Interior Ministry demands VPNs blockage, claims it is used by ‘terrorists to facilitate violent activities’

 The Interior Ministry on Friday asked the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to block “illegal VPNs” across Pakistan, citing their use by terrorists to “facilitate violent activities” and to “access pornographic and blasphemous content”.

Virtual Private Networks, better known as VPNs, are widely used around the world to access content that may be inaccessible or blocked for internet users in their home country. In the case of Pakistanis, they are used to access X, among other restricted websites.

On Wednesday, the PTA said that VPN usage would be restricted in the future to curb access to pornographic content, following a disruption that rendered VPNs dysfunctional across the country on Sunday.

In a statement, the authority claimed it had so far blocked 100,183 URLs containing blasphemous content, as well as 844,008 pornographic websites. It also claimed that approximately 20 million attempts were made from within the country to access pornographic websites daily, which were blocked at the international gateway level.

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