Very concerned about Pakistani bloggers, activists going missing: US

WASHINGTON: The US State Department on Friday expressed concern over the missing Pakistani bloggers and social media activists and said they were monitoring the situation.

Replying to a question, State Department spokesperson, Mark C. Toner said, "We’re very concerned by reports that several Pakistani bloggers and activists have been reported missing and we’re going to continue to monitor the situation."

"We value freedom of expression, that’s something we take very seriously and are going to continue to monitor the situation in Pakistan," he added.

While commenting on the ‘tactical security operations center’ about which Secretary of State John Kerry had said that Pakistan was among the countries in which the US has state-of-the-art security operations center, Toner added it’s an embassy operations center for monitoring purpose.

“It’s basically monitoring worldwide activity 24/7 in order to – if something happens in anywhere in the world that affects our people or affects American citizens or is a crisis that it has to involve the Secretary of State or, rather, the inter-agency, the operations center is, if you will, the first responders to any kind of activity like that, to any kind of crisis.”

Elaborating on the function of these centres, Toner said the embassy operations center are kind of a central location – is a central location to a kind of coordinate security and emergency events as well as monitor threats to the embassy or its personnel and it allows for real-time communications with Diplomatic Security and department officials in Washington. It also allows us a way to connect directly with host government officials. So we have one of these in Pakistan, we have them elsewhere in the world as well.