Pakistan's Sindh Province To Ban Skype, Viber For 3 Months Over Terrorist Usage, Demanding More Data Access

Pakistan is known for a long-standing ban on YouTube and occasional blocks of sites like Facebook and Twitter. Today, the government in one large part of the country said that it was planning to block two more social media services — Skype and Viber.

According to a report in the Express Tribune, the government of the Sindh province — home to over 35 million people, including those living in its capital, Karachi — is planning a three-month block of the two messaging platforms because they are being used by terrorists who want to avoid conversations getting monitored on regular mobile networks. To that end, the government apparently also is requesting further access to data being passed through networks like Viber and Skype.

The newspaper reports that for right now it’s just these two services that will be affected, although the ban could possibly also be extended to Tango and WhastApp, the newspaper notes. It does not say when the ban will begin.

We have reached out to both Skype and Viber for comment and will update the story as we learn more.

The decision to ban the networks was made between Sindh Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah and officials from the Karachi police, intelligence agencies and others. In other words, it doesn’t sound like there has been much in the way of official dissent. It’s not a great message for freedom of speech in the country, even if those channels clearly are getting abused by some.

In a country with a lot of political strife and distribution with large geographic obstacles, communications networks are a lifeline for many ordinary, law-abiding people, too. Unfortunately, Pakistani residents are no strangers to Internet service blockages. In addition to the periodic outages from sites like Twitter and Facebook, and the extended block of YouTube, it looks like there the mobile networks also get shut down periodically, also to cool down terrorist chatter.

The YouTube ban appears to be more about blasphemous content rather than direct issues related to terrorism. It is currently getting reassessed as part of a wider look at a new filtering program for digital content, much like the one used in Russia today.