The government is planning to ink an agreement with the US authorities in order to be better equipped at handling militant and terrorist activities on the internet.
The plan emerged from the thought that most of the social media websites are operated from the US.
“We will be able to stop criminal activities on those websites if we can sign an agreement with the US federal government,” an official of the Telecommunications Division of the government told the Dhaka Tribune.
The authorities of these websites are obliged to obey certain set of rules to operate, and the Bangladesh government plans to sign the agreement to get some privileges.
The official also said: “If the Bangladesh government gets into an agreement with any individual company, it might be tough to get assistance from other companies. Instead, signing a deal with the government will give a better opportunity to combat cyber crime.”
In 2012, the government temporarily blocked YouTube, the most popular video sharing website in the world, after a controversial video titled “Innocence of Muslims” was posted on it.
It had to be blocked because the government could not convince the YouTube authorities to either withdraw the video or impose a region-specific ban for Bangladesh. That ban was finally lifted after nearly nine months.
On Tuesday, an information technology expert suggested that the killers of publisher Faisal Arefin Dipan and the attackers on another publisher Ahmedur Rashid Tutul used social networking site Twitter and instant messaging software Viber to communicate before, during and after the missions. Whenever militant groups have claimed responsibility of murders in the past, almost every time the claims were posted on Twitter.
The plan to sign an agreement with the US is part of a recent move of the Post and Telecommunication Ministry to identify why the country’s telecom regulator has been failing to stop criminal activities on the cyber world.
In a recent meeting, the ministry asked the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) to prepare a report as soon as possible with suggestions to solve the issues, a senior ministry official, who attended the meeting, said yesterday.
Based on this report the ministry is looking to sign the deal with the US government.
The BTRC was supposed to submit the report within 10 days of getting the working paper prepared after that meeting. However, that paper has not arrived at the BTRC office as of yesterday.
