Old and New Media: Converging During the Pakistan Emergency (March 2007-February 2008)

3. Disconnected: Jamming cellular networks

November 6, 2007: Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry addresses the nation

As the public adopted alternative media platforms, the government escalated its efforts to control communication and news dissemination. On November 6, the ousted chief justice of the Supreme Court, who had been placed under house arrest when emergency rule was declared, chose to address the nation via cellphone. In his talk, he called for mass protests against the government and the immediate restoration of the constitution. Justice Chaudhry placed a conference call to members of the Bar Association, who relayed his message via loudspeakers. That broadcast was intended to be further relayed by members of the crowd who had planned to simply hold their cellphones up to the loudspeakers to allow remote colleagues and concerned citizens to listen in on the address. More ambitious members of the crowd planned to record the message on their cellphones and subsequently distribute it online.

However, most mobile phone services in Islamabad went down during Chaudhry’s address, prompting suspicions that they had been jammed by the government.[23] In the first few days of the emergency, sporadic efforts to cut telephone lines and jam cellphone networks were common, even though the telecommunications infrastructure in Pakistan is privately owned. Mobile connectivity at the Supreme Court, protest sites, and the homes of opposition politicians and lawyers who were placed under house arrest was jammed at different times. In off-the-record interviews, employees at telecommunications companies explained that the government had threatened to revoke their operating licenses in the event that they did not comply with jamming requests.

The government’s attempts to jam cellphone networks during the emergency demonstrates that, much like television, cellphones had become an integral medium of information dissemination and community organizing across Pakistan. This is not surprising given that cellphones have been the most rapidly adopted--and adapted--technology in Pakistan’s history.

Between the late 1990s and July 2006, mobile penetration in Pakistan increased from 0.2 percent of the population to an unprecedented 43.6 percent.[24] Months before the emergency declaration, in August 2007, there were 68.5 million mobile phone users across Pakistan, which amounts to 60 percent of the total potential cellphone market in Pakistan.[25] Given Pakistan’s leapfrog into the era of wireless communications, it is not surprising that the authorities were intimidated by the public’s unprecedented and instantaneous connectivity during a time of political instability. Indeed, citizen journalists and activists harnessed this connectivity in subsequent protest rallies as well as during the February 2008 general election.

SMS text messaging also played a large role in helping communities organize protests during the emergency. Owing to the low literacy rate and the non-availability of mobile platforms in local languages, SMS traffic has remained low. That said, 2007 saw a marked increase to 8,636 million text messages exchanged from 1,206 million in 2006.[26] On July 20, 2007, when the Justice Chaudhry was first reinstated, 400 million SMS messages were sent nationwide. According to the PTA, that is the highest number of SMS generated in one day in Pakistan. But mobile service providers claim that a record number of SMS messages were exchanged in the five days after emergency rule was declared (statistics to support this fact are not available). No doubt, in the absence of independent news channels, text messaging emerged as an instantaneous way for people to update each other on developments such as protest rallies and the numerable arrests of lawyers, journalists, and activists. In the early days of the emergency, SMS text messaging was lauded across the Pakistani blogosphere as the savior of communication in a time of crisis.