Commonwealth Telecommunication Organization has organized a workshop on “Tackling Cybercrime in the Telecommunications Sector in Pakistan” from 15-16 March 2018 in facilitation provided by Ministry of IT & Telecom. Senior delegates from CTO and Commonwealth Secretariat have arrived in Islamabad to conduct this workshop. The CTO is mandated to assist the 53 countries of the Commonwealth to leverage all forms of ICTs for socio-economic development. This workshop is part of capacity building activities for its member countries and will focus on subjects including, global cybercrime landscape, legal responses to cybercrime, data protection etc. Ms. Anusha Rahman Khan, Minister of State for IT & Telecom inaugurated the workshop. The session was also attended by His Excellency Thomas Drew, High Commissioner of the United Kingdom to Pakistan. Mr. Drew emphasized the need of collaborations in tackling cybercrimes. While acknowledging the technological advances in ICTs, he also indicated the potential threats arising out of ever increasing reliance on cyberspace during his remarks. Ms. Anusha Rahman Khan, highlighted that Pakistan had promulgated PECA in 2016 which has made many online crimes cognizable. She particularly referred to child protection online. She stressed upon that users of cyberspace should have same rights and protection as are available offline. The Minister also acknowledged the increasing misuse of cyberspace for criminal acts, however, she was of the view that development activities in ICTs should continue to grow. She also highlighted significant projects which ministry has undertaken to benefit the society using ICTs particularly the infrastructure development in Baluchistan and FATA, social uplift of girls through “ICT for Girls” in which young girls of 226 schools of Islamabad are being trained on coding and cloud computing programs. Director Operations, CTO thanks the Ministry for its facilitation and highlighted the importance of tackling cybercrime. He said that as we were moving in e-commerce and IoTs era, we should be focused on securing our privacy and be well aware of potential risks in cyberspace.
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