Pakistan calls jihad on YouTube… and fails life

How dumb are these people? Only last week did swiss bank syndicate Bank Julius Baer learn (we hope) that Internet censorship is FUTILE in their lame attempt to censor WikiLeaks. Now, Pakistan is taking a limp-penis poke at net-censorship by attempting to block YouTube, only to screw themselves off the net.

These blogs from ZDNet’s Richard Stiennon shows the brief timeline thus far:

3:16 PM Eastern US time:

Pakistan takes out YouTube by ZDNet’s Richard Stiennon — Like I said in a recent post, the Internet is a series of tubes. Sometimes that helps route around malicious legislation and regulators, somethings it causes big problems. Like today at 2 PM eastern when someone in Pakistan announced a more specific BGP route announcement for the block of IP addresses that YouTube uses. Routers […]

3:36 PM:

Pakistan declares war on YouTube by ZDNet’s Richard Stiennon — What could at first have been just one of those days on the Internet where some newbie engineer accidentally announces a spurious route and takes out a segment of the network has turned into an international fiasco. But no, Pakastan has ordered all ISP’s to block YouTube. From Yahoo news: ISLAMABAD (AFP) - Pakistan has […]

4:40 PM:

Pakistan removed from the Internet by ZDNet’s Richard Stiennon — 4:30 PM Eastern (US). The telecom company that carries most of Pakistan’s traffic, PCCW, has found it necessary to shut Pakistan off from the Internet while they filter out the malicious routes that a Pakistani ISP, PieNet, announced earlier today. Evidently PieNet took this step to enforce a decree from the Pakistani government that ISP’s […]

Richard’s third blog has his comment that pretty much puts the Pakistani zealots in their place:

A religious state, Pakistan, identifies a content provider, YouTube, as the source of blasphemous, seditious content and orders, King Canute style, that the Internet tides be stopped. A zealous ISP ignorantly decides the best way to comply with the decree is to re-route all of YouTube’s IP addresses to whatever site they thought was more appropriate. The first repercussion was that YouTube disappeared from the Internet for almost an hour. I suspect the second repercussion was that Pakistan’s Internet access crawled to a halt as all of a sudden they were handling IP requests for one of the busiest sites in the world. As of this writing YouTube has announced more granular routes so that at least in the US they supercede the routes announced by PieNet. The rest of the world is still struggling. So, while working on a fix that will filter out the spurious route announcements, PCCW has found it necessary to shut down Pakistan’s Internet access. The leadership of Pakistan just created a massive Denial of Service on their own country.

Pakistan took itself offline… SMOOTH MOVE EX-LAX!

Musharraf calls “blasphemy,” someone else calls “shenanigans.” The Islamabad zealots called for the blockage of YouTube for “containing ‘blasphemous’ content and material considered offensive to Islam.”

…BUT…

There may be another reason for the god-squad’s knee-jerk reaction, as shown in this post on Blogger News Network:

Musharraf’s Inquisition: Reason Why YouTube Was Blocked In Pakistan
February 24th, 2008 by Farrukh Khan Pitafi

The telecommunication authorities are claiming in Pakistan that YouTube was blocked for featuring allegedly blasphemous documentaries. While this move if triggered by this motive is as foolish as burning an entire library just because on a page of one of the books someone has scribbled a couple of words against you, it is far from truth. Actually Musharraf is a very self centered and insecure man these days and has recently learned from his sycophants that YouTube carries many videos critical of his government especially his torture on lawyers and political captives and since during this campaign technology played critical role in influencing people he wants to block out every kind of criticism. Again many citizens have reportedly uploaded video clips showing rigging under process in the constituencies where his allies either won or managed to dilute the verdict. There is distant though connected evidence why this must be true.

The day when the government decided to block YouTube two things happened. First AAJ TV brought back on air two of its anchors banned by Musharraf. The channel was immediately blocked by the satellite operator. The crime of the two anchors (Nusrat Javed and Mushtaq Minhas) was only to doubt Musharraf’s previous claims thinking out loud on television. Musharraf’s this ban has affected many of Pakistan’s leading anchors and opinion leaders of which I am aware of Dr Shahid Masood, Hamid Mir, Asma Sherazi and Kashif Abbasi apart from the above two.

The second thing that happened was the airing of an investigative report by Geo television which showed footage of rigging in the constituencies of Musharraf loyalists made through hidden camera. This too has reportedly not gone down well with Musharraf. Since in the past the regime also tried to block google’s weblog hosting service blogger.com in the name of countering blasphemy, the ban on YouTube does not seem anything different. But Musharraf’s toadies are not happy with Pakistani blogs and cable channels too. So a similar ban may follow on these outlets too unless the west pressures him not to do so. This episode however has exposed Musharraf’s liberal credentials and committment to fighting extremism yet again.

Lessons NOT learned. Somebody didn’t learn from Bank Julius Baer’s idiocy in trying to get WikiLeaks shut down, but since they’ve cut themselves off the net it’s understandable. If Pakistan needs to learn a lesson, it is this:

You silence the TRUTH, it will become louder.
You blind the TRUTH, it will become brighter and clearer.
You suppress the TRUTH, it will oppress you.
You close the door on the TRUTH, it will open the windows.
You imprison the TRUTH, it will escape.
You devalue the TRUTH, it will become more valuable than you can afford.
You claim the TRUTH is a lie, it will prove YOU are the lie.
You strangle the TRUTH, it will slip through your iron fist like so much sand.
You declare the TRUTH is dead, it will live longer and stronger.

And as ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn wrote:

Congratulations, Musharraf. You just screwed the nation you’re supposed to lead.