The Citizen Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto has uncovered that Canada-based Netsweeper internet filtering products have been installed to function at the national level in Pakistan.
According to the new report, “Netsweeper technology is being implemented in Pakistan for purposes of political and social filtering, including websites of secessionist movements, sensitive religious topics, and independent media.”
In addition to using Netsweeper technology to block websites, it was found that local ISPs also use other less transparent methods such as DNS tampering to block content.
The report stated that Netsweeper has categorised over five billion URLs in total, adding approximately 10 million new URLs every day.
Its online filtering solution provides clients with an automated mechanism to bulk-filter multiple content categories that can be customised.
The report concluded that “altogether, the evidence suggests that Netsweeper filtering devices are being actively used to censor content on an ISP-wide level in Pakistan”.
