seen by Coda Story.

“I just asked a question from the minister, just like any journalist would do,” said Zaidi.

He was left wondering exactly which law had been violated by his tweet. “No idea who is the complainant and how it violates Pakistani law,” he wrote on Twitter.

Human rights workers and journalists have reported an increase in threats and violence in an atmosphere of deteriorating press freedoms in Pakistan. 

Zaidi is not the only person to have received such an email. While no one keeps records, scores of prominent Pakistani journalists and activists – including those who are living abroad and those who are not Pakistani citizens but of Pakistani heritage – as well as other activists who have no connection to the country have also received the same email warnings from Twitter.

Shrinking Digital Rights and Intimidation

Twitter has become a major platform for political debate in Pakistan over the last few years. From the government and the opposition to the military and rights-based groups, Twitter acts as the primary platform for breaking news, opinion and contesting narratives.

After the local and international media were effectively banned from covering the Pashtun Protection Movement — an anti-war, human rights movement based in northwest Pakistan which has come under heavy scrutiny from the government and the military. Its organizers have used social media, particularly Twitter, to sidestep censorship and broadcast their protests.

In an email statement, a Twitter spokesperson said many countries have laws that apply to content posted on the platform. “In our continuing effort to make our services available to people everywhere, if we receive a valid requests (sic) from an authorised entity, it may be necessary to withhold access to certain content in a particular country from time to time,” the statement read. The spokesperson did not confirm whether any content had been withheld so far.

Naila Inayat, South Asia correspondent with the Berlin-based Associated Reporters Abroad, also received a similar email from Twitter on November 3, 2018. She had posted a meme comparing the Pakistan military’s surrender to Indian forces in 1971 — which led to the creation of Bangladesh — with the government’s dealing of Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan, a far-right Islamist party accused of inciting hatred and violence against religious minorities.

Inayat received the warning email only a day after she tweeted the meme. “Being a journalist working in Pakistan, I was really scared,” she said. She deleted her tweet.

Human rights workers and journalists have reported an increase in threats and violence in an atmosphere of deteriorating press freedoms in Pakistan. In a detailed report last year, the Committee to Protect Journalists wrote that Pakistan’s military was responsible for “encouraging self-censorship through direct and indirect methods of intimidation, including calling editors to complain about coverage and even allegedly instigating violence against reporters.”

“Under the excruciating circumstances that journalists are facing in Pakistan, I felt extremely unsafe and kept wondering which law I had violated,” said Inayat.

Another senior journalist, Murtaza Solangi, also received the same email from Twitter. Solangi was previously asked to resign from his position as the Islamabad bureau chief for a local news channel. At the time, he claimed that his tweets critical of Pakistan’s military establishment were the reason behind his dismissal.

A journalist from Jang Group, Pakistan’s largest media conglomerate, told Coda on the condition of anonymity that the group’s management had been continuously pressured to ensure employees didn’t tweet criticism of the military.

Jang Group faced a crisis last year when its leading news channel Geo News was abruptly taken off-air. At the time of its disappearance from the airwaves, which cost millions of dollars in lost advertising revenue, Geo News ranked as the most popular TV news station in Pakistan by Medialogic, a ratings provider.

Later, Reuters reported that the channel’s management had struck a deal with the military over their political coverage and was allowed back on air.

Geo News remains Pakistan’s most-watched television news channel with 24% of the overall viewership in the country.

Pakistan’s Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Fawad Chaudhry, denied that the government was in correspondence with Twitter over blocking content by these journalists.

“These journalists are insignificant,” he said in an interview. “No one knows them in Pakistan, so why would the government care what they say on Twitter?”

New Government, New Tone

Only six months after Prime Minister Imran Khan's victory in the wake of controversial elections, his new government has come under criticism for its treatment of journalists. In the first week of January, journalists boycotted the press conference of a minister over his harsh response to a reporter’s questions.

Similarly, Khan’s party, Pakistan Justice Movement, recently attacked The Economist on Twitter over an article critical of the country’s military. The Economist is “running sponsored articles attacking the entire state of Pakistan… puts serious questions on whether It’s the economist hiring authors or authors hiring the economist to do propaganda against Pakistan,” the party tweeted.

Chaudhry added that the government was not in regular touch with Twitter, unlike Facebook. He said requests to block content on Twitter could have originated from private citizens.

Chaudhry repeated that denial on Twitter when Reema Omer, a legal advisor working with the International Commission of Jurists, also received an email from Twitter on January 21 over her tweets discussing a possible extension to military courts in Pakistan. The courts have come under severe criticism over their alleged violation of fundamental rights.

