[HOT] Pakistan Anti-Mapping Legislation: Implications for HOT/OSM

[Alex Barth]

"The proposed Bill will require all government or private agencies involved in surveying and mapping to register themselves with the SoP. Failing to do so will result in one-year imprisonment and a fine of up to one million rupees."


This is fucked up. The national security argument is completely futile. I think this law would really hurt OpenStreetMap, essentially making every mapper on the ground a criminal unless they register with a gov agency (yeah, right) and it completely hampers geo-based IT innovation like Faisal said.

What can we do about this?

On Nov 26, 2012, at 1:31 AM, Faisal Chohan <faisal at cogilent.com> wrote:

> On a general terms:
> 
> 1. Laws are never implemented on powerful persons or entities in Pakistan. Laws are for general public and implemented on them harshly. And when an ordinary person gets into these cases there is no way out. It destroys all of his/her life and career.
> 
> Specific to the mapping. I am not a lawyer but this is my observation,
> 
> 1. The local laws do not affect the people living out-side Pakistan, unless they do not enter in Pakistan. e.g in one instance a case is registered against facebook founder, but it does not mean anything for the facebook founder. The only problem with the case is that the facebook founder cannot enter in Pakistan without clearing from this case. 
> 
> This directly harms the Pakistani IT community and people. As Facebook will never build a physical office in Pakistan due to this case. The powerful and rich people will have their children studying in US and then get access to the employment in companies like facebook but a general person will not.
> 
> The only problem with international projects like openstreetmap is that most of the implementations are carried out by local people. And once they cannot be involved into these projects, there seems distant possibility of any substantial projects initiated or completed. 
> 
> 2. We were doing on-ground mapping in Pakistan especially our TED prize winner project "SaafPindi". After reading this news we have stopped on ground mapping and are not updating open street map from Friday on-wards.  We are just pondering different options.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Faisal Chohan
> 
> TED Senior Fellow | www.ted.com/fellows
> Disaster and open data mapper | www.pakreport.org 
> Co-Founder | www.BrightSpyre.com
> Co-Founder | www.cogilent.com
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Mobile: +1 415 692 7920
> Twitter: @faisalchohan
> Skype: faisalchohan
> Personal Blog: http://faisalchohan.blogspot.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 7:38 AM, Kate Chapman <kate at maploser.com> wrote:
> Hi Mark,
> 
> I think it depends. If we were going to start a project in Pakistan
> physically on the ground it is a huge deal. Remote activations it
> probably isn't a huge issue for us specifically, though I wonder about
> people on the ground using the data. Would it be an issue if they were
> not mapping, but just using unofficial map sources.
> 
> There are some similar sounding laws in Indonesia, but the
> implementation has been really different. For example 2 years ago a
> law was passed that in summary says if you distribute inaccurate data
> you will pay a big fine or do jail time. We are working closely with
> Badan Informasi Geospasial (the NMA) on this however. The law is a lot
> less scary in implementation in our case than when it first come out.
> 
> Can't say that Pakistan will do the same, but it is one of those
> things where I'm not sure what we can do other than wait and see.
> 
> -Kate
> 
> On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 10:43 PM, Mark Iliffe <mark at markiliffe.co.uk> wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > I've just seen this through Twitter, it may be of relevance to those mapping
> > in/near Pakistan. The short version is thus; it seems that Pakistan is
> > legislating against mapping which ins't conducted by the national mapping
> > agency.
> >
> > http://dawn.com/2012/11/21/pakistanis-lost-without-maps/
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > Mark
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > HOT mailing list
> > HOT at openstreetmap.org
> > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/hot
> >
> 
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Alex Barth
http://twitter.com/lxbarth
tel (+1) 202 250 3633