A ban with an asterisk
On December 24, 2025, Bangladesh's Council of Advisers approved the Telecommunication (Amendment) Ordinance 2025, inserting a new Section 97 that bars the government from shutting down internet or telecom services "under any circumstances" — no more executive-order blackouts, ever, according to the ordinance summary reported by ViewsBangladesh. The same ordinance formally abolished the National Telecommunication Monitoring Centre (NTMC), the home-ministry surveillance unit that a government probe found had personally directed the July–August 2024 mobile and broadband blackouts alongside then-state-minister Zunaid Ahmed Palak, per BSS News. NTMC was to be replaced by a Centre for Information Support (CIS) that could only intercept communications on request from an authorized agency with court or review-council sign-off — a real, structural upgrade from an agency that could act unilaterally.
Eight months later, NTMC is still open for business. The Daily Star reported that a February 20, 2026 home-ministry letter granted the agency a one-year extension "until necessary rules are formulated" to operationalize the CIS — reviving, in practice, the exact body the ordinance had just dissolved. On May 20, 2026, the Cabinet Committee on Government Purchase approved Tk 94.95 crore (roughly $7.7 million) for NTMC's "Expansion of Content Blocking & Filtering System (Phase-1)": three next-generation firewalls, hybrid packet brokers, and equipment across six data centers, supplied by Global Brand PLC, according to Daily Asian Age. That is not a caretaker budget for an agency being wound down. It is a capacity build-out.
The case for keeping some capability
It would be unfair to pretend Bangladesh's government has no legitimate interest here. A telecom-monitoring capability that can flag coordinated disinformation, trace SIM-based fraud networks, or support lawful interception in a genuine national-security investigation is standard infrastructure in most democracies — the UK, the US, and India all maintain some version of it, typically under statute with judicial or parliamentary sign-off. Bangladesh's own CIS design, at least on paper, tried to import that model: interception only on request, only with court or review-council approval, with a Transparency and Accountability Committee overseeing BTRC. A government replacing an unaccountable Directorate General of Forces Intelligence spinoff with a warrant-gated successor is, in principle, exactly the reform critics of the 2024 shutdowns asked for.
The problem is sequencing and evidence. The transition rules that would make CIS's safeguards real do not yet exist eight months after the ordinance passed, and in their absence the government has simply kept the old, unsupervised agency running — and funded its content-blocking hardware, not its oversight infrastructure. If NTMC were truly a bridge to CIS, the Tk 94.95 crore would plausibly have gone toward interception-request logging, court-approval workflows, or the review council's technical needs. It went to firewalls and packet brokers for blocking and filtering at national scale. That is a capability upgrade for the agency being phased out, not a transition cost.
What the joint statement actually asks for
On July 28, 2026, eight organizations — Access Now, Amnesty International, ARTICLE 19, CIVICUS, Fortify Rights, Human Rights Watch, the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Center, and Tech Global Institute — published a joint statement on Bangladeshi surveillance, flagging that NTMC "operates without a clear public-facing statutory mandate, independent oversight mechanism, or transparency framework," and citing the May procurement as evidence that capability is expanding faster than accountability, per the full statement hosted by Tech Global Institute. Their six asks are notably modest: an independent legislative commission to review surveillance law, a new rights-respecting statutory framework, import controls on surveillance technology, judicial oversight, a parliamentary oversight committee, and narrowly drawn data-privacy exemptions. None of this asks Bangladesh to abandon lawful interception. It asks the government to finish the reform it already legislated.
Why this matters beyond Bangladesh
The 2024 blackouts cost Bangladesh's economy an estimated hundreds of millions of dollars in e-commerce, remittance processing, and garment-sector logistics disruption during the worst days of the crackdown — the kind of self-inflicted damage that a Section 97-style shutdown ban is specifically designed to prevent. That ban is worth defending and worth other governments studying. But a shutdown ban that leaves the pre-existing content-blocking and filtering apparatus fully funded and operationally intact solves only the most visible half of the 2024 story. Bangladesh's reformers correctly diagnosed that NTMC's unaccountable structure, not just its power to flip the kill switch, was the underlying defect. Eight months of "rules not yet formulated" is long enough that the delay itself has become the policy. If the government wants credit for the December 2025 reform, the fastest way to earn it is to publish the CIS transition timeline, freeze further NTMC procurement until it does, and let BTRC's own new transparency mandate — the public hearings every four months the ordinance requires — apply to NTMC's remaining year in exactly the way it was designed to.