On 27 September 2026, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi visited the Lahore headquarters of the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) Central Zone and ordered stronger action against online harassment, digital blackmail and financial fraud. He called protecting women and children from online abuse a special priority. He also told the agency to review pending cases, expedite investigations, and strengthen digital forensics and investigator training.
The order is right about the problem. Whether it fixes anything depends on whether the agency can turn complaints into prosecutions. The evidence suggests that is where the system is failing.
The strongest case for a crackdown
The case for forceful state action is serious. Online blackmail, non-consensual intimate imagery and AI-fabricated pictures do real harm, and victims often have no practical civil remedy. Dawn reported on 13 June 2026 that the NCCIA arrested ten alleged harassers across Punjab in one day. In one Faisalabad case, a suspect allegedly used AI-generated images of a girl to extort Rs2 million. The agency also acknowledged that many related complaints remain pending.
A state that does nothing about this abandons the people least able to protect themselves, and that is a failure of speech policy too. Harassment silences women online. A free-expression agenda that ignores it is incomplete.
The numbers describe a capacity problem
The government told parliament in May that 157,465 cybercrime complaints were filed last year. The Cyber Crime Report 2025 presented to parliament counted far fewer formally registered cases. TechJuice's summary of it lists 1,285 registered cases, of which 545 were harassment. Among harassment victims, 360 were women, compared with 110 men and 15 children. The two figures measure different things, complaints and registered cases, and TechJuice's own table and text disagree in places, so treat the breakdowns as indicative.
Even so, the pattern is plain: a large intake and a narrow funnel. Figures reported to a parliamentary committee in December 2025 pointed the same way. The NCCIA had received more than 22,500 complaints of crimes against women, had only 33 female officers handling gender-based cases, and secured 26 convictions from roughly 620 registered cases in 2025. We could not locate the committee record behind those numbers, so we report them as stated in coverage of the hearing rather than independently confirmed.
The Senate Functional Committee on Human Rights raised the same concern in July. It summoned the NCCIA director general over what it called delays and technical faults in the complaint portal and a slow response to online harassment complaints. Senators said harassment cases were going without meaningful agency response.
A ministerial directive to "speed up investigations" does not create investigators, forensic labs or trained female officers. Many victims will only report to someone they trust, and 33 women officers for a complaint load in the tens of thousands cannot provide that.
Where the legal toolkit is the wrong instrument
The agency works under the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016, as amended in 2025. That amendment also added a broad offence on spreading "false or fake" information, which is under challenge in the Sindh High Court on free-speech grounds. This is the central risk. An agency stretched thin and told to show results has an incentive to pursue easy cases, and political speech complaints are often easier to process than a blackmailer hiding behind a foreign number.
The record already shows the mixed incentives. The same Dawn report that described the June arrests noted a PECA case registered against a ruling-party legislator after an actor's complaint. That is a useful sign that the harassment channel can work against powerful people. But the agency's wider public posture is enforcement volume: on 9 October Dawn reported dozens of arrests in raids on call centres in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. Raids against scam operations produce quick numbers. Slow, forensic cases on harassment of individual women do not.
What proportionate action would look like
A pro-innovation, pro-speech approach does not mean doing less about abuse. It means spending on capacity before expanding powers.
- Publish outcome data. Registered cases, charge sheets, convictions and median time to resolution, split by offence type and by victim gender. The December figures only surfaced through a hearing.
- Staff the victim-facing front line. The NCCIA's dedicated women-and-children cell in Punjab is a start. It needs trained women investigators in every zone and a complaint portal that works.
- Fund forensics. AI-generated imagery and encrypted messaging require tooling and training. This is what the minister's order actually names, and it is the part to hold him to.
- Use narrow offences. Prosecute blackmail, extortion and non-consensual imagery under specific provisions. Do not rely on vague "false information" clauses that can chill legitimate speech.
- Ask platforms for speed, not surveillance. Faster removal of reported intimate images through proportionate notice-and-action processes beats demands for broad monitoring or traceability.
The test
Naqvi's order will be judged by outcomes. If the next parliamentary briefing shows more women investigators, a shorter backlog and a conviction rate well above 26 in 620, the push worked. If it shows more arrests in call-centre raids and the same thin record on harassment, the directive was a press event. Victims deserve the former.