Guardian warmongering over Pakistan encryption ban
August 31st, 2011The Guardian helps to whip their idiotic readers into line in advance of regime change for Pakistan. All articles of the type that you read below are designed to discredit the governments, like them or not, of the target countries with lies, hypocritical attacks and pure propaganda.
France ‘banned encryption’ in the 1990s; Dominique Strauss-Khan ended the restrictions Where were all the howling articles about interception then?
Where are the howls today about the deliberately weakened A5 GSM encryption? Where are the howls from the Guardian about ECHELON? Where are the howls about RIPA, which forces you to reveal your passphrase? Where are all the howls about the German government’s attempts to break into Skype calls? Where are the howls about all the abuses going on from inside their precious ‘democracy’?
Before you attack Pakistan, get your own house in order. If you do not, then every foreign country in the world will point to you as an example of how to govern correctly. US/UK has full access to all land line phone calls, mobile calls, internet traffic that is not encrypted and a myriad of other ‘intelligence sources’ which actually means immoral privacy violations on a mass scale. They also have access to all of the communications taking place in Pakistan.
It is only natural that Pakistan, who is not invited to share in the data collected by the west from ‘their own citizens’ that they should take steps to get access themselves.
Lets do this!
Pakistan to ban encryption software
Internet service providers will be required to inform authorities if customers use virtual private networks in government crackdown
This is no different to the moves in the west to force ISPs to retain data and cut off users who are sharing files. Once the French (for example) figure out that VPNs can be used to share files and beat their ban, they will move to outlaw them also. You dont think that France could possibly ban VPNs? they already did something just as stupid, as you can see here.
Internet users in Pakistan will no longer be able to access the web through virtual private networks following the government ban.
Millions of internet users in Pakistan will be unable to send emails and messages without fear of government snooping after authorities banned the use of encryption software.
The same is already true of users in the US/UK. Millions of internet users cannot send email without fear of government snooping, so what is the problem with Pakistan doing the same thing? I wonder if these Guardian shills can explain why they think that its OK for US/UK to ‘snoop’ on communications but its NOT OK for Pakistan to do so. Of course, they would not call it ‘snooping’ in the US/UK, they call it ‘security’. It is base hypocrisy turned up to eleven.
A legal notice sent to all internet providers (ISPs) by the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority, seen by the Guardian, orders the ISPs to inform authorities if any of their customers are using virtual private networks (VPNs) to browse the web.
Seen by the Guardian, but not by you. Pics or it didn’t happen. There is absolutely no reason why the Guardian should not publish this document so that we can see if for ourselves. But of course, the Guardian is a paternalist newspaper that rather than let you make up your own mind, presents a sugar coated, fact free fait accompli for you to swallow whole. Wether its articles on economics, computer security or anything else, they do not present you with all the facts. But lets move on…
Virtual private networks allow internet users to connect to the web undetected, meaning that they can access banned websites and send emails without fear of government interception.
Pakistan’s 20 million internet users have previously been banned from popular social networks, such as Facebook, because of blasphemous material about the prophet Muhammad. All internet traffic in the country travels through the Pakistan Internet Exchange, which can be intercepted by the military and civil intelligence agencies. The move echoes a crackdown against encrypted communications across the border in India and in China.
And what is left out of this part is the fact that BBM is encrypted, and that back door access to it has been given to the State right here, the recent mass looting being the pretext. Lets also not forget that right here, it was seriously proposed that Twitter and Facebook be ‘shut down’ in an ’emergency’ by the state.
Why are these journalists whining about China, Pakistan and India, when the same nasty things are being done right here? Those countries are acting rationally and following the example of the UK.
The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority legal notice urged ISPs to report customers using “all such mechanisms including EVPNs [encrypted virtual private networks] which conceal communication to the extent that prohibits monitoring”. Anyone needing to use this technology needs to apply for special permission, the notice said.
OUTRAGEOUS! Not.
Authorities in Islamabad insisted that the ban on VPN access was intended to stem communications by terrorists.
