---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 17:08:05 -0400 From: David Farber <dfarber@earthlink.net> To: ip-sub-1@majordomo.pobox.com Subject: IP: New Project: Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia -----Original Message----- From: Ben Edelman <edelman@law.harvard.edu> Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 14:28:46 To: dave@farber.net Subject: New Project: Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia Professor Jonathan Zittrain and I have been studying Internet filtering in multiple countries worldwide ([1]), and we released today our first investigation in this series. In recent testing, we designed software to connect to the Internet through proxy servers in Saudi Arabia, and we subsequently attempted to access approximately 60,000 Web pages as a means of empirically determining the scope and pervasiveness of Internet filtering there. Saudi-installed filtering systems prevented access to certain requested Web pages; we tracked a total of 2,038 blocked pages. Such pages contained information about religion, health, education, reference, humor, and entertainment. Specific blocked sites include the Women in American History section of Encyclopedia Britannica Online (women.eb.com), the Rolling Stone Magazine (rollingstone.com), Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance (religioustolerance.org), and the ivillage.com Women's Network, among hundreds of others. We conclude that the Saudi government maintains an active interest in filtering non-sexually explicit Web content for users within the Kingdom. We also find that substantial amounts of non-sexually explicit Web content is in fact effectively inaccessible to most Saudi Arabians. Finally, we note that much of this content consists of sites that are popular elsewhere in the world. Our full report, along with a listing of specific blocked web pages, is available at <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/saudiarabia/> Ben Edelman Berkman Center for Internet & Society Harvard Law School http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/ References: [1] "Documentation of Internet Filtering Worldwide" <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/> For archives see: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/