MCMC confirms lifting ban

MCMC said it

PETALING JAYA: The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) says it has unblocked the Sarawak Report and Medium now that the 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) report has been made public.

The MCMC started blocking Sarawak Report on July 2015 following complaints that the site was posting unsubstantiated information despite an ongoing investigation by a 1MDB special task force.

The Sarawak Report then started uploading its content to publishing platform Medium, resulting in it also being blocked by the MCMC in January 2016

Following the 1MDB audit report being declassified on May 15, MCMC has lifted the block on both websites.

In a post on its Facebook page, the MCMC said any action to block websites would be in-line with the laws of the country.

“Any content that is pornographic or has any threatening or vulgar elements will be blocked based on complaints from the public.

“This is all done to maintain public order,” it said in a statement.

It also explained that it had blocked the GE14 results page live.undi.info site on polling night.

It said it received complaints from the public that the results and information displayed on the site were inaccurate.

Digital transparency advocacy group Sinar Project released a report on May 16 that the website was blocked on the evening of polling day on May 9.

It claimed a couple of providers had blocked the site for several hours past 9.55pm using a method known as Domain Name Service (DNS) hijacking.

DNS hijacking works by redirecting users from their requested ser­ver to another. In this case, instead of going to the GE14 results page, visitors were sent to a site displaying MCMC’s notice.

“However, after reviewing the content, we removed the block as the criteria used to do so were no longer relevant at the moment,” said the MCMC.