The internet is an ocean. Most Pakistanis are still wading in.

Divers in an ocean of data

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Zaki Khalid as part of a field that has only recently begun to surface in Pakistani conversation: OSINT, or open-source intelligence. Zaki, at the time consulting at the Centre for Strategic and Contemporary Research and preparing to launch his own training institute, offers the cleanest possible framing in the opening minutes.

“The internet is basically a vast ocean,” he tells Muzamil. “So you have to dive in it. The more deeper you dive, the more bits and pieces of precious things you can collect. So that’s what we do basically. We are divers.”

He sketches the three layers most people misunderstand. The surface web is what a Google query returns. The deep web is the material that exists publicly but does not surface without targeted searching. The dark web is a different domain entirely, accessed through Tor and its peers. OSINT, he is careful to say, lives almost entirely in the first two. “What we do,” Zaki says, “we just compile them together and we try to make sense of it. That’s when it transforms from information to intelligence.”

The distinction is the load-bearing idea of the conversation. Information is lying around. Intelligence is what you get when someone with discipline and ethics arranges it into a sequence that finally says something.

A childhood in atlases

Muzamil asks how Zaki ended up here, given that this career barely existed in Pakistan a decade ago. The answer is unexpectedly personal. Zaki spent his early years in the UAE, where his father worked in the government’s forestry department, and went to the Sahofat school in a multicultural environment that he credits with sparking his curiosity about the world. He memorised the capitals of every country by the age of eight.

His first real OSINT experiment, in his telling, was finding an aunt in Islamabad whose address he did not know. A now-defunct service called Carl Point hosted a PTCL directory online; Zaki fed in the few details he remembered and walked to her door. “That’s when I realised, ok, you know, this is quite thrilling that I am able to find someone while not actually going there.”

He insists he was self-taught. He read NATO’s late-1990s OSINT manual, which he describes as one of the earliest doctrinal publications in the field, and discovered that the CIA had a dedicated OSINT division. The path from curiosity to career, he tells Muzamil, was almost accidental — “that passion ultimately became a career.”

The ethics line: OSINT is not hacking, and it is not doxxing

Zaki is careful, almost insistent, about where OSINT stops. The first wall is hacking. “Hacking is totally different. It’s a complete breach of privacy. You invade someone’s system or their profile.” OSINT, by contrast, works only with what is already public. If your privacy settings are tight, he tells Muzamil plainly, “I can’t know about you.”

The second wall is doxxing — the practice of publishing what you have found in order to humiliate or expose someone. He treats this as a failure of discipline. “Research is something else and creating noise is something else.” The people in this field, he says, have to “uphold the code of ethics,” and he is candid that he learned the boundaries from mentors over years rather than from a textbook.

This is the moment in the conversation where the field stops sounding like a parlour trick and starts sounding like a profession.

Taking yourself off Google

Muzamil pivots to the question most listeners will have come for: how do ordinary people leak their information, and how do they pull it back? Zaki’s answer is structured.

The leak, almost always, is voluntary. People accept end-user licence agreements without reading them. Their Spotify playlists reveal personality. Their old university admission lists sit indexed in Google for years. From these fragments, Zaki says, a competent OSINT practitioner — or a malicious actor running a phishing campaign — can assemble enough to manipulate a target. He walks through a hypothetical: a phishing email offering exclusive early access to a band whose music you have publicly liked. “I going to click on it. Right. And then all my credentials are gone.”

The recovery, he tells Muzamil, is also structured. First, tighten privacy settings on every active social platform — that is where new exposure is generated. Second, for material that already sits indexed, file a request with Google under the framework most people know as DMCA. “You can send Google a form, and they will ask for identification and they will take it down immediately.” The cached preview that survives a page deletion is, in his telling, the real residual risk.

The advice is unglamorous and correct. Most of Pakistan, he implies, is not even doing the first step.

The dark web is mostly noise

Muzamil asks about the dark web, the part of the internet that draws the most rumour and the least understanding in Pakistan. Zaki’s answer is deflationary by design.

The dark web has no search engine, he explains — that, more than anything, is what separates it from the surface. “You can’t just type Pakistan weapons and you come across dangerous forums.” Access usually requires knowing the exact onion link, which propagates through word of mouth in the deep web. He recounts one example he came across by chance: a Florida-based forum claiming to broker hashish, cocaine and Kalashnikovs from Pakistan’s northern areas. He never bothered to verify it. The point, he tells Muzamil, is that the dark web is “just a purely different underworld” — populated mostly by people who need anonymity because what they are doing is “too inconvenient to do on the regular web.”

