COMMENT: Ban the internet? —Dr Syed Mansoor Hussain

Censorship of any means of communication rarely works and often has the opposite effect from the one intended. It only helps to tweak the interest of people in the censored piece of information

Evidently, a divisional bench of the Lahore High Court ordered many major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and search engines including Google, Yahoo, MSN and a slew of others closed down in Pakistan. The reason of course being that it was possible to access ‘blasphemous’ sites through these search engines.

Before I go any further I do have a few legal questions. Of course people on the street can protest against all insults, real or imagined, to any holy personality but I always thought the honourable justices need actual proof before they can make a decision of this or any other sort.

So my question then is, did the petitioners first go to all these sites, watch all the blasphemous content and then copied it to present to the court as evidence? If they indeed went through all these sites and copied such material on them, then are they themselves not guilty of blasphemy? Or did the learned judges go through all the sites themselves to see the blasphemous material and if they did, would that not then be blasphemous behaviour in itself?

Complicated questions these. And I do also then wonder if the learned judges never actually saw the blasphemous material but yet ruled against these sites? If so, were they then acting on unsubstantiated ‘hearsay’ evidence? Either way, such a ruling seems a bit strange since unless all internet service is banned in Pakistan, people who are really interested in accessing such sites will always be able to do so.

Moreover, by banning internet traffic, such sites will continue to exist and our behaviour will be akin to the ostrich burying its head in the sand. As far as disseminating any blasphemous material in Pakistan is concerned, such activity is illegal and carries very heavy penalties. But internet search engines as well as ISP providers are literally ‘inanimate’ entities and can be used for much of anything, including accessing pornography if the users so choose.

The internet is also a major educational and informational tool. Like much of modern technology, it can be used for good things and bad depending on the intentions of the users. An obvious analogy is the ubiquitous ‘cell phone’. The cell phones have made communications easy, their picture taking ability can be used to record unique incidents and transmit that information but they can also be used to plan and carry out terrorist activities. So, should we not ban cell phones also?

Moreover, censorship of any means of communication rarely works and often has the opposite effect from the one intended. It only helps to tweak the interest of people in the censored piece of information. The banning and the ‘fatwa’ against Salman Rushdie arguably made him a bigger, richer and more famous writer than he perhaps deserved to be.

The more important issue at stake here is really that of censorship of the internet or any other means of information transfer. Now that we are in a free and democratic environment where the freedom of the press is being hailed from all corners of our society, should we then be trying to curtail the freedom of access to the internet?

As far as the question of enforcing morality or moral standards is concerned, one of the most important lessons from human history is that personal morality cannot be legislated or adjudicated. Our country is still reeling from the consequences of such attempts at legislating morality during the dark days of ‘Islamisation’. This of course does not mean that morality as a basis of law should be abandoned. As it is our constitution is a very ‘moral’ document. And there are enough laws in the books that are or at least can be used to enforce established values and norms of our society.

But the world has changed dramatically with the internet. Almost all countries in the world are wrestling with how to contain it and control the content available on it. Some of these attempts are politically motivated while others have moral implications. So far this has met with little success.

Personally, I use as little of modern technology as I can and have never been on ‘Facebook’ or other such sites. I use the internet to communicate with friends and family and to search for information related to my professional and personal interests. I have for instance rarely, if ever, watched internet generated videos or accessed any of the so-called ‘blasphemous’ sites. Yes I do read about 10 Pakistani and international newspapers on the net every day and visit some news sites also. And I also regularly download the New York Times’ crossword puzzle.

But there are people that depend on the internet for all sorts of things, personal, professional, social interactions, buying and selling things and of course for fun. Most young people would essentially fall apart if they do not have full, fast and continuous access to the internet. My children for instance communicate with their cousins and contemporaries almost entirely through ‘Facebook’ and when visiting Pakistan if they are denied access to this site, they will probably think twice about visiting it again in the future.

Old fogies like me could possibly do quite alright even if the access to the internet was severely limited in Pakistan. I need the internet to send this article to the newspaper after I am done with it, to research things like what exactly a ‘Luddite’ might be and of course to work on the NYT puzzle that I have just downloaded.

I strongly recommend that the honourable chief justice of Pakistan should constitute a regular bench that receives input from experts and makes a decision on what needs to be done about controlling access to the internet and if such control is really needed or even possible. And this bench should be the only one that can make decisions concerning all future petitions about censorship of any sites on the internet.

Syed Mansoor Hussain has practised and taught medicine in the US. He can be reached at smhmbbs70@yahoo.com