Pakistan advertises for web censor

Any of our tech-savvy readers looking for work? How about censoring free expression in Pakistan? Few nations have so publicly revealed their plans to censor the Web as Pakistan is doing, however. Last month, the government took out newspaper and Web advertisements asking for companies or institutions to develop the national filtering and blocking system.[…] ...

By , a former associate editor at Foreign Policy.

Any of our tech-savvy readers looking for work? How about censoring free expression in Pakistan?

Any of our tech-savvy readers looking for work? How about censoring free expression in Pakistan?

Few nations have so publicly revealed their plans to censor the Web as Pakistan is doing, however. Last month, the government took out newspaper and Web advertisements asking for companies or institutions to develop the national filtering and blocking system.[…]

The government advertisements state it wants a system capable of shutting down up to 50 million Web addresses in multiple languages with a processing delay of not less than one millisecond.

Pakistan’s internet filtering efforts aren’t particularly extensive, though it did get international attention in 2010 for briefly blocking Facebook because of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed. Evidently, the authorities are looking to upgrade to something a bit more sophisticated. 

Hat tip: Jillian York

 

Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating

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