In an unprecedented move, the government on Friday apparently forced a popular political discussion web forum Siasat.pk offline, however it was not immediately clear why the government had taken the step.
Siasat.pk, through its social media accounts, said on Friday that its name servers had been suspiciously removed by their Islamabad based domain host, Nexus.pk, without being approached before hand or being warned.The site, which hosts recordings of popular television talk shows along with discussion forums, added that they had received threats from higher authorities around five months ago, after which they had setup an alternative domain as well as a backup. However, on Friday that was down too.
While the domain host initially did not disclose who or how the site had been taken down, Siasat.pks administrator Adeel Habib was later told by the F-10 Markaz-based company that they had received a request from the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to remove the site from their servers immediately.While the government has previously opted to block websites, those hosted from within or outside Pakistan through the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, this is the first reported incident of a site being forced off the servers by the government.
In April, Adeel had posted on the forums that the site had received threats from higher authorities who had warned him of shutting down the site within five minutes if he did not comply with their demands.I will not get into the details due to security reasons. It just made me realize how vulnerable .pk domains are. Therefore as a backup, I have these domains, Adeel said.
While .pk domains are hosted in Pakistan, Nexus.pk lists that its servers are hosted in the US with state of the art security but then surprisingly mentions that it does not house your websites, applications on servers being fed with bandwidth passing through bottleneck back bones (Like PTCL).
The site, however, said that it had managed to restore its name servers but it would take a little while to restore the website. A mirror of the website was active on a different domain extension.
Siasat.pk is ranked at 98 in Pakistan receiving most of its traffic from within Pakistan with Saudi Arabia, UK and the US.
http://tribune.com.pk/story/955201/govt-forces-popular-political-discussion-forum-siasatpk-offline/
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