He is unwilling to romanticise it and unwilling to fearmonger about it. The rhetorical statements from Pakistani politicians and Twitter commentators about dark web menace, he suggests, are mostly performance.

A million real users in a country of millions

The most analytically interesting stretch of the conversation comes when Muzamil asks how OSINT and online discourse map onto Pakistan’s actual demographics. Zaki cites the numbers he trusts. As of January 2020, Pakistan had no more than two million Twitter users by reputable measures. He estimates, conservatively, that half of those are fake or bots. That leaves roughly a million real accounts driving a national conversation in a country of two hundred million plus.

Facebook is the most-used social platform. YouTube is the country’s true mass medium. “We here,” Zaki says, “people forward YouTube videos which have weird conspiracy theory material on them, and you are like, why are people believing that?” The answer he gives is structural rather than condescending: the people who live on YouTube and Facebook are not the same people who live on Twitter, and the two populations are barely talking to each other.

Muzamil takes this and pushes it further into a frame he has clearly been thinking about. Pakistan’s internet, he argues, divides cleanly into pre-2013 and post-2013 — before and after the arrival of 3G and 4G. Before, the online conversation was an extension of the same small editorial class that had run the country’s newspapers and FM stations for decades. After, the masses arrived. He runs the math: roughly six per cent of Pakistanis since 1947 have completed any university degree, and the country’s mediated public discourse has historically been authored by an even smaller slice of that six per cent. The 2013 rupture, he suggests, was not the collapse of standards. It was the moment the elite was forced to see the rest of the country and reacted, predictably, with horror. “Suddenly your driver comes online, and he gives an alternate opinion. And you say, ya chacha aisa hi hai. And you secretly want chacha to go away so the intellectuals can carry on.”

Zaki agrees with the diagnosis and adds his own marker: the 2011 Abbottabad raid, when a single Pakistani in Abbottabad tweeted in real time about strange helicopters and inadvertently broke a global story before the US president had spoken. That, in Zaki’s reading, was the moment Pakistan’s internet realised it could matter outside its own borders.

Fifth-generation warfare and the cost of public paranoia

Muzamil asks about information warfare — the much-invoked “fifth-generation warfare” that has become a fixture of Pakistani op-ed columns and political talk shows. Zaki’s answer is more sceptical than his audience might expect.

The concept, he explains, originated with US defence thinker Jim Mattis as a young officer and was later largely discarded by the military community as overstated. It was then narrowly redefined in some Western strategic literature in the context of Russia and China. “Type hybrid warfare or fifth generation on Google for the last five or six years. Nine out of ten results you will get are columns, op-eds, tweets written by Pakistanis.” The obsession, he suggests, is disproportionate.

He does not deny that information warfare exists, that adversarial states try to undermine each other, or that the EU DisinfoLab revelations about Indian influence operations were real. His objection is to the public theatre of it. He invokes a German concept he came across, Herrschaftswissen — knowledge that should not be shared with everyone. The handling of strategic threats, he tells Muzamil, belongs to the state organs whose job it is. Pulling all of it into the public square produces paranoia, crowds out conversation about the economy and education, and turns citizens into amateur traitor-hunters. “Not everything should be discussed publicly or deliberated upon so openly.”

When Muzamil presses on whether Pakistan’s state infrastructure is equipped for this fight, Zaki is blunt. The human and technical resources exist. The bureaucracy does not let them through. Colonial-era promotion criteria mean policy-shaping roles are filled by men in their fifties who would never have to do the work themselves. The reform he wants is generational and procedural before it is technological.

A society that cannot be lied to

Muzamil closes with the question he asks every guest. Zaki is thirty-two. By 2050 he will be sixty-two. What does the Pakistan of that era look like?

Zaki resists the question for a moment, then answers it carefully. “If I reach that old age, then I would see that the Pakistan of that time would be comprised of a citizenry that is extremely well informed. They would be sceptical to the bone, and they would not be someone you could bullshit with.” A well-informed society, he argues, can verify on its own and reach its own conclusions, and only such a society can produce policy that is not captured by the insecurities of its policymakers.

Muzamil presses one last time: do Pakistanis today know what is good for the country? Zaki answers as plainly as he has answered anything. “People don’t know what’s good for their own selves.” The civic project, in his framing, starts at the level of how one person speaks to another online. A disagreement framed with a reason instead of an insult. A correction made quietly instead of a pile-on. Morality, he insists, is underrated.

By the end of the conversation, Zaki has done something rare on Pakistani television: he has spent fifty-five minutes on a subject most people associate with paranoia, and has used those minutes to argue for less paranoia, not more. The internet is an ocean. Some people know how to dive. Most are still learning to swim. And the country, he believes, will be fine — in about a decade.