Written By: Shahmeer Amir
Let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment. Are we really this bothered about someone potentially looking at our data? Because if that’s the hill we want to die on, then we better start vetting every single microchip and circuit board that enters this country. That’s the rabbit hole we’re going down if we apply that logic universally. And yet, while we sit here having this same circular debate for what feels like the hundredth time, the rest of the world is already zipping along on Starlink and other LEO constellations. We’re still stuck debating whether 400 critical links should shift to satellite, when in reality, they should have been primary links yesterday, not tomorrow. But no, we keep dragging our feet, finding new reasons to delay.
The Stubborn “What If”
I keep hearing this argument about Paksat and having our own indigenous launchpad. Look, I get it. That’s the dream. That’s the ideal scenario that every sovereign nation should aspire to. But let’s be brutally honest here, when is that launch actually happening? There is no clear news, no timeline, no concrete update. We sent up Badr-1 in 1990. Our last major collaboration was Paksat-1R back in 2011 with Chinese assistance. We sent ICUBE to the moon, which was genuinely impressive, but a working, reliable launchpad for a full-fledged communications satellite? That remains a distant hope with no definite date on the horizon. So what exactly are we supposed to do, wait another thirty years twiddling our thumbs while the rest of the planet leaves us in the digital dust?
The Datacom CEO raised a valid concern recently, and I’m not dismissing the man or his expertise entirely. Security matters. Data sovereignty matters. These are not trivial issues. But is that one concern, however legitimate, substantial enough to push back on a technology whose upsides are genuinely massive and transformative? Come on now. We’re talking about banking inclusion for remote rural areas that have never seen a fiber optic cable. We’re talking about disaster recovery when terrestrial infrastructure gets washed away in floods. We’re talking about redundancy that our crumbling, aging terrestrial links just cannot provide. And let’s not forget, modern satellite systems come with end-to-end encryption baked in. That’s not a magic bullet, sure, but it gives you a pretty solid layer of assurance that your data isn’t just floating around for anyone to scoop up.
Who Actually Did the Math?
If institutions like the National Bank of Pakistan have already done their homework and moved ahead with satellite-based solutions, that should tell us something. It tells us the risk-reward math has already been crunched by people whose entire job is safeguarding financial transactions. They didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to wing it. They did the body of work. They analyzed the threats. And they still came to the conclusion that the benefits outweigh the concerns. Maybe, just maybe, we should trust that process instead of assuming we know better from the comfort of our armchairs.
The Elephant in the Room
Here’s the uncomfortable truth that nobody wants to say out loud. We are a third-world country with one of the largest youth populations on the planet, and yet we have consistently failed to cultivate the kind of talent that builds foundational digital services. Paypal still isn’t here. We couldn’t build a local alternative if our lives depended on it. So instead of having all these talking heads on television throwing around fancy words about traffic management and hypothetical backdoors, we should be racing to adopt, not finding excuses to delay. Security risks will always exist, regardless of whether the signal travels through a satellite or a fiber optic cable. Targeted interception happens, even on our own domestically operated birds, it’s simply the nature of the game in modern telecommunications. You cannot eliminate that completely. So why are we letting the fear of the perfect blind us from the genuinely good?
A Simple SWOT Reality Check
Our greatest weakness as a nation is not foreign surveillance. It’s our own tendency to overthink, overanalyze, and ultimately, overdelay. We see problems where others see opportunities. We argue about the traffic before we’ve even built the highway. We demand a flawless system before we’re willing to take the first step. Meanwhile, the world is sprinting ahead, integrating satellite tech as a primary link while we’re still trying to figure out if we should dip our toes in the water. The real danger isn’t adopting foreign technology with manageable vulnerabilities. The real danger is remaining digitally stranded while everyone else forges ahead, leaving us further behind with each passing day.
The Bottom Line
For Allah’s sake, let’s just use the tech. Let’s bring it in, deploy it aggressively, and figure out the vulnerabilities in real time as we go. Let’s patch them as we discover them, build our expertise through practical experience, and stop using security as this convenient shield for our chronic indecision. The benefits; faster communications, better banking infrastructure, broader reach into underserved areas, disaster resilience – they simply blow the risks out of the water. We’ve been waiting long enough. The rest of the world isn’t waiting for us to catch up. The launchpad may be years away. The perfect security solution may never arrive. But the technology is here, it works, and it’s ready to be used.
Shahmeer Amir is a globally recognized ethical hacker, Forbes Technology Council member, and Cyber Security Advisor to the Ministry of Finance in Pakistan, as well as the founder of multiple tech ventures including Veiliux and Speeqr.
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