Internet Privacy ? High speed internet subscribers targeted by police in Nepal

What is the speed of your internet connection?

If you live in Nepal, and are subscribed to internet speed more than 1mbps, forget about your privacy. The police are snooping on those high-speed internet users.

After a couple of failures on internet banning attempts, police has thought of this new tactics to deal with illegal users of internet. Previously, police had directed ISPs to block sex related sites. The step proved to to short-sighted approach, as I suspected, and implementation was not done effectively. Some of the ISPs (e.g. Subishu) have blocked xNepali.com, and hence we are seeing lower than usual traffic from Nepal these days.

After the failure of identifying which site to block and which not, the police blocked 5 voip sites. The very next day, Google announced its internet phone service which offered free calls to US and Canada. Thank god, they didn’t try blocking Google.

It seems, until now, the police didn’t know it was the Nepal Telecommunication Authority (NTA) that handles the management of ISPs. When ISPs refused to give the information directly to the police, the police had to go to the NTA to ask for the information.

The police has asked for the name, address, and the copy of Citizenship certificate of the subscribers. For companies they have also asked for the company registration certificate.

According to a NTA report total internet subscribers in Nepal are 1million 359 thousand. Among them all except 65,000 subscribers are the clients of Nepal Telecom (NTC), a government owned company. (based on a Nagariknews article)