Big Brother is alive and well

Pakistan is becoming increasingly Orwellian as the years pass. In a digital age information is tightly controlled — the YouTube ban is perhaps the most obvious — and the actions of organisations such as Pemra that is currently busy giving warnings about criticism of a ‘friendly’ state, all serve to curb our freedoms. The state also wants to know a lot more about us than it already does, and it already knows a substantial amount courtesy of NADRA. Federal security agencies are distributing pro-formas at universities that require sectarian identification of the faculty members as well as students and other staff in Jamshoro, which has three large public-sector universities. Additionally, individuals are required to submit police verification reports as to their political, ethnic, religious and sectarian affiliations, a gross invasion of privacy to say the very least.

The burden that is being placed on the police is considerable, and begs the question as to how the police are to perform such a mammoth task of data collection and then set in place a process whereby individuals make an application for the verification of the data sought by government agencies. Students are also being asked about their current and permanent addresses and how far they live from the border, Line of Control or the Working Boundary. It is just possible to admit that there may be legitimate purpose in this attempt to gather data widely, and agencies may argue that it will help them understand and identify trends in population concentrations, extremist hotspots and the like — but equally the collection of data in this manner within universities may also be used as a vehicle for the harassment of individuals or worse by agencies that have little public accountability. There is clearly a justified need for data such as this to be gathered from those seeking jobs at sensitive sites — any nuclear installation, for instance — but to run a catch-all exercise across an entire campus from vice-chancellor to chowkidar is of doubtful practicality, and we would urge at least a rethink by Big Brother.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 7^th, 2015.

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