A Pakistan Telecommunication Authority spokesperson stated it was not responsible for communicating with Twitter, a claim which digital rights activists contest.

Twitter’s determined approach to policing content can be traced back to August last year when the company was threatened with a ban in Pakistan.

Nida Kirmani, a Pakistan-based sociologist and a professor at Lahore University of Management Sciences also received an email from Twitter on January 21. One of her tweets included a photograph of her standing next to Manzoor Pashteen, the chairman of the Pashtun Protection Movement (PTM). Kirmani is one of several academics to openly support the Pashtun Protection Movement.

“I am not under any major duress at the moment,” Kirmani told Coda. However, she said it was “a message from certain powerful sources”.

Nighat Dad, director of the Digital Rights Foundation Pakistan said Twitter’s processes are not transparent. She said that all of those who have received emails from Twitter have one thing in common: they are extremely critical of Pakistan’s security establishment. “We have been contacted by many journalists and activists, all confused over these extremely vague warnings, wondering whether they should be worried,” she said.

“Transparency is vital to protecting freedom of expression, so we have a notice policy for withheld content,” a Twitter spokesperson told Coda.

“Upon receipt of requests to withhold content, we will promptly notify affected users directly,” the spokesperson said, adding, “The practice of notifying users is part of our commitment to transparency and empowerment.”

Warnings, Threats and Exile

Some of the journalists and activists who have received these warnings are now living in exile after threats to their lives. Ahmad Waqas Goraya, a blogger who was abducted in January 2017, received an email on October 5 saying that his Twitter account was in violation of Pakistan’s laws. Goraya, who now resides in the Netherlands, had said that Pakistan’s security agencies abducted and tortured him for running a satirical Facebook page.

Gul Bukhari, a vocal critic of Pakistan’s current government and the military establishment who was briefly abducted in June last year, also received a notification from Twitter on November 10.  Similarly, former France 24 correspondent in Pakistan, Taha Siddiqui, had his account briefly suspended after an email from Twitter. Siddiqui reported last year that he escaped an abduction attempt in Pakistan. He now lives in Paris.

Twitter’s determined approach to policing content can be traced back to August last year when the company was threatened with a ban in Pakistan over its non-compliance with government requests to block offensive material. “Out of a hundred requests from Pakistan to block certain offensive material, roughly five per cent are entertained. Twitter ignores all the remaining requests,” a senior official at Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, an autonomous regulatory body, told the Senate.

According to Twitter’s transparency report, the platform received 243 removal requests from the government during the period of January 2018 to June 2018. The compliance rate, according to the report, was 0%.

Farieha Aziz, co-founder of Bolo Bhi, a Pakistan-based internet advocacy and research organization, praised Twitter for not complying with the government requests. “It is a standard practice for Twitter to notify the users over their content,” she said, adding, “but in the context of Pakistan, where the current political environment is extremely hostile towards free expression, these emails can be perceived as threatening.”

Analysts also worry that the country could move further towards authoritarianism under Imran Khan, who is believed to have close links to the military. Recently, the government announced a new media regulatory body which would also have powers over social media, along with print and broadcast.

In July last year, Khan attacked Dawn, Pakistan’s oldest English language daily newspaper, using language many critics said was reminiscent of President Donald Trump.

"The blatant bias of Dawn against PTI (Khan's political party) has now come out in the open. So much for Dawn's neutral and liberal credentials! Complete farce! Full marks to Stevan Sackur for exposing Dawn in his BBC HardTalk interview," he tweeted, referring to an interview with Dawn CEO Hameed Haroon with BBC's HardTalk interview program where Haroon had claimed media in Pakistan were facing severe restrictions allegedly perpetrated by the military.

Khan's government also launched an official "fake news buster" account on Twitter that was criticized for regularly scolding journalists over stories the government believed were fake.

Fawad Chaudhry said that the government was planning to ask social platforms like Twitter and Facebook to obtain official licenses to operate in Pakistan. “If they want to operate here, they must obtain licenses under the prevailing laws,” he said over a phone call.

Aziz said the push for local licenses for social media firms could lead to a more compliant approach to government censorship. YouTube was banned in Pakistan for three years and was allowed to relaunch only after the creation of a localized version that allows the government to demand the removal of material it considers offensive.

“All these platforms, including Twitter, are now trying to find a middle ground in Pakistan,” Nighat Dad said. “That, or they could be shut down completely.”

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