New Delhi: In order to fast process biometric data collection to curb terrorism, the Pakistan government is pushing its citizens to either provide their fingerprints in time or face cancellation of their cellular services.
However, as the task of fingerprint scanning of the country's million-odd population includes tedious amount of work, phone companies are dispatching outreach teams deep into the countryside and mountains to notify customers of the policy.
According to a report in the Washington Post, mobile companies have until April 15 to verify the owners of all of the cards, which are tiny chips in cellphones that carry a subscriber's personal security and identity information.
Those whose prints are not in the database that was first created in 2005 must first submit them to the National Database & Registration Authority. Some residents, including several million Afghan refugees not eligible for citizenship, also have to obtain a court affidavit attesting they will properly use their cellphones.
In the past six weeks, 53 million SIMs belonging to 38 million residents have been verified through biometric screening, but there still remain 50 million more SIM cards that need verification.
A senior Interior Ministry official, who is not authorised to speak publicly about Pakistan government's security policy, said that once the verification of each SIM is done, coupled with blocking of unverified SIMs, the terrorists will no longer have this tool.
Pakistan has been battling with Islamist extremism since over a decade now and this latest move to verify every single SIM in the country comes after the recent killings of 150 students and teachers by Taliban militants who used cellphones registered on a woman's name who had no obvious connection to the attackers.
There are about 136 million cellphone subscribers in the country today, according to the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority.
Once the nationwide verification process is complete, police and intelligence officials will have a much easier time tracing the origins of crimes or terrorist attacks, said Ammar Jaffri, the former deputy director of Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency.
Cellphones have often been used to detonate explosive devices in Pakistan and the authorities are also struggling to curb extortion carried out by criminals, often affiliated with banned militant groups, who make threatening phone calls demanding money.
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