Pakistan is not new to censorship. But trying to censor the Internet is a futile task.

And even though the Pakistani government has done it before, Pakistan’s legal community and telecommunication regulators are finding out again how difficult it is.

After banning Facebook across the nation on May 19 because of objectionable content on the super popular website, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) quickly slid down the slippery slope slicked by the Lahore High Court and a group called the Islamic Lawyers’ Movement.

The next day, May 20, Pakistani netizens found YouTube blocked. Then it was Wikipedia. Then there were rumours that Flickr was down. I became paranoid when my Gmail account was acting up. Then Google seemed to stop responding for a while late in the night while my searches on yahoo.com were providing fast results. How far would they go?

Objectionable material can be found anywhere. And if this is how the government and our esteemed courts are going to handle all the haters, dissenters, critics and fools in the world, then they might as well ban the web altogether.

Google’s feature to allow the viewing of cached pages allowed people to find wikipedia’s “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” entry easily on May 20. The original poster-style cartoon done by the US artist Molly Norris that inspired the call for depictions of the Prophet (PBUH) was there for everyone in Pakistan to see. (Note: for a while even mollynorris.com was blocked on May 20-21). Cached pages of the Facebook group that caused the ban could also be opened.

In fact, routes around the ban were popping up within hours of the original announcement on the 19th. Messages were being traded telling people to use a website called Facebook Proxy. Google the term “Facebook Proxy” and you’ll get over eight million hits. (Many corporate firms dislike Facebook as much as some Islamists, just for different reasons).

The government had trouble with the endless trails leading to blasphemous content. In a Reuters report, PTA spokesman Khurram A. Mehran spoke about the decision to block YouTube:

“Before shutting down (YouTube), we did try just to block particular URLs or links, and access to 450 links on the Internet were stopped, but the blasphemous content kept appearing so we ordered a total shut down.”

Imagine that.

Surely, the blocking of sites will continue while this court order is in place. The press release on the PTA website that provides information on the Facebook ban actually calls out for the public’s help in spotting “objectionable” material.

PTA has established a Crisis Cell to monitor all such contents.  PTA’s helpline toll free number 0800-55055 and email [email protected] can be used to notify all similar URLs where such objectionable material is placed.

The infamous FB group is objectionable and hateful. Hate material should be banned. But by now the PTA’s phone lines must be jammed.

Note: As of May 21, Wikipedia was accessible again. So was flickr and mollynorris.com.