Terrorists do not use VPNs or GPG/PGP. Those of you who are up on this remember the bogus Steganography Threat that did the rounds years ago. Bad journalists at papers like the Guardian claimed that terrorists were hiding secret messages inside photos posted on the internet. There has never been a single instance of this found; it was just pure hype, just like this article is pure hype, and like the pretext Pakistan is using to ban VPNs because of ‘Terrorism’ is pure nonsense.
However, banks, call centres and many other businesses use encrypted connections to communicate with their branches and customers, to protect sensitive data such as account numbers and passwords.
Which is why the French ban in the 1990s didn’t make sense, and this doesn’t make sense either.
“This is like banning cars because suicide bombers use them,” said Shakir Husain, chief executive of Creative Chaos, a Karachi-based software company. “You have to find out who these guys [extremists] are. This is a blanket, knee-jerk, response.”
Mr Husain, you cannot possibly expect common sense out of these people. They exist in a parallel universe where logic, rational thought, morality, ethics and decency are poisons.
There is strict regulation of internet traffic in Pakistan.
LETS BOMB THEM! REGIME CHANGE! SPREAD DEMOCRACY!
Last year, the authorities banned the entire Facebook website for months after a user launched a contest to draw a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad.
LETS BOMB THEM! REGIME CHANGE! SPREAD DEMOCRACY!
Accessing the internet on BlackBerry smartphones is problematic, because of the device’s high-security encryption software.
But its not a problem for the US/UK, because they have back door access, and journalists at the Guardian do not care about that; instead, they care about a country thousands of miles away, where no one reads their rag, where only the elites use the internet, and where they cannot have any influence whatsoever. No, this article is designed to make you feel good about living in the ‘free’ west, to pour scorn on Pakistan, and to loosen your resistance in advance of the day when the bombs start dropping on them.
Recently the regulator made it impossible for Pakistanis to access the website of Rolling Stone magazine, after it published an article on the high proportion of the national budget in Pakistan that goes on its military.
[…]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/30/pakistan-bans-encryption-software
In Britain, you can be arrested for possessing books. Pakistan banning Rolling Stone is no different in any way.
Britain has the highest level of google takedowns in the whole world. Blogs are amongst the most targeted. Of course, the Guardian has nothing to say about this whatsoever; all eyes on PAKISTAN!
This is warmongering, hypocrisy and nauseating, stinking garbage wrapped into one pice of filthy propaganda.
Anyone with an intact moral centre understands that the people in Pakistan have the right to live in whatever way they choose. It is not the place of anyone to point a finger at them and say that they are not living correctly; point your bony finger at your own State and its dirty dealings, immoral restrictions, privacy invasions, lies and mass murders and fix your own problems.
Lest we forget, people in Pakistan are not plagued by millions of CCTV cameras; you can walk all over the place there without being watched. Which country has the most CCTV cameras in the entire world, violating millions of people on a daily basis?
It seems today, that it is impossible to read any article in a newspaper that tells the truth.
It doesn’t matter any more.
No one is getting their news from the war machine and its paid shill monsters. Take a look at this:
Look at the seething, roiling anger in the face of the murder machine apologist, face contorting like a cornered rat. These people know that the jig is up, no one trusts them anymore, no one is listening to them; all they have are straw men, ad hominems and syrupy appeals to emotion.
This is why we have the absurd stories of viagra fuelled rape squads and all the other completely bat-shit insane lies paraded by the lie machines. These stories, the manufactured propaganda smears are as sick as the people who repeat them. They need to go this far, because they have been caught lying so many times with the more reasonable sounding stories that only completely crazy scenarios will work to grasp anyone’s attention.
Sadly for them, thanks to the internet, these lies do not last more than a few days before they are completely debunked. They are running out of tools (plausible and implausible lies) that they can sell. This is why they are so angry; there is no higher volume to turn their lies to past eleven on the dial, and it is why, as you can see in the video above, they are so angry at Russia Today, who are playing better chess than them.
Russia Today is outflanking all other news media by telling the truth using the mouths of people who have the truth in them.
They get on a wide variety of completely credible people to tell you the whole truth, and who, when you research what you have been told, can be verified every time as telling the whole truth.
Contrast this with what The Times, the BBC and The Guardian peddle, and you begin to understand why Russia Today has all the respect, attention and the traffic, and why the US/UK mainstream media is losing money, credibility and attention.