Don’t Block the Blog confirms this.

Update: Associated Press (via New TeeVee) reports that Pakistan has removed the block that resulted in a worldwide block of the service. The offending video has been removed, of course. It’s an education to realize that one group of people in one country can deprive the entire world of a communications vehicle.

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Update: In a “near global blackout,” the actions of the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority managed to bring down all of YouTube for nearly every YouTube user! It’s bad enough when the delicate sensibilities of a government or mob in one country compromises that country’s citizen’s ability to engage in debate. It is simply unacceptable when the censorship activities of one country put the screws to the whole world. Enough already.

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RSF reports that YouTube was blocked Friday by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority for the presence of “non-Islamic objectionable video.”

(T)he PTA, the official Internet regulatory body, ordered all Pakistani ISPs to block access to the website until further notice . . . Don’t Block the Blog, a group of Pakistani bloggers who combat censorship, thinks the blockage order was prompted by two videos. One is anti-Islamic. The other shows voters describing the fraud they witnessed during the parliamentary elections on 18 February, which ended up being won by the opposition Pakistan People’s Party.

We’ve asked our friend Dr. Awab of Don’t Block the Blog for a comment. See below in comments section.

(T)here’s been a joint-united protest by bloggers, students and human rights activists outside one of the homes of judges from the supreme court in pakistan who refused to take oath under the new pco this morning. About more than 5,000 students and bloggers from LUMS - Lahore University of Management Sciences have been receving threats of all sorts and attempts of arrest by intelligence and armed riot police while about 40-60 folks including Hina Jilani and Asma Jahangir are protesting in a peaceful rally outside the judge’s house. Students from LUMS are sending in their sms updates to the blog over here: teeth.com.pk/blog and here: pakistanmartiallaw.blogspot.com.

Later, he forwarded an SMS message from Urooj Zia, a journalist and blogger who was briefly arrested last week:

We were brutally lathi-charged [Baton Charged]. Got hit thrice on my head and then on my arms and hands when I tried to protect my head. Women were punched. Head hurts but we didn’t give in. They were forced to let us move forward. We’re outside the Islamabad Press Club now.

Police, on Tuesday, baton-charged journalists protesting against the closure of Geo News, outside the Karachi Press Club. Several journalists were wounded in the police charge. Subsequently, the arrested journalists were released at night, following relevant orders from Sindh Governor Ishratul Ibad. The media representatives were scheduled to approach the Governor House to speak with the authorities but they were accosted by the police. Thereupon, the journalists staged a sit-in protest, but the police began to arrest them. When the journalists began fleeing, the police chased them into the Press Club and began the baton-charge, wounding several of the media men.

Update: Ange, who is handling the “editing” duties on Teeth Maestro, for the duration of the crisis wrote:

(T)he journalists, bloggers and activists have all been released after a tensed standoff earlier this evening, 3 senior journalists weren’t on the list of those to be released and all 186 journalists at both cop stations refused to leave until the chief minister re-issued the order including those 4 senior journalists - that happened. I think this is the first positive stand off with productive results, and i’ve been monitoring this real close.

Ange wrote to tell us that Urooj Zia, a the journalist from the Daily Times in Pakistan and one of the folks behind the protests against martial law, and who blogs under the name Uzi, was arrested about five hours ago, along with a number of other journalists, and held for abut four hours before being released.

They were arrested by police during a protest and booked at the Docks Police Station in the town of Kemari in Karachi.

According to a statement by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, on Dr. Awab’s blog Teeth Maestro:

(T)he police under the instructions of the provincial administration attacked on a peaceful demonstration of journalists with tear gas and batons and arrested hundreds of journalists and members of civil society while more than a dozen were badly injured.

Dr. Awab Alvi of Teeth Maestro is reporting on the ground from Karachi via Blackberry.

Ange Embuldeniya is handling the actual posting out of fear that the press crackdown following Musharraf’s “state of emergency” will soon result in a crackdown on bloggers. New York Times’ blog The Lede detailed the method in a recent post.

I asked the good doctor whether blogs had been effected yet. “Luckily no,” he said. “But we remain on the watch. The government has bigger fish to fry with private news channels before they turn on us.”

Subscribe to Dr. A’s feed for reports and photos of protests and actions on the street.

Even before the “state of emergency” was declared, Pakistan began lowering the boom on electronic communications, including blogs.

Update: Pakistani students have created the Emergency Times to give constant updates on the martial law situation in their country.

It has being widely reported throughout Pakistan that access to the entire blogspot.com domain has yet again been blocked in Pakistan. For about four months (since May, 2007) Google fortunately had changed the IP address of its Blogspot servers. The new IP addresses were not demarcated as prohibited by the censorship filters located at the Pakistan Internet Exchange. Today, for some odd reason, Google has suddenly reverted back to its original IP address, which has been on the block list since March of 2006.

Don’t Block the Blog has a post today entitled, “Draconian Cyber Crime in Pakistan.”

In it the writer recounts a seminar on this law, called the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2007, which is making its way through the Pakistani legislature. The seminar was led by attorney Zahid Jamil, who outlined the legal implications.

This law seems to be written so broadly as to allow the possibility of a seven-year jail sentence for erasing information from a computer disc. Such an action becomes an act of terrorism if “altering by addition, deletion, or change or attempting to alter information that may result in the imminent injury, sickness, or death to any segment of the population.”

In other words, anything with a computer attached can be called terrorist if the judge or prosecutor or legislator decides so.

Another part of the law states, “the FIA (Federal Investigation Agency of Pakistan), has been given complete and unrestricted control to arrest and confiscate material as they feel necessary, without forcing them to present a credible case before an arrest warrant is issued, if the FIA follows the law by the book they can pick up any person or property, hold them for up to one year (extensions allowed) before appearing into the courts to challenge the case.”

If this passes, Pakistan is well on the way to becoming its own Guantanamo.

(For more in depth analysis of the law, see the above-mentioned post.)