Silenced - Saudi Arabia
21/09/2003
Saudi Arabia
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the largest country in the
Gulf region. One of the most stable and conservative powers in the Arab world,
Saudi Arabia largely dominates decision-making in the region. One of the main
goals of the government is to protect the country and its society from “immoral
foreign influences”. This has a direct impact on the diffusion of Internet
technologies in the kingdom.
The Saudi media serves as a hub for peripheral Gulf States.
Saudi’s private offshore media dominates at least 80% of total Arab media
consumption.
For a country as wealthy as Saudi Arabia, it is interesting
how reluctant society has been to adopt Internet technologies. Saudi
Arabia was the last Gulf state - and among the last countries in the Middle
East - to adopt Internet technologies. This occurred in 1994, when only a few
medical and academic communities were privileged to have access.
Many critics have declared that this delay was due to the
Saudi government’s determination to wait for technology to become available
that would enable the government to block material that could be of potential
harm to Muslim culture and values, including pornographic material, gambling
sites and other undesirable “un-Islamic” material.
The first Saudi Internet connection was provided through a
US company and censorship over its content was conducted abroad before
transmitting back to the kingdom. Saudi citizens and residents were also free
to connect to the Internet through neighbouring ISPs, such as Bahrain. In doing
so, the Saudi government promoted the goal of implementing Internet technology
to assure controlled use of the Internet.
The Saudi government established the King Abdul Aziz City
for Science and Technology (KACST) as the governing and regulatory body for the
Internet and appointed it with the task of designing the framework within which
the Internet would function according to Islamic rules. In 1997, the government
commenced feasibility studies seeking avenues to “protect national stability”
by careful control of the Internet. In 1999, 71 ISPs were selected to offer
Internet service to the community. Most of these companies were government
associates loyal to the ruling family.
Soon, more than 100,000 people were using the Internet in
Saudi Arabia, with numbers rising exponentially. Within the next three years,
more than 1.5 million Saudis had joined the Internet community, the main demand
coming from the commercial sector. This increase in the number of users was
not, however, matched by the development of telecommunications infrastructure.
The increase in the number of users was met, instead, with
more measures to constrain the medium. In a period of three months, KACST
blocked over 400,000 websites and established complex technical mechanisms to
limit access to foreign Internet hosts and to block not only “immoral websites”
but also those belonging to opposition and human rights groups. Many of the
filters for this exercise were provided by Western companies such as Secure
Computing and Matthew Holt.
In 2001, the Council of Ministers issued a resolution
prohibiting users from publishing or accessing data that “infringes the
sanctity of Islam and its benevolent Shari’ah”, “breaches public decency…
contrary to the state or its system” or data that is damaging to the “dignity
of heads of states or heads of credited diplomatic missions”. ISPs were
required to track users’ activities in order to enforce the resolution.
In a 2002 study, Harvard University’s Berkman Center found
that over 2000 sites that they checked for availability were being blocked.
They also found “(1) that the Saudi government maintains an active interest in
filtering non-sexually explicit Web content for users within the kingdom; (2)
that substantial amounts of non-sexually explicit Web content is in fact
effectively inaccessible to most Saudi Arabians; and (3) that much of this
content consists of sites that are popular elsewhere in the world” (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/saudiarabia/).
Business news from the region indicates that Saudi telecoms
tycoon, Prince Walid Ibn Tallal is planning to set up a rival Arab WWW that
will only present pre-censored content.
On the other hand, there appears to be an increasing amount
of activity in circumventing government restrictions in the kingdom. Some ISPs have
hired professional hackers to escape proxy servers in order to connect to
banned websites and to surf the web anonymously. Others have started secretly
connecting to the Internet via satellite communication networks in order to
escape government censorship.
References
Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society,
Documentation of Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/saudiarabia/
Human Rights Watch Report on
Saudi Internet Censorship
http://www.hrw.org/advocacy/internet/mena/saudi.htm
Page to request unblocking of
site
http://cgi.isu.net.sa/unblockrequest/
King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST)
http://www.kacst.edu.sa/en/
Council of Ministers Resolution,
12 February 2001
http://www.al-bab.com/media/docs/saudi.htm
Internet Report on Saudi media
http://www.internews.org/arab_media_research/saudiarabia.pdf
Joshua Teitelbaum Middle East Journal, Dueling for Da‘wa:
State vs. Society on the Saudi Internet, Spring 2002.
http://www.dayan.org/Teitelbaum.pdf
Dr. Ibraheem S. Al-Furaih , Internet Regulations: The Saudi
Arabian Experience (govt paper)
http://inet2002.org/CD-ROM/lu65rw2n/papers/u05-a.pdf
BBC country profile
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/saudiarabia/
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