Articles & Reports

A comprehensive review of Pakistan's legislative framework governing digital freedom of expression, examining how cybercrime statutes are deployed against journalists, activists, and minorities - and the structural gaps that enable abuse.

An examination of the use of electoral data during and after Pakistan's 2024 general election without voter consent - mapping the legislative gaps, the actors involved, and the technical mechanisms through which data was accessed and deployed.

This report documented the systematic use of digital platforms by coordinated right-wing religious networks to target and silence women journalists in Pakistan - tracing the technical and organisational infrastructure behind these campaigns and their policy implications for platforms and state actors.

A historical analysis tracing the structural origins of gendered disinformation as a tool of political control, situating contemporary coordinated online harassment within longer patterns of patriarchal power and state-adjacent media manipulation.

Examines how Pakistan's blasphemy legislation has been progressively deployed to censor online expression, situating this local enforcement pattern within the global debate on platforms, harmful speech regulation, and government overreach.

A foundational review of privacy and data protection practices across Pakistan's telecommunications sector - one of the first systematic analyses as to how Pakistani telecoms, at the time of the report, handled government access requests, subscriber data, and retention practices.

An analysis of Pakistan's Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA) and its implications for freedom of expression - arguing that the law's broad provisions create significant potential for abuse while failing to address the genuinely dangerous speech it claims to target.

A critical examination of proposals to use GPS tracking technology as a punitive measure for domestic violence offenders - interrogating the privacy implications, the assumptions embedded in the technology, and what it means to locate safety in surveillance.

Following the Hacking Team data breach of July 2015, this report traced how Pakistani intelligence agencies sought to acquire commercial surveillance software - providing one of the first detailed accounts of state procurement of offensive surveillance capabilities in the region.

An examination of the risks of large-scale metadata surveillance, using the case of journalist Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan - reportedly placed on a US terrorist watchlist based on metadata-driven profiling - to highlight how pattern analysis can misidentify individuals and chill press freedom.