Haq's Musings: Pakistan Boosts Electronic Surveillance to Fight Terror
Pakistan is building digital surveillance capacity to rival America's NSA with broad public support in the country, according to a report by London-based Privacy International.
"Attacks against civilian targets in Pakistan’s cities have also fed popular support for communications surveillance and other efforts to register and monitor the civilian population, including national databases and mandatory SIM card registration", says the report. Pakistan requires universal SIM card registration by fingerprint, and maintains a national biometric ID database.
Pakistan has seen nearly 60,000 of its citizens die in incidents of terrorism since theUS invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, according to data reported by South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP). What is happening in the country now follows a familiar pattern seen elsewhere in the world: Faced with growing terror threat, people are willing to trade privacy for security.
Like the US National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program, the Pakistani effort includes both voice and data communications. Over 70 per cent of the country's population uses mobile phones, and an estimated 11 per cent of the population has internet access, the report says. This makes surveillance in Pakistan advanced and comprehensive as there are currently 50 operational internet providers and five mobile phone operators. Pakistan government has acquired technology and purchased equipment for surveillance from local as well as some foreign companies such as Ericsson, Alcatel, Huawei, SS8 and Utimaco. Here's an excerpt from the report:
"In June 2013, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s best known intelligence agency, sought to develop a mass surveillance system by directly tapping the main fibreoptic cables entering Pakistan that carried most of the nation’s network communication data. The confidential request for proposals outlines a “Targeted IP Monitoring System and COE [Common Operations Environments]” that aimed to capture and store approximately 660 gigabits of internet protocol (IP) traffic per second under ISI control. This system would make available virtually all of the nation’s domestic and international communications data for scrutiny, the most significant expansion of the government’s capacity to conduct mass surveillance to date. The total intake of data every second sought by Pakistan in the proposal document would rival some of the world’s most powerful surveillance programmes, including the UK’s ‘Tempora’ and US’ ‘Upstream’ programmes. What the ISI wanted to build, according to the request for proposals, was a complete surveillance system that would capture mobile communications data, including Wi-Fi, all broadband internet traffic, and any data transmitted over 3G. According to the documents, the interception activities were to be “seamless” and “must not be detectable or visible to the subscriber”.
Source: South Asia Terrorism Portal
Pakistan has seen a significant decline in terror-related deaths in the last two years. Civilian death toll has declined from 3001 in 2013 to 1781 in 2014 and 577 so far this year, according to SATP. It's attributed mainly to the launch of Pakistan Army'sOperation Zarb e Azb against militants in 2013. It is believed that increased electronic surveillance has probably contributed to at least some of this success in reducing death toll.
Related Links:
Haq's Musings
Pakistan's Biometric Registration Database
Operation Zarb e Azb Launch
Ex Indian Spy Documents RAW's Successes in Pakistan
Intelligence Failures in Preventing Daily Carnage in Pakistan
What If Musharraf Had Said NO to US After 911?
Pakistani Computer Scientist Fights Terror
3G 4G Rollout Spurs Data Services Boom in Pakistan
Fiber Optic Connectivity in Pakistan
Haq's Musings: Pakistan Boosts Electronic Surveillance to Fight Terror
Pakistan is building digital surveillance capacity to rival America's NSA with broad public support in the country, according to a report by London-based Privacy International.
"Attacks against civilian targets in Pakistan’s cities have also fed popular support for communications surveillance and other efforts to register and monitor the civilian population, including national databases and mandatory SIM card registration", says the report. Pakistan requires universal SIM card registration by fingerprint, and maintains a national biometric ID database.
Pakistan has seen nearly 60,000 of its citizens die in incidents of terrorism since theUS invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, according to data reported by South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP). What is happening in the country now follows a familiar pattern seen elsewhere in the world: Faced with growing terror threat, people are willing to trade privacy for security.
Like the US National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program, the Pakistani effort includes both voice and data communications. Over 70 per cent of the country's population uses mobile phones, and an estimated 11 per cent of the population has internet access, the report says. This makes surveillance in Pakistan advanced and comprehensive as there are currently 50 operational internet providers and five mobile phone operators. Pakistan government has acquired technology and purchased equipment for surveillance from local as well as some foreign companies such as Ericsson, Alcatel, Huawei, SS8 and Utimaco. Here's an excerpt from the report:
"In June 2013, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s best known intelligence agency, sought to develop a mass surveillance system by directly tapping the main fibreoptic cables entering Pakistan that carried most of the nation’s network communication data. The confidential request for proposals outlines a “Targeted IP Monitoring System and COE [Common Operations Environments]” that aimed to capture and store approximately 660 gigabits of internet protocol (IP) traffic per second under ISI control. This system would make available virtually all of the nation’s domestic and international communications data for scrutiny, the most significant expansion of the government’s capacity to conduct mass surveillance to date. The total intake of data every second sought by Pakistan in the proposal document would rival some of the world’s most powerful surveillance programmes, including the UK’s ‘Tempora’ and US’ ‘Upstream’ programmes. What the ISI wanted to build, according to the request for proposals, was a complete surveillance system that would capture mobile communications data, including Wi-Fi, all broadband internet traffic, and any data transmitted over 3G. According to the documents, the interception activities were to be “seamless” and “must not be detectable or visible to the subscriber”.
Source: South Asia Terrorism Portal
Pakistan has seen a significant decline in terror-related deaths in the last two years. Civilian death toll has declined from 3001 in 2013 to 1781 in 2014 and 577 so far this year, according to SATP. It's attributed mainly to the launch of Pakistan Army'sOperation Zarb e Azb against militants in 2013. It is believed that increased electronic surveillance has probably contributed to at least some of this success in reducing death toll.
Related Links:
Haq's Musings
Pakistan's Biometric Registration Database
Operation Zarb e Azb Launch
Ex Indian Spy Documents RAW's Successes in Pakistan
Intelligence Failures in Preventing Daily Carnage in Pakistan
What If Musharraf Had Said NO to US After 911?
Pakistani Computer Scientist Fights Terror
3G 4G Rollout Spurs Data Services Boom in Pakistan
Fiber Optic Connectivity in Pakistan
Haq's Musings: Pakistan Boosts Electronic Surveillance to Fight Terror
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That is what happens when patriotism takes over logical sense or you have no domain knowledge but goes boo boo according to just one report who only mentions RFPs. On a side note, even UK's GCHQ obtained data of their citizens for scrutiny from NSA because they couldn't do it.
Can you kindly tell me what is a cyber attack and how it happens and of what kind I am going to face? I have no knowledge of traditional weaponry so I won't ever make a comment about what JF-17 or MI blah blah is. Here likely, you have no knowledge of how this works but like OP for some reason you feel obliged to magnify something based on an international report. which only mentions request for proposals. We are "this much advanced" that there is one single point of connection to Internet. Even Oman has more. Find out how many data centers are there in Pakistan and their computing capacity? Then we can talk about indigenous capability to store and analyze data moving at speed of 660 Gbps. I don't think that it would be even possible in far future. And if it is going to be outsourced, well 
