EDITORIAL: The state’s war against digital technologies shows no signs of abating with the PTA (Pakistan Telecommunication Authority) devising yet another strategy to regulate Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) after the complete failure of its previous such endeavour that had envisaged a registration process for VPNs ostensibly to cater to the needs of businesses and freelancers.
The latest such stratagem will see the introduction of a new licencing regime under which companies will need to apply for permits to provide VPN services. This would result in all proxy networks not provided by licensed companies to be deemed unregistered and hence blocked, meeting the long-sought aim of the authorities to ban unregistered VPNs.
Worryingly, licensed service providers would be bound by local regulatory provisions that will enable the authorities to exert control over them and monitor VPN traffic, essentially stripping users of the primary benefits of VPNs — privacy, anonymity and security — and thereby subjecting citizens to intrusive state surveillance.
Under the age-old guise of ensuring national security, one of the provisions drawn up for VPN service providers mandates that “the licensee and/or the service provider will have to provide Lawful Interception equipment to the nationally authorised security organisations… .”
It is pertinent to note that the use of VPNs in Pakistan has skyrocketed over the course of the year as citizens attempt to circumvent arbitrary government bans, like the one on X, and to overcome routine WhatsApp media disruptions that compromise people’s ability to send audio notes, videos and images over mobile data, often during times of political protests.
Not satisfied by imposing these capricious prohibitions, the authorities then turned their attention towards VPNs. Even as government ministers, including the prime minister himself, continued to access X through VPNs, the obsession with restricting VPN access for the general public has only increased, demonstrating both a disregard for online freedoms, and a lack of understanding of how digital technologies work, as effectively controlling the use of VPNs remains an inherently complex and an ultimately futile endeavour in a globally connected digital ecosystem, as workarounds can always be devised by tech-savvy users to bypass restrictions.
Additionally, government mandarins also haven’t comprehended that VPNs remain a core part of the digital infrastructure that helps businesses and individuals worldwide to safeguard their cyber-security needs.
According to a recent survey conducted by PWC Pakistan, 90 percent of Pakistani bankers listed cybercrime to be the biggest challenge confronting banking in the country. And instead of providing an enabling environment that enhances cyber-security for organisations, this government action will have the opposite impact, dismantling existing cyber-security mechanisms by diluting the effectiveness of VPNs.
So, apart from apprehensions regarding the state’s intent to control citizens’ online freedoms and going after dissenting voices, we are also faced with a plethora of cyber-security concerns.
For example, how will the authorities ensure that any information that VPN service providers relay back to them will not be vulnerable to data leaks as recurring cyber-security breaches have already exposed the weaknesses in government databases, a case in point being the NADRA data leak that resulted in the particulars of 2.7 million citizens being compromised between 2019 and 2023?
Not only do Pakistani citizens have to contend with an overbearing state, they also now need to be apprehensive about an incompetent regulatory apparatus that has already demonstrated its inability to securely handle sensitive information.
It is clear that without a comprehensive data protection legal framework and legal safeguards requiring the authorities to justify their need to access citizens’ data based on solid security concerns in a court of law, such measures will ultimately do more harm than good, undermining both fundamental rights and the business environment.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
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