I AM The Universe: Random Thoughts

I read this (original post by T2F here)on a friends blog, and I find it equally disturbing as it is unlawful. Eh, since when did laws become unlawful? Anyway, it’s Pakistan, and I think that after this bill is passed, we will be right on track with superpowers like China. We will be one step closer to every Pakistani governments dream of control and censorship of the media. Here, the medium being targeted is the Internet and cellular networks.

The bill does not warrant internet censorship directly, but it will bring us one step closer to a form of censorship directly endorsed by the government. We have previously seen censorship in the form of banning the blogspot.com domain.

But the current issue that we have with this bill is the amount of legal access that it provides the government to email messages, mobile texts and other data of the citizens. I assume that these steps were taken to make citizens more secure on the internet, with cyber-crime seeping into our culture slowly, and our generally unaware public becoming an easy target.

But perhaps our policy makers fail to realize how to make people more comfortable with technology. I, for one, am not comfortable with anyone reading my emails – be it a malicious hacker or the government. What we need is an e-crimes bill that does not violate privacy. Especially so when this can have me convicted for sweetly addressing someone with a friendly, four letter word.

It is now tough for me to decide which is worse – internet censorship, or providing someone access to my emails and texts. Oh well, in a few years we won’t have to deal with this dilemma in Pakistan, since both these policies will probably be in effect.

EDIT: Some small tips for keeping your email messages secure.

1. Avoid using email services hosted in Pakistan, or any other country that has such laws concerning privacy (Duh!)
2. If you use webmail services like Windows Live Mail (formerly Hotmail), or Gmail, use a secure server if possible. For gmail, you can do this but using:
   https://www.gmail.cominstead of just http://www.gmail.com. Yahoo uses secure services in the background (no visible https address), but the security of Windows Live Mail remains lacking beyond the login point
3. As Zohair pointed out in the comments section, you can use GPG keys to secure your emails. For a GPG tutorial, go here. I will hopefully do a step-by-step, easy to understand GPG guide on this blog in the near future.
4. Always address the other person with respect, and treat him nicely, in case all your above efforts fail.

Allow me to go a little off topic with this hilarious parody on that Anti-Piracy Ad that we’ve been seeing so much of: