According to several organizations, on February 22, 2012, the National ICT R&D Fund, representing the government of Pakistan, placed an advertisement in the press calling on companies to submit proposals “for the development, deployment and operation of a national level URL Filtering and Blocking System.”
Broad censorship of the internet by governments, and restricting citizen access runs counter to Websense Policy on Government-Imposed Censorship and the principles of the Global Network Initiative (GNI), which we are an active member of.
Websense will not submit a response to this request for proposal (RFP), and we call on other technology providers to also do the right thing for the citizens of Pakistan and refuse to submit a proposal for this contract. Broad government censorship of citizen access to the internet is morally wrong. We further believe that any company whose products are currently being used for government-imposed censorship should remove their technology so that it is not used in this way by oppressive governments.
Websense will work with the GNI and other interested parties to continue to pressure our peers to not only refuse this RFP, but to adopt general policies so that they will also refuse to support government-imposed censorship of the internet in the future.