Pakistan to develop national internet firewall to block content on internet
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ISLAMABAD- Pakistan has decided to launch an internet firewall like China to Block the undesired content on the internet.
Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) is planning to develop and setup a sophisticated turn-key Technical solution named “Web Management Solution (WMS)”, at a national level, for identifying and blocking access to the objectionable internet content and websites.
A request for proposal, for the development and deployment of the national firewall, has been issued by the regulator.
The authority has widened the scope of work for the WMS in which content of following topics will be identified and blocked on the internet for the general public.
- Blasphemous. - Pornographic - Indecent or immoral - Anti-State - Contempt of court - Law and order - Incitement to an offense - Sectarian - Others as stated in law for time being in force to be described unlawful according to Pakistan Electronic Crime Act (PECA).
PTA said that it wants a solution with an ability to identify IP addresses and information about users who are are accessing unlawful and objectionable content.
The solution is going to have an ability to display a warning to the user upon accessing unlawful web content.
It will have the ability to restrict delivery of unlawful content to the public without affecting any other content being served by the same server, site or domain.
Firewall is likely to be designed as a crawler, a program that systematically browses the World Wide Web in order to create an index of data with inbuilt and auto-learning functionality to automatically identify and classify unlawful content and make it unavailable for the public.
The system will provide real-time analysis of Internet traffic to automatically identify unlawful internet content (i.e. web pages, images, videos, words, applications etc.) and block it for public viewership as and when required.
National firewall will reportedly be able to classify websites (i.e. social, pornographic, Financial, sports, etc.). It will have an ability to collect countrywide statistics related to websites (i.e. number of times being accessed; the number of sessions etc.).
More detail about Web Solution Management could be viewed here <link>.
The internet watchdog has sought applications from service providers for complete deployment, management and maintenance of the new internet mechanism. It will include supply, installation, and configuration of applicable hardware/software/middleware to establish Web Management Solution (WMS) for live management of Internet traffic passing through country’s internet gateways.
- PTA wants selected solution providers to provide training to designated PTA Human Resource for carrying out Hardware and Software configuration and Operations of the WMS. - PTA or its designated team should be able to easily operate WMS and configure changes to tailor the solution for on-going developments in the field. - WMS should be robust and scalable for supporting increases in International bandwidth and newer Internet technologies/protocols. - PTA wants WMS hardware and software support at no cost for a period of (03) three years.
The authority has given a deadline of March 08 to interested service providers to submit their technical proposals along with budgets.
