Check out the fascinating new results of the ongoing Open Net Initiative study of internet filtering in Saudi Arabia. This initiative has spent years testing the blocking and filtering systems of various authoritarian regimes. Here's the summary of the report:
"The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia controls the
information its citizens can readily access on the World Wide Web
through a sophisticated filtering system that draws upon commercial
software from the United States (Secure Computing's SmartFilter)
for technical implementation and site blocking suggestions, expert
local staff for operations and additional site identification, and
Saudi citizen input to suggest over- or under-blocking according to
stated filtering criteria. The OpenNet Initiative
(ONI) has tested filtering in Saudi Arabia over a three-year period. We
found that the Kingdom's filtering focuses on a few types of content:
pornography (98% of these sites tested blocked in our research), drugs
(86%), gambling (93%), religious conversion, and sites with tools to
circumvent filters (41%). In contrast, Saudi Arabia shows less interest
in sites on gay and lesbian issues (11%), politics (3%), Israel (2%),
religion (less than 1%), and alcohol (only 1 site). Unlike filtering in
states such as China, the policies, procedures, and philosophy for Saudi Arabia's filtering system are relatively transparent and documented on the Web site of its Internet Services Unit
(ISU). Users who try to access forbidden sites see a Web page informing
them that the site is prohibited. Despite this openness about
filtering, the system inevitably errs, resulting in overblocking of
unrelated content."
The findings on the relatively low blocking of political sites is particularly interesting from my perspective, of course, but the whole thing offers an unusual look into the priorities and techniques of the Saudi regime.
It all sounds very progressive. I'd rather have no censorship myself, but to each his own.
Posted by: jr | November 24, 2004 at 05:55 PM