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7 RSIL L. Rev. 39 (2023)
Charting the Digital Surveillance Machinery of Pakistan

handle is hein.journals/rsil2023 and id is 39 raw text is: RSIL LAW REVIEW VOL. 7 2023 CHARTING THE DIGITAL SURVEILLANCE MACHINERY OF PAKISTAN MUSA SAEED I SAFA IMRAN Musa Saeed is a fifth-year law student at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan. His primary interests include environmental law and climate change policy, and poverty law. Safa Imran is a practising corporate lawyer based in Lahore. She graduated from the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in 2023, and her academic interests lie in constitutional and human rights law and their evolution in an increasingly digitised world. ABSTRACT This article identifies the form of surveillance carried out and establishes the surveillance network of the Pakistani State. The modes through which this surveillance is carried out is meticulously analyzed, from phone and wire-tapping to surveilling data from service providers like telecom companies and internet service providers. All these State actions are legitimated through the country's legislative framework and this has had adverse implications for human rights and democratic processes. To combat this, there is a need for a consolidated national data protection act with stringent enforcement mechanisms that strike a balance between the right to privacy and necessary State surveillance for national security purposes, bringing Pakistan in line with its international human rights obligations. KEYWORDS: Surveillance, surveillance network, privacy, PECA, PTA, FTA, GDPR, national security, state interests, international human rights law. 1. INTRODUCTION Defining mass surveillance is complex. Simply put, it can be defined as a focused and systematic effort to obtain information for 'tactical and strategic purposes'.' In the age of surveillance, States have formulated a variety of modes of survey.2 For the purposes of this article, the type of surveillance that best fits the phenomenon we are studying is dataveillance. Computer scientist Roger Clarke introduced the term 'dataveillance', which he defines 1 SE Costanza 'Surveillance' in A. Javier Trevino (ed), The Cambridge Handbook of SocialPoblems Volume 2 (Cambridge University Press 2018). 2 Margaret Hu 'From the National Surveillance State to the Cybersurveillance State' (2017) 13 Ann. Rev. of L. & Soc. Sci. 161, 163. 39

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