• Population: 23,520 000
  • Internet users: 1,500,000 (2003)
  • Average charge for 20 hours of connection: 27 euros
  • DAI*: 0.44
  • Situation**: very serious

Saudi Arabia has created one of the world's biggest Internet filtering systems. The authorities have officially announced that they block access to nearly 400,000 webpages, with the aim of "protecting citizens from offensive content and content the violates the principles of Islam and the social norms."

The Internet blacklist in Saudi Arabia covers some very broad fields, including the websites of political organisations and Islamist movements that are not recognised, and any publication dealing directly or even very indirectly with sexuality. Saudi women, who represent nearly two thirds of the country's Internet users, can only access online content that has been expunged of any reference to their rights, their health or their intimate lives.

Saudi Arabia has no law dealing specifically with the Internet. So, in practice, it is covered by the press law, which requires all media to obtain official permission. Furthermore, the royal family has the power to dismiss journalists and appoint news media executives and editors. Free expression does not exist in Saudi Arabia, whether in the press or on the Internet.

The Saudi censorship system

The Internet Services Unit (ISU) is in charge of maintaining the Saudi Internet censorship system. It manages the gateway used by all the local Internet Service Providers (ISPs). As a result, it can monitor all online data exchanges taking place in Saudi Arabia. The ISU is also the agency that is in charge of the country domain name (.sa) and it manages the technical aspects of the Saudi Internet. But it just carries out the instructions it receives from the Saudi security services and does not decide what must be censored.

The ISU offers an online form and e-mail address ([email protected]) for Internet users who want to report sites they think should be blocked. Hundreds of requests of this kind are received every day. They are handled by a team assigned full-time to this task.

It seems that the filters installed by the ISU, with the help of such US companies as Secure Computing, are easy to get around. In fact, a seasoned Internet user can access censored sites quite quickly. The simplest solution is to go to a discussion forum offering an up-to-date list of proxy servers. In the great majority of cases, these relay servers are used to access pornography sites.

Blocked content

The sites blocked by the Saudi authorities are mainly those of a sexual, political or religious nature. (The banned religious sites do not, of course, include approved Islamic ones.) Homosexuality and women's rights are completely absent from the Saudi Internet. Music sites such as www.rollingstone.com, humour sites such as www.poopreport.com, online translation software such as www.systransoft.com and the best-known anonymizers such as www.anonymizer.com and www.megaproxy.com are also on the ISU blacklist.

The Saudi government blocked the site of the Jordanian-based Arab Region Resource Center on Violence against Women (www.amanjordan.org) on 5 August 2003 after it posted articles on the violence undergone by women in Saudi society. The blocking was lifted on 30 September 2003.

Censored gay sites

Gaymiddleeast.com, a news and information website targeted at the Middle-Eastern gay community, was rendered inaccessible by the Saudi authorities at the start of March 2004. It had already been blocked for a month in June 2003.

The site carries gay-oriented information on 15 countries (Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates and Yemen), especially about the persecution undergone by gays. The US site 365gay.com, to which Gaymiddleeast.com is affiliated, was also blocked. Homosexuality is banned in Saudi Arabia, and is punishable by imprisonment or flogging.

The OpenNet Initiative, an academic network focussing on Internet censorship, carried out a study on gay sites in Saudi Arabia. It did a search for the word "gay" in Google SafeSearch (which excludes pornographic sites) and selected the first 902 results. Of these 902 sites, 170 are blocked by the Internet Services Unit (ISU). They include:

Reporters Without Borders wrote a letter requesting the lifting of the ban on Gaymiddleeast.com. The head of the ISU, Eyas Al-Hajery, replied on 29 March: "After receiving your letter, a re-examination of these sites was carried out. As no pornographic content was found, the blocking was lifted." The two sites, 365gay.com and Gaymiddleeast.com, can indeed be freely accessed again in Saudi Arabia.

Evading the censorship

Created in 1996 by Sa'ad Al-Faqih, the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia (MIRA) is a London-based religious movement that is very critical of the Saudi regime. Its website, www.miraserve.com, is on the list of sites that have been censored by the government since the Saudi Internet's outset. But the movement very quickly found ways of getting round the censorship. It managed to find solutions which, although involving sophisticated technology, are easy to use.

To access www.miraserve.com despite the filter, Saudis just have to send an e-mail message to a certain address in order to receive an automatic response identifying an URL (web address) that is not blocked. The MIRA installed a device that allows it to created an unlimited number of web address through which its online publication can be accessed. MIRA also offers advice on how to use the Internet anonymously by using an e-mail address such as Hotmail or Yahoo! and by surfing the Web using software provided by companies such as Anonymizer or Safeweb.

Links

* The DAI (Digital Access Index) has been devised by the International Telecommunications Union to measure the access of a country's inhabitants to information and communication technology. It ranges from 0 (none at all) to 1 (complete access).

** Assessment of the situation in each country (good, middling, difficult, serious) is based on murders, imprisonment or harassment of cyber-dissidents or journalists, censorship of news sites, existence of independent news sites, existence of independent ISPs and deliberately high connection charges.

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