Daily Times

KARACHI: The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has planned to establish and deploy national level Web Management Solution (WMS) for identifying and blocking access to any online content classified as unlawful under Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA).

In this regard, the PTA has invited applications from interested parties to supply, installation and configuration of applicable hardware/software/middleware to establish WMS for live management of internet traffic passing through Pakistan’s internet gateways, for identification and prevention of public access to internet content which is classified as unlawful under PECA.

Under the PECA, any pornographic, blasphemous, indecent or immoral, anti-state, contempt of court, law and order, incitement to an offense, sectarian, others as stated in law for time being in force content is classified as unlawful.

The PTA has planned to establish and deploy WMS having crawler with auto learning functionality to automatically identify and classify unlawful content available on the internet as per classification at point.

The system will have ability to restrict delivery of unlawful content to the public without affecting any other content being served by the same server / website / domain. The WMS will do real time analysis of internet traffic to automatically identify unlawful internet content (i.e. web pages, images, videos, words, applications etc.) and will block it for public viewer ship as and when required.

The WMS will also classify the web sites (i.e. social, pornographic, financial, sports, etc.) and will collect country wide statistics related to website (i.e. number of times being accessed; number of sessions being made to, etc.).

Also, the PTA has planned to provide training to its designated Human Resource staff for carrying out Hardware and software configuration and operations of the WMS.

The PTA seeks robust and scalable WMS for supporting increase in international bandwidth and newer internet technologies/protocols.

It is important to mention here that the current total volume of complete internet traffic in Pakistan is around 1.5 Tbps.

The PTA has designated some network monitoring sites which include PTCL IGE-I Pak Capital Exchange Karachi, PTCL IGE-II, Marston Exchange Karachi, PTCL IGE-III – Satellite Town Exchange Rawalpindi, PTCL Misri Shah Exchange Karachi and TWA – Hawks Bay Landing station Karachi.

In 2017, the Lahore High Court had directed the federal government to introduce necessary amendments to the PECA in order to empower the PTA to block information systems or social media websites if service providers do not remove blasphemous content on them.

Published in Daily Times, February 16^th 2018.